Looking backward at the Next Big Thing

by David Benjamin

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men
          Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
          For promis’d joy! — Robert Burns

Eighteen years ago, when mobile telephony was only “3G” and “smartphones” were still a mere glitch-plagued twinkle in the eyes of the cell phone moguls at Motorola, Nokia, Sony, Samsung and Huawei, I was trailing my wife, Hotlips, the crack high-tech reporter, to an annual flip-phone expo in Barcelona, then known as the 3GSM World Congress and since renamed the Mobile World Congress.

I tend to attend electronics festivals like Mobile World with an air of jaded skepticism, knowing that the best-laid crapola generated by tech tycoons and their marketing elves gangs aft agley. Despite my dearth of technical knowhow, my record of forecasting the failure of heavily hyped technologies has ganged aft accurate. This is not because I’m uniquely prescient. I owe my gift of prophecy to the simple awareness that Silicon Valley and all its global offshoots have been sucked into a breakneck race to introduce the Next Big Thing ahead of everyone else despite their knowledge that a) the thing hasn’t been tested sufficiently to determine that it works the way its promoters say it’s gonna work and b) “consumers” don’t know what it is, what it does and why in God’s name they should be the least bit interested in buying it, especially at those prices.

Often, my analysis of a new technology dwelt more on its likely social and political consequences instead of its chips and substrates. In a screed posted in February, 2007, I enlisted the aid of Bienfang, an entrepreneur without peer, to help envision the nexus of mobile telephony and the burgeoning “surveillance society” of 2025 and beyond.

* * *

BARCELONA—The latest “killer application” for cell phones, according to all the hype at last week’s 3GSM World Congress, is mobile TV. The idea is that you could watch the tube while walking (into telephone poles), driving (into telephone poles) or even telephoning. Trouble is, according to 3GSM’s own surveys, only about seven percent of cell phone users are watching mobile TV. Worse yet, it seems that the majority don’t even want it, and if they get it, they don’t want to pay for it.

Plus, technologically, mobile television is hard to do.

“Not only is it hard, it’s just not worth the aggravation.” So said one of my technology mentors, Dr. Wilhelm “Hello Central” Bienfang, who brought to the 3GSM conference what he calls a “better mobile-TV mousetrap.”

“Incoming mobile TV is a veritable hairball, but outgoing? That’s easy. The sender doesn’t even have to know he’s transmitting,” said Bienfang. “In fact, it’s best if he doesn’t know. It’s certainly funnier that way!”

Bienfang perceived my confusion. “Y’ever see The Conversation?” he asked. “Enemy of the State? The Ed Show? The Truman Show? The secret to making money on mobile TV is not about viewers watching TV. It’s about TV watching the viewers.”

Bienfang recently started a company called PeepFone Technologies, whose first products are already included in a range of mobile handsets manufactured by major companies who prefer to remain anonymous. Each handset contains a pin-prick lens that sends video of the user—his conversations, his friends, his life, his dreams, his moments in the latrine—back to monitors at an undisclosed location, where somebody (Bienfang wouldn’t say who) sits there watching twenty-four hours a day.

And taking notes.

“Why take notes?” I asked.

“Hell, boy! That’s where you make your money,” said Bienfang.

Bienfang said that by the end of this year, virtually every new mobile phone will be PeepFone-equipped, and live. “You can turn off the phone,” he said, “but the film just keeps rollin’.” Before you can say, “I see London, I see France,” PeepFone headquarters will have compiled thousands of hours of intimate audio/video on each user, and a dossier several inches thick.

Then, one day, a PeepFone representative shows up and offers a deal.

“For a fee, we’ll tell you if you’re being ‘PeepFoned’ (You probably are!). For a fee—say, $1,000—we’ll sell you your personal video, on VHS, DVD, high-definition DVD, MP3, flash-drive, you name it—either the full collection or a professionally edited package of selected embarrassing highlights. For an additional fee, we’ll throw in your entire dossier, hardbound, softcover, leatherbound, digital, you name it. You see how the revenue starts to pile up here?”
But there’s more. “For an additional fee—okay, this would be pretty steep—we’ll agree NOT to send copies of your personal video to, say, the government, your parents, your spouse, your boss, your impressionable little children, The National Enquirer.”

There is, in fact, no end to the profit potential in what Bienfang puckishly calls “permanent colonoscopy.” He said, “Let’s say we’ve sold you the whole package—all your DVDs, your dossier and our silence. Six months later, we come back and say, ‘So, fella, you want to buy up six more months of your sordid secret life? Or do we just send it to the FBI, the IRS and your local police?’ And you say, “Oh my God! I thought I paid you people to stop watching me on TV!’ And we say, ‘Oh, goodness me! Did you want our special, patented turn-off service, too? Gee whiz, that’ll cost you a little more.’ And then we explain our insurance policy.”

Bienfang explained: “You know those ‘credit-rating’ come-ons you see on TV? Where they offer to reveal your ‘credit number’ and tell you, for a fee, what a bunch of anonymously gathered credit reports say about you? Well, of course, these services are offered by the same sleazebags who went out and created these phony credit reports in the first place. Well, we found that inspirational.”

Bienfang said that, for an annual premium, PeepFone Technologies will insure mobile phone addicts against PeepFone Technologies. “You pay us for watching you, you pay us for not watching you, and you pay us for not going right back and watching you all over again. Isn’t handheld technology wonderful?”

PeepFone’s range of services goes on and on. Among exhibitors at the 3GSM show were companies who provide twenty-four-hour transmission—on mobile TV—of the lives of “interesting people,” like frequently naked Spanish starlet Sonia Baby. “We can provide the same stuff, but much more authentically,” said Bienfang. “If we spot a user whose unwitting antics are particularly entertaining, dangerous, erotic, disgusting or just weird, well, we offer that goofball a contract for a cut of his or her own action and a membership in the Screen Actors Guild.”

Eventually, said Bienfang, PeepFone could “turn all of human society into one big reality show, with people tuning in to watch people watching them watching other people watch people.”

While my head was still spinning, Bienfang also said that PeepFone has signed several government contracts that will allow government agencies to watch other government agencies watching government agencies watching people watching other people—all in the privacy of each government agent’s personal handset.

I begged Bienfang to rescue me from this Escher maze. He took pity and agreed to spare me any involvement ever again with mobile TV—incoming and/or outgoing—for a substantially discounted price that I agreed not to disclose (but I had to sell my car). Bienfang departed, laughing all the way to the bank. I can still hear his parting words.

“The phone companies think there’s money in getting people into mobile TV. There is, but it’s chump change!” he said. “Once we get our hands on mobile TV, you watch! The big bucks are going to come from getting people out of it.”