Over The Top, Again

Last month, Amazon blocked Meta’s new Muse agent from shopping its store. A few days later, in an interview with Alex Heath, Satya Nadella pointed to it as an early example of what happens when an agent “comes over the top” of a service that wasn’t built for that kind of traffic: it breaks the platform’s relationship with its actual (i.e., human) users. From the platform’s side, it looks like a renegotiation of who owns the customer or, worse, the beginnings of disintermediation. From the user’s side, it looks like empowerment – assuming the agents are truly aligned to the user’s wishes.

(Disclosure, as in the retrospectives: I once worked at Meta. Nothing here draws on anything I know from the inside.)

“Over the top” is where this blog got its name, more than a decade ago. I started OTTN as a way to collect my thoughts – as a lawyer, technologist, and investor – and to see if my thinking about technology, policy, market structure, data privacy, and more would hold up. As the tagline put it, the blog was intended to be about ruminating on issues related to our “brave new connected world.”

OTT Nation is dedicated to exploring how ubiquitous connectivity, low cost computing power, and exponential growth in data collection is changing the world we live in — including the way we interact with others, consume and create content, and shape and perceive the world around us.

OTTN “About” page

I was also referring to the idea that the vast majority of people in the world would likely be “online” in the not-so-distant future, and that the resulting changes in society would raise a bunch of novel and interesting issues worth thinking about. I chose the name “OTT Nation” as: (1) a reference to “over the top” content, meaning media services that delivered video, audio, or other programming directly to viewers over the internet, bypassing traditional communications infrastructure providers; and (2) a pun – the whole world was about to be connected in ways we’d never seen before, and things were likely to get a little over the top.

As David Bowie put it in his 1999 BBC Newsnight interview with Jeremy Paxman, “I think the potential of what the Internet is going to do to society, both good and bad, is unimaginable. I think we’re actually on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying.” And when Paxman pushed back that it was just a tool, Bowie wasn’t having it: “It’s an alien life form.”

David Bowie with Jeremy Paxman on BBC Newsnight, 1999. Watch on YouTube.

And now we have AI…. Things are definitely “over the top” and will continue to be so for the foreseeable future – in both senses. The societal craziness is easy to see. But the Muse fight shows that the original, media-and-tech meaning is back too, only now it’s AI agents doing the disintermediating. That one example alone raises a host of questions worth digging into.

So now what?

I just finished a two-part retrospective on OTTN, going back through the calls/predictions and arguments I made over the years. The blog likely wasn’t read by anyone at the time, but revisiting it turned out to be a pretty valuable exercise – not because I got everything right, but because it showed me which parts of my thinking held up and why.

It strikes me as a good time to revive OTTN – there are so many new avenues to explore with AI thrown into the mix of the connected world. At the same time, just writing posts the way I did before feels like only half the exercise. Back then, the only way to test my thinking was to write it down and wait a few years to see if it held up. Now I can also test it by building things.

Individuals can now design and build things in ways that weren’t possible before, and I believe the “maker” designation is going to apply to way more people who are able to outsource work to “AI labor.” That is Bowie’s “exhilarating and terrifying” all over again, but perhaps OTTN can play a minor role in this shift in a way that is responsible and useful.

So I think the time has come to make projects the main focus of OTTN, with the writing continuing alongside them. The first projects will be my own – small apps and agents built to test the ideas I’ve written about here. Where it goes from there is part of the experiment. I’m excited to see what’s possible.

Stay tuned!