The great geyser of our times, of course, is the hand-held connectivity that Steve Jobs tapped with his iPhone, and that Google, Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat now so powerfully refine and distribute on their social media platforms.

They’ve allowed more players to rush in to give you the exact sorts of videos, music, news and entertainment you want, exactly when you want them. They’ve also sent the media industry off its moorings. The last remaining tethers — cable television cords — are rapidly snapping.

The evolving media order has created its share of innovative winners and disrupted losers. Generally, though, it has been a boon for the advertising world, giving marketers the ability to make sales pitches to you based on your precise moods and interests — derived by your likes, dislikes, clicks and thumb swipes.

Given that the limit is no longer the number of channels on the television dial but the daily human capacity to consume media, the rush is on to get even better at divining what you want before you even know you want it — and to make sure it’s available in ample supply.

“It’s chaos,” Shane Smith, the brash co-founder and chief executive of Vice Media, told me Thursday afternoon as he sipped wine on the rocks at his sumptuous seaside villa in Cap d’Antibes, Cannes’ even more exclusive neighbor. “But in the midst of the chaos there’s never been more content created, more money being made. There’s never been more stuff being sold, and for me on my end, there’s never been more people buying content.”