Ten years ago this month, I saw an eight-minute video that I’ve never forgotten. It seared into my brain an imaginary corporate merger between two tech giants that never actually took place: Googlezon.

While the details of "EPIC 2014" were certainly off, its larger message about technology and media still rings true: the algorithms have won.

Back in the fall of 2004, I was a student at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. Amazingly, hardly anyone was studying so-called "new media" at the time. We were all subdivided into "traditional" groups: newspaper, magazine, television, and radio. I was unusual in that I had an interest in tech reporting, but took classes from both the print and radio sides. While this approach is anathema to the way that journalism is taught today, each discipline was segregated—I never hung out with those weird TV kids.

In November 2004, one of my classmates showed me EPIC 2014. Being the pre-YouTube era, it was probably passed to me on a flash drive. The video, narrated by a man with a slightly creepy monotone voice, summarizes the actual rise of Google, Amazon, and TiVo. Then the video makes all kinds of semi-dystopian prophecies, some of which have sort of come true.

Remember Friendster?

As the narrator intones:

And then Google goes public. Awash in new capital, the company makes a major acquisition. Google buys TiVo. In response to Google’s recent moves, Microsoft buys Friendster. Google combines all of its services: TiVo, Blogger, Gmail, Google News, and all of its searches into the Google Grid, a universal platform that provides a functionally limitless amount of storage space and bandwidth to store and share media of all kinds. Always online. Accessible from anywhere. Each user selects her own level of privacy and she can store them securely on the Google Grid or publish it for all to see. It has never been easier for anyone, everyone, to create as well as consume media.

In this timeline, by 2008, Google and Amazon merge to form Googlezon. The film goes on, explaining how Googlezon uses its vast knowledge of all of us to provide increasingly granular levels of personalization.

Two years later, "The News Wars of 2010 are notable for the fact that no actual news organizations take part."

Eventually the "slumbering Fourth Estate awakes to make its first and final stand. The New York Times sues Googlezon, claiming the fact-stripping robots are a violation of copyright law. The case goes all the way to the Supreme Court."

The New York Times loses the case. The climax of the film is set in 2014, when Googlezon has debuted EPIC, the Evolving Personalized Information Construct. This amalgam of algorithms produces:

[A] custom content package for each user using his choices, his consumption habits, his interests, his demographics, his social network to shape the product. A new generation of freelance editors has sprung up, people who sell their ability to connect, filter and prioritize the contents of EPIC. At its best, EPIC is a summary of the world—deeper, broader and more nuanced than anything ever available before. But at its worst, and for too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia, much of it untrue. All of it narrow, shallow and sensational. But EPIC is what we wanted. It is what we chose. And its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy or journalistic ethics. Today, in 2014, The New York Times has gone offline. In feeble protest to Googlezon’s hegemony, the New York Times has become a print-only newsletter for the elite and the elderly. But perhaps there was another way?

The video’s creators, Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson, created a revised version the following year: EPIC 2015. It added a few new prognostications like Apple’s "WiFiPod," to be released in 2005. (They were just two years off: the iPhone didn’t debut until 2007.)

“You don't got it”

Back in 2004, the film’s creators were two young journalists at the Poynter Institute, a well-known Florida-based journalism think tank.

"Matt and I were fellow mutant j-school students," Sloan told me over coffee in Berkeley, California earlier this year.

"It was precisely our frustration that we were interested in a set of things that our instructors were not. We were interested in blogs! We were not seeing the kinds of jobs that we wanted to have."

Sloan, who has since become a best-selling novelist—Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore came out in 2012—explained how at first, he and Thompson had been asked to present to visiting groups about the future of news, given that they were the youngest at the institute.

They first began discussing the idea while on a road trip from Poynter’s St. Petersburg offices to Miami, four hours away.

"[Our chat] spilled out into the bars of Miami—we're sitting on high-heeled plush chairs in Miami having conversations about the future of media," Thompson, who is now the "Director of Vertical Initiatives" at National Public Radio, told Ars by phone this past week.

"We came back with a lot of ideas," he said. "The first encapsulation was that we're going to make this into a presentation."

But that first incarnation was basically dead on arrival.

"It was super boring—we had graphs and everything," Sloan said. "When we would present it, what we thought we were telling was one of apocryphal, seismic transformation and instead the story people were getting was not disbelief or disagreement, but ‘Yeah we got it.’ We were like: ‘You don’t got it!’" It became clear to us after doing the boring version that we were not using the tools that we had learned—wrapping ideas up in stories and we put our heads together to make this fictional history."

Thompson added that most journalists of the day "didn't understand how Google and Friendster and Amazon were interesting and important to a news organization."

Now, every media organization is all about sharing stories on social accounts: "clickbait" is now a thing, for better or for worse. Nearly all media organizations are being born on the Internet and live and die by their online traffic. All publications with dead tree versions are working to figure out how to make money as print ad revenue declines over time.

“Glittering travelers from the future”

After presenting the video internally at Poynter for months, Sloan decided he should finally post it on his own website. Somehow, Jason Kottke, an early influential blogger, found it in mid November 2004, and the rest is history.

"There was no YouTube," Sloan said. "To share it we posted on our nascent blog and sent a link to others and that was it and it took off from there. [Probably] because the tools weren’t great, and because we ourselves were web neophytes and because the culture of the web then was one of: I’ll mirror that for you."

Sloan and Thompson told Ars that EPIC 2014 was designed to shake their stodgy journalist colleagues into action. But for many non digital natives, social networks like Friendster—much less Facebook and Twitter—were hard to grasp.

Kelly McBride, now the vice president of academic programs at the Poynter Institute, taught the dynamic duo over the summer term that they were there. She attended many of their presentations—their screenings often concluded with their dramatic entrance into a conference room dressed as semi-robotic "glittering travelers from the future."

"Robin and Matt would come in with boxes on their heads, walking like robots," she said. "They took the boxes off and would lead a conversation about what they were seeing that media was going to dramatically change. At that point in time, I'm going to guess that most of those editors left the room thinking: maybe 20 to 30 percent of that is going to come true. I don't think that anyone at the time was certain that as much of that would happen."

While the film ends on a fairly low note, McBride observes that some journalists are more optimistic.

"The big crux [of the film] is that Google buys Amazon. So that didn't happen. But Amazon, or rather its CEO, Jeff Bezos, bought The Washington Post. So I kind of think: really that's actually a lot more hopeful if you're concerned about journalism," she added.

"Most of us watching the Post feel like everything going on there is hopeful and they have been doing good journalism with the support of Bezos and the next thing is: how is Bezos going to make money? I think that was a really hopeful moment in journalism, if the guy who was responsible for the original disruption sees a way to take what the post does and make money off of it in this environment then that's a good sign of journalism."

So now, a decade on, what do Sloan and Thompson take away from EPIC 2014? That indeed, there are echoes of Googlezon and EPIC in the modern media and technological landscape.

"We got the scale of the transformation of the scale broadly right," Sloan said. "Maybe it was obviously where we say something like the great news wars of 2009 and 2010 in which no news organizations took part: I think that’s the smartest line in the video and maybe one of the ones that been most correct. Twitter, Facebook and reddit: these are not the news organizations. I think the fact that the biggest and most important players in news are tech companies."

Thompson largely agreed.

"The impact was intended to frame the future of media in the context of behavior and technology as much as the decisions that news organizations were making as to what to cover," he said. "It seems self-evidently true a decade later: it is obvious how inextricable people's behaviors and changing uses of tech and media, how exquisitely tied those are to the fortunes of journalists and media organizations more broadly."