Information has never been more valuable, but the value of the information is in what it can be used for, and the most valuable thing is data that allows corporations and governments alike to observe us, track us, know us, target us, control us. And, the ability for us to be monitored and corralled has increased exponentially through the improvement in data collection and analysis tools, coupled with the massive growth in data we provide on a digital platter.
But, there is more to the digital world of information than this, and we are entering into the age of the content creator. However, most people don't actually seem to know what this means at a practical level, other than putting some videos on YouTube or OnlyFans and hoping for advertising and subscription revenue. However we are also entering into the world of AI generated content, and that is going to have an effect too.
Before we go on, let's do a little bit of "pseudo history" and have a look at the values and costs of proliferation. For instance, if we look back at around the 80s, there was a lot of paper in offices filling up filing cabinets. Lots and lots of paper, with receipts and contracts, reports and proposals all being typed up, printed out and stored in some way. But, while it looked like a lot, and took up a huge amount of space, it was also highly limited by costs of production, storage and transport. However, the digital transition kept bringing the costs down until now, where almost no paper exists in modern offices but the amount of documents have increased enormously.
The cost of a document is zero.
But, the information that document carries has value.
However, now, the cost of creating information has also come down, and similarly to the value of a document that costs nothing to produce, transport or store, the value of content is also reducing. There is approximately 300,000 hours of content uploaded to YouTube every hour, but who is watching the majority of it?
And this is the challenge that content creators are going to increasingly face. As while they are embracing generative-AI to speed up their production processes and even increase the quality of their output as an individual, every other content creator is doing the same. There is not only an explosion of content, there is also the homogenization of content, as people rely more on the tools, and less on their own creativity. This means that the volume grows, but the diversity narrows.
And the value decreases even further.
The problem with the value of content, is that the more there is, the less it will be worth as a product itself, because there is only so much time that can be spent consuming it. This is the problem with the attention economy, because we only have so much attention to spend. But, for that content to have value, it needs to be consumed, which hints at why almost 50% of the internet traffic is actually bots, not people.
There is now no stopping the exponential increase in content creation and ubiquity, because we are predictable animals - Short-sighted and lazy. When there is a shortcut to take, when there is a way to speed up getting what we want, when there is something that offers us convenience, we will take it, use it, and love it, even as it takes away the very thing we have been striving for.
Once upon a time, we used to do things because they were hard. We sailed around the world, we dove into the seas, we went into space, which led to all kinds of innovation and growth as a civilization. When we do something hard, we will face a mountain of unforeseen challenges that we have to overcome in order to get to where we want to go. However, that spirit of adventure is gone, and now it is about hitting the numbers, meeting demands, and scoring points.
Even as our communities, cities and minds are breaking down.
We are no longer looking to solve the hard problems and instead raising the irrelevant problems as if they are high priority. It is busywork, irrelevant to our wellbeing, a distraction from what we could and probably should be doing, that digs us deeper into the quagmire of our controlled existence, churning profits for faceless organizations, that will continue to consolidate wealth and exert control over us, the more we proliferate their content.
People don't seem to see it yet, but it isn't the just the value of content that is going down, it is the value of human, the value of us. We are becoming increasingly expendable, because we are no longer able to add enough value to warrant our existence. They talk about reducing populations to save the world, but what that really means is, reducing numbers to save some of civilization, because the world would be fine without us, no matter what we do to it.
It is us who have the problems to face.
What does the AI suggest we do?
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]