As
@eastdakota pointed out this week, humans are now the minority of internet users. This has radical implications that I don't think anyone has fully digested yet:
1) Tokens are cheaper than eyeballs. Meaning, ATTENTION IS NO LONGER SCARCE. AI agents are first class users of the internet means that the whole economic model underpinning the internet is at stake.
2) Last fall
@sama said that "Margins are going to go dramatically down on most goods and services." I think everyone nodded their head at that but didn't actually grok the long-tail implications of his statement. Any physical good, food, clothes, trips, whatever, all that touches the internet will have their margin eaten by tokens. Maybe that all goes towards consumer surplus, maybe it all goes towards Nvidia, but that money certainly isn't going to the digital SMB.
3) What is scarce is not taste. Taste is a nice idea that I believe in, but it has to be paired with high value, non-AI reproducible SKUs, because otherwise people will just replicate it for the cost of tokens. For example, I have readers who have made an "Evan Armstrong" skill on claude code that they ask for advice on their business strategy problems.
I also talked with
@blauyourmind about
@trydrip and
@carrawu about Index from
@p0 about their respective products trying to make this situation tenable for content providers. Their services charge AI agents a token tax everytime they reference a piece of content. I think these are good, noble ideas that I want to succeed. But startups selling content or software should view them as beer run money, not as long-term defensible assets that create enterprise value.
Anyways I'm buzzing, this is a radically different internet and is a problem I'm going to be chewing on for awhile. Reach out if you have thoughts or are building something.