Author: Not Understanding Classics

I. The Only True Leverage in the Post-Scarcity Era

Khamenei is dead, and with him, thirty thousand articles trying to ride the wave of hot topics have also died.

Within minutes of the event, our social platforms, friend circles, and information feeds were flooded with thousands of articles that "looked extremely professional" in their deep interpretations. These articles examined "in-depth analysis of the Middle East situation", "predictions for the future of the Iranian regime", "impacts on global oil prices and asset allocation"...

These articles are well-structured, smoothly argued, data-rich, and densely packed with quotable lines. They had speedy versions of "event timelines", three-part "geopolitical cause analyses", five-item "global economic impact forecasts", and even ten practical tips on "how ordinary people can protect their wallets". Each piece seemed plausible and insightful.

But what was the result? After you scroll through three screens quickly, you can hardly remember the core argument of any article, let alone have any of this information change your understanding.

Just think back to merely a month ago, when the U.S. multinational captured Maduro alive. A country directly sending troops across borders to capture the sovereign leader of another country is an extremely rare and explosive historical event in the entirety of modern human history.

At that time, the internet was also buzzing, with all kinds of "in-depth analyses" flooding in. But how long did the heat of this event last? Three days, at most a week, and people had already forgotten, swept away by the next hot topic.

In today's era of information tsunami, human attention is being sliced shorter and shorter. A massive amount of rapidly produced information and content is like pebbles thrown into the deep sea; they leave no substantial trace in the world.

This is one of the greatest paradoxes of contemporary existence.

The information is getting more, yet understanding becomes shallower.

The content is getting denser, but memory becomes shorter.

The explanations are getting richer, but meaning becomes scarcer.

You think you are "receiving knowledge", but in reality, you are closer to "swallowing noise". You think you are "consuming opinions", but in fact, you are passively absorbing one round after another of attention harvesting.

Yet at the same time, those producing this content are well aware that these words will probably not bring any substantial impact, will not form a real transmission chain, and are even less likely to provide any long-term economic benefits to creators.

All of this points to a cold reality: knowledge is turning into an extremely cheap public good, or even a public good in the form of noise. The more content there is, the scarcer the meaning; everyone can produce "knowledge" at a low cost, and the ultimate result is that the premium of knowledge as a commodity is systematically reduced to zero.

This is very much like the old saying about the Soviet Union: we know they are lying, they know they are lying, they even know we know they are lying, and we know they know we know they are lying.

This is why you always see the same titles, the same viewpoints, the same structures. We are trapped; garbage content does not follow any narrative arc. In the garbage world, there are no climaxes or conclusions, only garbage and more garbage. Endless unfolding, always on the way.

In a "post-scarcity" world, what constitutes a scarce good? Not information, not content, not knowledge. AI can generate endless content. Blog posts, articles, summaries, sharp comments, all in limitless supply.

We once lived in the information economy era. Now we live in a narrative economy era, a narrative world. You can call it the "post-truth world".

Most people are about to take a cruel lesson about "leverage".

For the past half-century, or even longer, the enormous commercial value of knowledge has essentially come from a kind of "arbitrage structure". The emergence of AI has almost struck down these four major price differences one by one, like a dimensional reduction strike.

For 30 years, the reason "work in front of the screen" could earn salaries is that humans were the only interface between messy realities and final decisions. You were responsible for transforming vague information into action. You were the bottleneck.

AI has eliminated this bottleneck. Not in some future day, not waiting for general artificial intelligence (AGI). Right now, through those "just adequate" systems that are integrating into every workflow.

In a post-scarcity world, the only true leverage remaining— is narrative. The value and importance of "narrative" are soaring rapidly.

Narrative is by no means simple "storytelling skills"; it is the only mechanism through which humans can reconstruct meaning and order in a chaotic environment of information surplus, choice surplus, and explanation surplus. It determines what can be seen, what can be believed, what can provoke action, and what can truly penetrate cycles.

Knowledge arbitrage is dead, long live narrative.

This article will do three things:

• First, dismantle why "knowledge and knowledge arbitrage" are dying, and what specifically is dying.
• Second, delve into the definition, structure, and anthropological roots of narrative, explaining why it will "live forever" and why it is the true leverage in the AI era.
• Third, provide practical strategies for the AI era, aimed at all creators, entrepreneurs, and onlookers, offering an executable "narrative gravity" framework.

II. The Disenchantment of Knowledge and the Total Collapse of Arbitrage Models

Many content creators and knowledge workers have recently felt an obscure sense of collapse: "I have produced so much content, I have worked hard, even writing better than previous professional authors, but why is there no return?"

The answer is harsh: because you are chasing hot topics, because you are producing "content in explicit forms of knowledge", and these commodities are either one-time consumables or entering the end of their life cycle.

1. The Fate of Hot Content, Becoming More Like Disposable Consumables

At the stage when AI-generated content is fully rolling out, a standard production process for a hot topic is almost fixed.

Step one, gather materials.

Step two, splice the timeline.

Step three, plug in common geopolitical templates or economic impact templates.

Step four, provide a few risk-free suggestions.

Step five, create a clickbait variation.

This process that used to require human labor and time is now more like pressing a button. The marginal cost is approaching zero, and supply is naturally infinite. A large part of the mass of "in-depth interpretations" you see does not come from the long-term research accumulation of a specific author; it resembles a rapid rearrangement of public corpora.

This is the first layer of meaning behind "knowledge is dead".

What has died is not the facts themselves, nor the truth itself. What has died is the premium of explicit knowledge as a commodity. That part of knowledge that is codifiable, replicable, retrievable, and quickly outsourceable is degrading from an asset to background noise. No matter how correctly you write, it is difficult to win the attention dividend because correctness has become the minimum threshold.

You will soon discover an awkward reality.

When everyone can produce "decent content" using tools, content in the market resembles generic parts more. The price of generic parts will be driven close to cost by competition, while AI reduces costs to nearly zero.

Thus, content slides from being an asset to becoming a liability. The more you post, the more fatigued the readers become. The more you explain, the more the world seems like a gooey mess.

This is what has been commonly referred to as "AI slop" in English-speaking circles in recent years, referring to large amounts of low-quality or highly homogeneous AI-generated products used to seize traffic and attention, with platforms pushing it to new users.

Its harm lies not in how poor a single article is, but in how it raises the overall entropy of the information environment, making it more difficult for you to extract order from the environment.

2. Why Is the Content You Produce Ineffective?

What does impact mean?

Impact means that an article or a viewpoint has changed someone's judgment, reshaped a group’s emotional structure, altered an organization’s decision-making direction, or changed the probability of an action occurring. Impact means that after you express yourself, a corner of the world becomes different because of you.

The vast majority of AI-generated or "AI-like" generated content fails to do this. The reason is not mysterious:

· It lacks a subject willing to take on costs: a machine does not bear the risk of saying the wrong thing, there is no "skin in the game".

· It lacks verifiable sources of experience: it describes 100 pitfall guides for entrepreneurship, but has never actually experienced the deep night of almost going bankrupt.

· It rarely offers "new" problems or "new" explanatory structures: It is only good at rearranging old human explanations into more perfect grammar.

You can certainly use it to "summarize" a financial report, but it is hard to use it to "found a nation"; you can use it to "polish" an email, but it is hard to use it to "determine destiny". It is always correct, always complete, but also always risk-free and soulless.

When "generation" becomes extremely cheap, the supply of content will expand exponentially. But human attention has not expanded; you still only have 24 hours in a day. The inevitable result is that the market shifts from "information scarcity" to "attention scarcity", and is rapidly falling into the black hole of "meaning scarcity".

3. The Four Pillars of Knowledge Arbitrage Structure Are Being Ruthlessly Pierced

For the past half-century, or even longer, the enormous commercial value of knowledge has essentially come from a kind of "arbitrage structure". Consulting firms, media, analysts, and even most educational systems earn from the following four types of price differences:

• Access Premium: Those who can leverage information asymmetry to obtain information earlier and exclusively have privileges.
• Translation Premium: Those who can translate obscure professional language and academic jargon into language understandable by the public or bosses can profit.
• Synthesis Premium: Those who can piece together and refine vast amounts of scattered information into an executable plan (like a million-dollar consulting PPT) have an advantage.
• Authority Premium: Those who can speak in the name of "experts" through titles and packaging can gain trust premiums.

However, the emergence of AI has almost struck down these four major price differences one by one:

The vast data you could access earlier can be crawled by model systems in seconds; the code or foreign languages you can translate can be converted in real-time seamlessly by AI; the industry research frameworks you can assemble can be done more comprehensively by AI’s deep research models; as for authoritative posturing, when clients find AI's suggestions to be more comprehensive than what they could get from a highly-paid consultant, the "illusion of control by static experts" completely shatters.

When these price differences are erased, the premium of knowledge as a commodity is flattened until it approaches zero. This is the second layer of meaning behind "knowledge is dead".

免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。