What’s Scarce When Content Is Infinite?

System Alerts 05 from Engines of Change

I’ve been reading Doug Shapiro’s Mediator Substack since I first started publishing here, and I’ve found myself nodding along almost every time he hits “post.” His writing is sharp, grounded, and genuinely curious and I have found it to be a valuable overall.

His recent keynote at AI on the Lot is a perfect synthesis of the themes he’s been developing over the past year: how media disruption has shifted from the cost of distribution to the cost of creation, and why GenAI might be the most profound inflection point since the birth of the internet.

I’ve covered many of the same dynamics from a different angle; through the lens of storytelling, interface design, and cultural memory. Doug’s talk sharpened a few things for me. It’s not just about production workflows or toolkits. It’s about redefining what’s actually scarce when everything becomes cheap to make.

The Hit

The Next Great Disruption Is About Creation, Not Distribution

Doug lays out a simple but powerful progression:

• The last media d…