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 disruption made it cheap to move bits (distribution).
The next one makes it cheap to make bits (creation).
That insight reframes how we think about the current AI moment. It’s not just about tools getting better — it’s about a shift in the very foundation of the value chain.
He then unpacks seven “known unknowns” of GenAI video:
How much will it really bring down costs?
How good will it get?
Will consumers embrace it?
How disruptive will it be?
How fast will it happen?
Are we thinking too skeuomorphically?
What’s still scarce when content is infinite?
Every one of these deserves its own essay. And I’ve touched on several in my own work. I think this is a list we should all be coming back to as we read anything about genAI and content creation in the coming months.
Signal Boost
If you’re not reading Doug’s Substack, The Mediator, this is your invitation to start. His keynote is crisp, timely, and packed with frameworks that connect the dots between AI, strategy, and the economics of modern media.
Doug blends analyst-level clarity with a storyteller’s intuition for what matters. He’s asking the right questions at the right moment and this talk is the prime synthesis of his ideas.
→ Watch the full talk or grab the slides
What It All Means
When content becomes infinite, creation is no longer the bottleneck. The real constraints and the new sources of value become:
Time and attention
Marketing and distribution
Provenance and trust
Fandom and community
Interfaces and algorithms that know what matters
Doug’s list of modern scarcities reads like a survival guide for media leaders:
Time. Attention. Marketing. UI. Trust. IP. Fandom. Data. Community. Context.
These are the places where strategy, craft, and storytelling still matter not in spite of AI, but because of it.
I’ll be returning to a few of these ideas in upcoming essays, especially in The Interface Is the Showrunner. For now, consider this a highly recommended read and a hat tip to a fellow traveler sketching out the new maps for this rapidly shifting landscape.
thanks for sharing Doug's writing, I'll be sure to check it out!!