Author: Unaware of the Classics

I. The only true leverage in the post-scarcity era

Khamenei is dead, and with him, 30,000 articles that jumped on the bandwagon have also died.

Within minutes of the incident, our social media platforms, WeChat Moments, and news feeds were flooded with thousands of in-depth analyses that appeared to be highly professional. These articles discussed topics such as "In-depth analysis of the Middle East situation," "Prospects for the Iranian regime," and "Impact on global oil prices and asset allocation," etc.

These articles are well-structured, present insightful viewpoints, are rich in data, and are packed with memorable quotes. They include quick-read timelines of events, three-part analyses of geopolitical causes, five-point lists of global economic impact projections, and even ten practical tips on how ordinary people can protect their finances. Each article is well-reasoned and highly insightful.

But what's the result? After quickly scrolling through three screens, you can hardly remember any of the core arguments, let alone have your understanding changed by this information.

Recall that just a month ago, the United States captured Maduro across borders. For one country to directly send troops across borders to arrest the sovereign leader of another is an extremely rare and explosive historical event in modern human history.

The entire internet was abuzz at the time, with all sorts of "in-depth analyses" flooding the internet. But how long did this buzz last? Three days, at most a week, and people had already forgotten about it, carried away by the next hot topic.

In today's information tsunami era, human attention spans are becoming increasingly fragmented. The massive amounts of information and content produced at such a high speed are like pebbles thrown into the deep sea, leaving no substantial trace on the world.

This is one of the greatest paradoxes of human existence in the modern world.

Information is increasing, but understanding is becoming increasingly superficial.

The content is becoming increasingly dense, while memory is becoming increasingly short.

The explanations are becoming richer, but the meaning is becoming increasingly scarce.

You think you're "receiving knowledge," but you're actually more like "swallowing noise." You think you're "consuming viewpoints," but you're actually passively accepting round after round of attention harvesting.

However, at the same time, those who produce this content are also very clear that these words are unlikely to have any substantial impact, will not form a real chain of dissemination, and are even less likely to bring any long-term economic benefits to the creators.

All of this points to a stark reality: knowledge is becoming an extremely cheap public good, or even a noise-driven public good. The more content there is, the scarcer its meaning becomes; everyone can produce "knowledge" at low cost, and the ultimate result is that the premium of knowledge as a commodity is systematically eliminated.

This is similar to that 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.

That's why you always see the same titles, the same viewpoints, the same structure. We're trapped; garbage content doesn't follow any story arc. In the world of garbage, there are no climaxes or endings, only garbage and more garbage. An endless unfolding, forever on the way.

In a post-scarcity world, what is scarce? It's not information, not content, not knowledge. AI can generate an endless supply of content: blog posts, threads, summaries, and insightful commentary.

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

Most people are about to learn a harsh lesson about leverage.

For the past half-century, and even longer, the enormous commercial value of knowledge has essentially stemmed from an "arbitrage structure." The emergence of AI is almost like a dimensional reduction attack, breaking through these four price differences one by one.

For 30 years, "screen jobs" have been salaried because humans are the only interface between the chaotic reality and the final decision. You are responsible for translating vague information into action. You are the bottleneck.

AI has eliminated this bottleneck. Not some future day, not even waiting for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Right now, through systems that are "just enough" and are being integrated into every workflow.

In a post-scarcity world, the only remaining real lever is narrative . The value and importance of narrative are skyrocketing.

Narrative is far more than a simple "storytelling technique." It is the only mechanism by which humanity reconstructs meaning and order in a chaotic environment of information overload, choice overload, and interpretation overload. It determines what can be seen, what can be believed, what can incite action, and what can truly penetrate the cycle.

Knowledge arbitrage is dead, long live narrative!

This article will do three things:

• First, we need to analyze why "knowledge and knowledge arbitrage" are dying, and specifically what is dying.
• Second, delve into the definition, structure, and anthropological roots of narrative to explain why it is "immortal" and why it is the real lever in the AI ​​era.
• Third, it provides practical strategies for the AI ​​era, offering an executable "narrative gravity" framework for all creators, entrepreneurs, and the general public.

II. The disenchantment of knowledge and the complete collapse of arbitrage models

Many content creators and knowledge workers have recently been experiencing a vague sense of collapse: "I've produced so much content, I've worked so hard, and I even write better than professional authors before, so why am I not getting any returns?"

The answer is harsh: because you are chasing trends, because you are producing "content in the form of explicit knowledge," and these products are either disposable or are entering the end of their life cycle.

1. The fate of trending content is increasingly resembling that of disposable items.

In the phase where AI-generated content is widely deployed, the standard production process for a trending topic is almost fixed.

The first step is to gather the materials.

The second step is to piece together the timeline.

The third step is to apply common geopolitical or economic impact templates.

The fourth step is to provide several risk-free suggestions.

Step 5: Create a clickbait variation.

This process used to require manpower and time, but now it's more like pressing a button. The marginal cost is close to zero, so the supply is naturally unlimited. A large part of the massive amount of "in-depth analysis" you see does not come from the long-term research accumulation of any particular author; it is more like a rapid rearrangement of public corpora.

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

What's dead isn't the facts themselves, nor the truth itself. What's dead is the premium that explicit knowledge carries as a commodity. The portion of knowledge that can be encoded, copied, retrieved, and quickly outsourced is degenerating from an asset into background noise. No matter how correctly you write it, it's difficult to gain attention, because correctness has become the minimum barrier to entry.

You will soon discover an awkward reality.

When everyone can use tools to produce "decent content," content becomes more like a generic component in the market. The price of generic components will only be driven down to near cost by competition, while AI drives the cost down to almost zero.

So content has slid from an asset to a liability. The more you publish, the more exhausted your readers become. The more you explain, the more the world resembles a mess.

This is what the English-speaking world has been referring to as the "AI slop" in recent years. It refers to a large number of low-quality or highly homogeneous AI-generated content that is used to grab traffic and attention, and the platform mechanism will also push it to new users.

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

2. Why is there no impact on the content you produce?

What does impact mean?

Impact means that an article or a viewpoint can change someone's judgment, reshape the emotional structure of a group, reverse the decision-making direction of an organization, or change the probability of an action occurring. Impact means that after you express yourself, a corner of the world will become different because of you.

The vast majority of AI-generated or "AI-like" content cannot achieve this. The reason is not mysterious:

• It has no subject to bear the cost: the machine does not bear the risk of saying the wrong thing, and there is no "skin in the game".

• It lacks verifiable sources of experience: it describes 100 pitfalls to avoid when starting a business, but it has never actually experienced a night when it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

It rarely offers "new" questions or "new" explanatory structures ; it excels only at rearranging and recombining existing human explanations with a more perfect grammar.

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

When "generation" becomes extremely cheap, the supply of content expands exponentially. But human attention doesn't expand; 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 the knowledge arbitrage structure are being relentlessly breached.

For the past half-century, and even longer, the immense commercial value of knowledge has essentially stemmed from an "arbitrage structure." Consulting firms, media outlets, analysts, and even much of the education system have profited from the following four types of price differences:

• Gaining the price difference: Whoever can take advantage of information asymmetry and obtain information earlier and more exclusively will have a privilege.
• Translation markup: Whoever can translate obscure professional language and academic jargon into language that the general public or bosses can understand can make money.
• Overall price difference: Whoever can piece together and refine a vast amount of scattered information into an actionable solution (such as a million-dollar consulting PPT) will have the advantage.
• Authority premium: Whoever can speak out as an "expert" through titles and packaging can obtain a trust premium.

However, the emergence of AI has almost likened to a dimensional reduction attack, dismantling these four price differences one by one:

The massive amounts of data you can access early on can be crawled by large model systems in seconds; the code or foreign languages ​​you can translate can be seamlessly converted by AI in real time; the industry research frameworks you can piece together can be made more detailed by AI's in-depth research mode; as for the authoritative posture, when clients find that the suggestions given by AI are more comprehensive than those of consultants they have spent a lot of money to hire, the "illusion of control by static experts" is completely shattered.

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