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Stephen King, by his own account, writes about two thousand words a day. That’s roughly the length of this post. He has done this nearly every day for fifty years, and the result is one of the most prolific output records in modern publishing. The average adult reads at about two hundred words a minute. That makes King’s daily output ten minutes of reading material. One of the most productive writers in history produces, per day, about one-sixtieth of what his reader could consume. That ratio - call it sixty to one, give or take - has always been the underlying economics of text. A writer’s daily output is always tiny compared to a reader’s daily intake. The asymmetry between writing-time and reading-time isn’t a recent development; it is the oldest fact about written language. ...

The economics of content are breaking. Not gradually — the marginal cost of generating a competent paragraph, a convincing image, a plausible voice is approaching zero. That’s the supply side. The demand side hasn’t moved. Human attention is still roughly 16 waking hours, a few dozen context switches, a finite tolerance for stimulation before cognitive performance degrades. When supply expands without limit and demand stays fixed, scarcity inverts. We spent fifty years worrying about information scarcity — censorship, gatekeepers, access. The concern now runs in the opposite direction. The scarce resource isn’t content. It’s the absence of it. ...