The Silence Budget
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. ...