The Unfakeable Layer
The Unfakeable Layer When generation gets cheap enough to be effectively free, what holds value starts to shift. I spent two days at Startup Olé Marbella. Same venue, same pitch competition, same investors. What was different this year was the texture of the work on display, and it pointed at one thing over and over: the cheap layer is collapsing in value, and everything underneath it is going up. Start with where this ends. Right now I talk to my agent. Soon my agent talks to your agent. Then your agent talks to you. Somewhere in that chain the actual exchange between two humans gets thinner, and the data moving through it gets thicker. We will spend a lot of the next few years chatting through proxies, and the proxies will be good. Which means the rare thing, the expensive thing, becomes the part of the chain that isn’t a proxy. A real conversation. A verified human. An idea that wasn’t interpolated from everything that came before it. ...