What do books, art, music, video games, and mathematics have in common?

I remember the last time I went to the cinema and was genuinely impressed by a movie’s visual effects: Avatar (2009). Since then, my impression is that we’ve been living through diminishing returns: more polish, higher resolution, better lighting, but fewer moments that feel like a new era. The same seems true in video games: Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) felt like a leap, and many people are hoping GTA VI will be the next one. But few expect another order-of-magnitude jump anytime soon.

The answer is that none of these things can be used up. A painting doesn’t stop being a painting because a new painting is made. A theorem doesn’t lose its truth because a new theorem is proved. In many cases, the opposite happens: works become more valuable with time (classic literature and art are the obvious examples).

This has a bleak implication for the industries built around them: the effective supply of things worth consuming grows monotonically, but demand is capped by attention, time, and (ultimately) population. The library keeps expanding; a day remains 24 hours.

New creators have the Herculean task of competing with the entire history of human creativity.

AI may postpone this problem for a while by increasing diversity and lowering costs, but it also accelerates the rate at which the library expands. Either way, the underlying dynamic remains: more of what we can consume, not more time to consume it.

You may argue that I am being too pessimistic, so let’s consider some counterarguments:

  • Discovery is limited: Most people can’t access the “entire history” meaningfully. But recommendation systems, search, and social graphs keep getting better at surfacing relevant work (sometimes favoring the already-popular, but often making the long tail reachable).
  • Novelty is local: Even if “true novelty” is rare, novelty relative to a person’s taste, culture, and moment is abundant. A work doesn’t need to be historically unprecedented to feel new.
  • Social coordination matters: Releases are events. Part of the value of a new album, game, or paper is that other people are experiencing it now, so there’s something to share, discuss, and build on together.
  • Experience is more than the artifact: Concerts, live streams, mods, communities, and “how it was made” content add layers that don’t exist in a static archive.
  • Curation becomes the product: In an oversupplied world, selection, sequencing, and trust (editors, critics, curators, friends) become as economically important as production.

If this diagnosis is right, the scarce resources aren’t ideas or pixels, they’re attention and trust. The “industry” doesn’t die so much as it shifts: away from pure production and toward distribution, community, and curation.