The luxury of reality
As experiences become synthetic and instant, the things that can't be made at zero marginal cost start to look like luxuries.
you can't generate being there
trying to answer →Why might human-made things become more valuable?What becomes scarce when intelligence becomes cheap?
When factories made goods cheap, the handmade thing didn’t disappear. It moved upmarket. William Morris and the Arts and Crafts movement made a whole aesthetic out of what machines couldn’t do. A century later, “hand-stitched” is something brands print on the label.
AI could do the same to intellectual and experiential goods. Anything that can be generated trends toward free: images, music, conversation, company. What’s left at a premium is what can’t be generated at zero marginal cost: a physical place, people in the same room, a craft that took years, a thing there are only ten of, being present.In 2022 Americans bought more vinyl records than CDs for the first time since 1987. The more convenient format lost to the one you have to get up and turn over.
This is the experiential side of the aura dividend: that note is about proof that a person made something; this one is about things that only exist in the room. It’s also why I read Gen Z going offline as a market signal rather than a mood.
Unfinished: luxuries are by definition for the few. The question I can’t answer yet is whether reality becomes a luxury good, or a public one that someone has to pay for.