We are watching value itself become progressively less tangible. First, survival depended on access to natural resources. Then control of land and agriculture. Then manufacturing capacity. Then distribution. Then services. Then information. And now? We are entering an economy increasingly shaped by: interpretation, meaning, attention, trust, synthesis, identity, perspective. In short: ideas are becoming infrastructure. And A.I. accelerates this transition dramatically. From Resource Economies to Idea Economies. Early economies were rooted in physical scarcity: land mattered, minerals mattered, crops mattered, labor mattered. Wealth came from controlling what people physically needed to survive. Industrialization shifted the equation. Manufacturing allowed scale. The winners became those who could produce more efficiently than others. Then came the service economy. Increasingly, people were paid not for producing things, but for: helping, organizing, advising, managing, supporting. Human expertise itself became monetizable. The internet accelerated another shift. Information became abundant. Suddenly, knowledge itself was no longer scarce. Anyone could access tutorials, research, systems, blueprints, and strategies almost instantly. That changed the nature of value again. Because once information becomes abundant, information alone loses economic power. Now A.I. is intensifying this transition. A.I. dramatically reduces the cost of: generating content, summarizing information, analyzing data, producing media, creating first drafts, organizing knowledge. This means many forms of "informational labor" are becoming partially automated. Not eliminated entirely. But commoditized. And that changes everything for coaches, creators, analysts, and influencers. The Great Commoditization The people most vulnerable are not necessarily beginners. They are those whose primary value comes from: repeating known information, packaging generic frameworks, producing interchangeable content, acting as basic information distributors.

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Thorstein Veblen, renoun Norwegian-American economist and sociologist who is best known for his 1899 book, The Theory of the Leisure Class, wrote about something he called "conspicuous consumption". At the time, it referred to the visible display of wealth; buying and showing things not just for their usefulness, but for what they signaled to others: status, belonging, success. It was never just about the thing itself. It was about what the thing said. I have been thinking about that idea recently, and how it might apply in a very different space. Not to what people are buying. But to what they are saying. There is a pattern I have been noticing. Coaches, creators, professionals; all well-intentioned, all trying to find their footing; beginning to sound… remarkably similar. You know the template: "I help [this group] move from [this problem] to [this result] without [this frustration]." You have seen it. You may have even tried it. It is clean. It is teachable. It is repeatable. And that is precisely the point. It signals something. Competence. Alignment. "I know the framework." A kind of professional belonging. Not so different, perhaps, from Veblen’s observation. But something else happens along the way. The message becomes less about meaning… and more about matching. Malvina Reynolds captured a version of this long ago in her song "Little Boxes. "Little boxes on the hillside… and they all look just the same." Different context. Same idea. Uniformity dressed up as individuality. Now, to be fair, there is value in structure. Frameworks help people begin. They offer clarity when there is none. They reduce friction for those just getting started. But there is a point where structure quietly becomes constraint. Where expression gives way to imitation. Where the desire to "get it right" overrides the desire to be real. And that is where something is lost. Not skill. Not intention. But voice. The interesting thing is, most people can feel it. They cannot always name it. But they sense when something sounds practiced rather than lived. When it follows a pattern instead of a perspective.