The Attention Recession Is Bullish for One Asset: Your Taste
Starting Points: Why Your Taste Level Matters More Than Ever
I Write Starting Points. You Build The Rest.
I used to write 3,000-word essays. Then I looked at the data. The average newsletter reader gives you 51 seconds. Even on Substack, most people scroll to about 65% depth on a long piece. So I’ve created Starting Points.
Each edition gives you a sharp thesis in a few sentences, two to three AI prompts built to interrogate that thesis, and a curated pack of the best articles I found on the topic.
Read it in 90 seconds. Take it to Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, NotebookLM…
The premise is simple. The creator market does not need more content teaching people how to use AI. What it needs is a point of view, synthesis and curation of which ideas matter, sharp framing, and the tools to explore them yourself.
You don’t need more things to read, you need more starting points to inspire your curiosity and creativity.
I write starting points. You build the rest.
- j -
Start Here
Consumer enthusiasm for AI-generated content dropped from 60% to 26% in two years. More than 20% of videos shown to new YouTube users are now classified as AI slop. Content volume is at an all-time high and content trust is at a structural low.
My contrarian self is not betting that AI content fails, it is betting that AI content succeeds so completely at flooding every channel that the only remaining scarce resource is editorial judgment.
Taste, in the economic sense, is becoming a capital asset.
The people who can decide what matters, what to ignore, and what to remix will build the next class of media companies.
Prompts to explore:
“Make the economic case that editorial judgment and curation are becoming scarce resources in an AI-saturated content environment. Use the economics of scarcity, signaling theory, and network effects to explain why human taste could become a defensible competitive advantage. Include at least three historical parallels where information abundance created new scarcity-based businesses.”
“Analyze the business model of three curator-driven media companies or newsletters (for example: Dense Discovery, The Browser, Stratechery). What do they have in common structurally? What is the ‘moat’ of a curation business when AI can aggregate information at near-zero cost? Where does the moat break down?”
“I am building a personal brand around [topic]. If the contrarian bet is correct that taste and editorial judgment become the scarce asset in media, how should I restructure my content strategy to optimize for curation authority rather than content volume? Be specific about format, frequency, and positioning choices.”
Tool: NotebookLM (notebooklm.google.com). Run the prompts against the set of articles below. NotebookLM will query across all sources simultaneously, find contradictions between them, and generate synthesis that no single article provides.
The Reading Pack
Six articles. Upload all of them. They are the source material the prompts were built to interrogate.
Sloponomics: Who Wins and Loses in the AI-Content Flood — Tom Wainwright, The Economist (Oct 2025). The most rigorous economic analysis of the AI content glut. Documents the barbell effect: hobbyists and superstars thrive, the professional middle gets squeezed.
The State of the Culture, 2024 — Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker (Feb 2024). Gioia’s most viral essay. Maps the cultural food chain from art to entertainment to distraction to addiction. 25 million views. The framework that explains why the slop problem is structural, not temporary.
A.I. Is Homogenizing Our Thoughts — Kyle Chayka, The New Yorker (Jun 2025). MIT Media Lab research showing ChatGPT users produce more homogenized writing and demonstrate less brain activity. The empirical case that AI does not just flood the market. It flattens the thinking.
Drowning in Slop — Max Read, New York Magazine (Sep 2024). The investigative deep dive into the AI content farm economy. How abandoned domains get stuffed with machine-generated articles. The supply side of the crisis, reported from the inside.
This Is Just the Internet Now — Charlie Warzel, The Atlantic (Oct 2025). The definitive 2025 assessment that AI slop is no longer a trend piece. It is the default state of online content. The piece that stops pretending the problem is fixable at the platform level.
AI and the Human Condition — Ben Thompson, Stratechery (Jan 2026). Thompson’s argument that human-created content builds community in ways AI structurally cannot. The strategic case for why taste is not just a cultural preference but a business moat.
Ran the prompts?
What did you discover?
What are you going to build next?
Share in the comments.
Hope this helped.
I write starting points. You build the rest.
- j -
Companies are becoming tech stacks.
We are all becoming companies.
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John Brewton documents the history and future of operating companies at Operating by John Brewton. He is a graduate of Harvard University and began his career as a Phd. student in economics at the University of Chicago. After selling his family’s B2B industrial distribution company in 2021, he has been helping business owners, founders and investors optimize their operations ever since. He is the founder of 6A East Partners, a research and advisory firm asking the question: What is the future of companies? He still cringes at his early LinkedIn posts and loves making content each and everyday, despite the protestations of his beloved wife, Fabiola, at times.