2026+: What to Do When Everyone Can Do Everything

2025 was the year of simplification. Complex workflows collapsed into a few buttons. The distance between “I want this” and “done” is approaching zero. Soon we’ll be generating things through neural interfaces paired with AI agents. (Screenshot this.)

Now everyone can make anything - and everyone does. Content factories pump out AI-generated slop at industrial scale. Algorithms lock us into bubbles of perfectly curated comfort: soft, familiar, frictionless. Reels, shorts, endless scroll. Attention has become reflexive. In this ocean of noise, good ideas drown as quickly as bad ones.

Competing with AI on content production is pointless. The only competition left is in producing meaning and trust.

Paths Forward

Play the Algorithm Game

You can optimize for the feed - generate fast, generate lots, match what the system wants. It works as a business model, but you’re a replaceable part. Tomorrow, someone with cheaper automation takes your spot. This is a strategy for revenue, not identity.

Build Trust, Not Reach

People are getting tired of the noise. (They already are.) The value isn’t in access to information anymore - it’s in filtering it. A curator spends their time so you don’t have to spend yours. Communities form around culture and trust, not impressions. The question shifts from “what should I watch?” to “who do I trust?”

Mass reach is a game for big budgets and algorithmic luck. For creators, the math is different: depth matters more than width. One dedicated reader is worth more than a hundred casual scrollers. Subscriptions, communities, products, analysis, live formats - anything that builds return visits and trust.

Create Friction

Algorithms optimize everything toward the “averagely beautiful.” No resistance, no pauses, no need to think. Perfect for retention. But for a brain to wake up, it needs cognitive friction: a paradox, an odd pause, an incompatible combination, an unfinished thought - something attention stumbles over and has to engage with.

This isn’t a mistake. It’s intentional disruption of predictability, in both meaning and form: rough edits, “wrong” framing, grit where polish is expected. Friction creates the entry point. But what keeps people coming back is consistency - a series they return to.

Show Your Work

“Made by human” will become a marker like “organic” in food. But labels are easy to fake - so the value isn’t in the claim, it’s in the verification: reputation, history, transparency of process. Not “I’m human,” but “here’s my path, here’s how I think.” Mistakes, irony, risk - the things that feel alive.

Offer the Physical

The more digital noise there is, the more valuable physical presence becomes. Events, tactile experiences, merch - things that can’t be copied and forwarded. In a world where everything can be generated, scarcity lives in what can’t be.

Sell Context, Not Content

We’ll be selling not the video or the image, but the context and DNA of the idea: tone, taboos, archetypes, a library of meanings and rules - what a brand (or creator) can say and do, and what they can’t. Tools have become infinitely powerful - “how do I make this?” will be a solved problem. What remains is “what exactly should I make?” and “why?”

The Formula

In the feed, “precisely targeted” beats “well made.” Over time, “trusted” beats “loud.”

A working strategy might look like this: entry through the stream, a series people wait for, then your own territory where relationships are built.

Of course, things might go differently.