What stays scarce when making things gets cheap?
If software, research and design keep getting cheaper, value has to move somewhere. A working list of candidates, none of them assumed safe.
An open question, not a conclusion.
A great deal of what used to need a team (writing code, analysing a market, designing a page) now needs one person and a set of capable tools. If that continues, the ability to produce stops being the scarce thing. Something else has to carry the value.
These are the candidates I am testing, roughly in the order I trust them:
- Trust and reputation. People still need to know who stands behind something.
- Distribution. A legitimate, direct relationship with the people you serve.
- Physical-world execution. Kitchens, vans, villages and deliveries do not compress the way software does.
- Accountability. Someone who answers when it goes wrong.
- Taste and problem selection. Choosing what is worth making at all.
- Deep integration into how real work is actually done.
- Ownership of useful assets and durable relationships.
- Communities and experiences people genuinely value.
None of these is automatically defensible. Distribution can be bought, trust can be faked for a while, and taste is easy to claim. The projects in Build and Lab are partly ways of finding out which of these hold up.