The thesis. As AI raises productivity across industries, making the thing stops being the bottleneck: products commoditize, competence commoditizes, execution commoditizes. Scarcity doesn't vanish — it migrates to the one input AI does not mint: human awareness. What used to be marketing's means (get attention, in order to sell the product) becomes the contested end: the fight is over the stock of awareness itself, and products increasingly justify themselves as ways of acquiring it.
The lineage, honestly. Simon said it in 1971: information wealth creates attention poverty. The advertising funnel said it in 1898 — the A of AIDA (Attention–Interest–Desire–Action) comes first. What is new is not the scarcity but the inversion: the funnel's top stage, once a corridor to Action, is becoming the property itself. MrBeast's empire monetizes backwards — awareness first, commerce (Feastables) bolted on after; the video is not an ad for anything, it is the product.
Stock and flow (the frame that keeps the accounting straight):
- Attention is the flow — impressions, views, reach; priced per thousand (CPM) since the print era.
- Awareness is the stock the flow deposits — mindshare, mental availability, a subscriber base that can be re-mobilized.
- Brand equity is the stock capitalized; goodwill is its name on a balance sheet.
The craft under study in this column is the manufacture of flow to accrete stock — and per the-mrbeast-factory, that manufacture is further along toward industrialization than most people are comfortable believing.
Corollary for builders. In the AI era the binding constraint of a solo product is decreasingly "can it be built" and increasingly "does anyone's awareness contain it" — the maker's bottleneck moves from the workshop to the stock of minds. (The demand-side twin of this thesis: desire-is-labor — when satisfaction is cheap, demand is the last commodity still requiring production. Awareness is where that production happens.)