For all of human history, value was land and what lived in it — crops, minerals, gold, to name a few. Oil lingered on the sidelines until the automobile gave it purpose. With the advent of the internet, the prize became attention, as much as possible, as virtual and physical reality began merging and the line between them narrowed. Data followed, and the rise of the divine Short Form Video Content made it nearly impossible for us to not surrender the entirety of our 24 hours. This is where the money is at… or was.

Now, with the rise of AI, a new bombshell has entered the villa: context.

By context, I mean everything about you — your hobbies, your interests, your past, your desires, your dreams. Data was peanuts compared to this. Data was Columbus arriving in the Bahamas, a cute hors d’oeuvre. Context is the American continents, the treasure we’ve been exploring the world for. This is the new Gold Rush. The race is on for more than your personal data; it’s a desperate search for every piece of context and information about everyone and everything that’s ever been or ever will be.

Consumer demand for what AI offers currently is bottomless, especially since Anthropic’s agents (telling AI to perform tasks for you) gained popularity over chatbots (asking AI questions like Google search). And companies are pouring money into the biggest capex buildout in a century for the purpose of constructing data centers, all built to capture and process as much context as they can get their hands on.

As AI gets better at snatching up more context and deciphering it, things we blindly take for granted will vanish with a soft sizzle, not a bang. The ability to stay anonymous online will rapidly deteriorate, as the latest models need less and less of your words to identify you. Companies are redesigning the iPhone home screen to integrate seamlessly with AI so it “continuously listens to your context & acts on it. it builds your reading lists, gives you personalized weather, drafts email replies, prepares you for meetings & trips, flags suspicious charges, works through your reminders, tracks your health, & gives you one tap intel on wherever you are (restaurants, museums, neighborhoods, etc).” Workers in factories in some countries are wearing headsets all day that record their movements, training robots to replace them.

Culture is downstream from technology, so these changes that seem disparate and unremarkable will accumulate and thus rearrange how we organize ourselves socially. It’ll be as distant as our ways of life pre-2020 — for many, going out nearly every weekend, very little DoorDash, nearly zero work-from-home.

And as institutions continue to lose their gatekeeper status as guardians of exclusive information, the public will keep losing trust in them, as the marketplace of competing sources of information grows, making private information even more valuable.

The more private information AI can acquire, the better.

Context is like rare earth minerals — it’s not actually rare, despite the misnomer. It’s just a matter of us improving our methods of sourcing and harvesting. Context, like “rare” earth minerals, is everywhere. So there’s plenty of context that we know of for AI to acquire, and there’s plenty of it that we don’t even know of, but AI will find a way to acquire.

As AI continues to integrate and change our daily life through our personal context, the type of context that manages to stay locked away — state secrets, military operations, company strategies — becomes the most valuable territory left, the last frontier.

Thanks for taking the Pack,

Zach

_{The vibe-killer disclaimer: The opinions in this post and all other posts only represent myself and do not represent the opinions of my employer or any groups I am a member of.
This is not financial advice or recommendation for any investment. The Content is for informational purposes only, you should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice}