The previous essay identified a mechanism: intelligence on tap acts as a selective solvent, dissolving barriers built on knowledge and capital while leaving those built on regulation, physical infrastructure, and trust largely intact. Where the erosion is happening, it compounds. Where it compounds, sunk costs fall toward zero, and markets become contestable in ways that Baumol’s framework predicted but that have never materialized at this speed or this breadth.
Has this happened before? Three times in the past two centuries, a fundamental economic input became dramatically cheaper, and in each case the same sequence followed: barriers built on that input’s scarcity dissolved, competition intensified, margins compressed, and new monopolies formed around the next scarce resource. The first time was when information started moving faster than people.
The world before the wire
In 1840, the fastest way to send a message from New York to London was to put it on a ship. The voyage took roughly ten days. The fastest way to send a message from New York to New Orleans was to put it on a different ship, or hand it to a series of riders. Commodity prices in Liverpool, the world’s largest cotton market, were unknowable in New York until the next steamer arrived. Securities prices on the London Stock Exchange were invisible to traders in Philadelphia. Every merchant house in the transatlantic trade operated with information that was, at best, a week and a half old.
This delay was a structural feature of the economy, and entire fortunes were built on exploiting it. The Sassoon dynasty ran what amounted to a private intelligence network spanning Bombay, Shanghai, Hong Kong, London, Baghdad, and half a dozen other ports. David Sassoon stationed his eight sons across these offices, each writing daily letters to the others in Judeo-Arabic, reporting prices, political developments, and competitor movements. In a world where information traveled at the speed of sailing ships, this network gave the Sassoons a systematic advantage over any merchant who relied on public knowledge. They knew London cotton prices in Bombay before anyone else. They knew Shanghai opium demand in Baghdad before the market moved. By the 1860s, David Sassoon & Co. handled roughly 70% of the Indian opium trade.
The Sassoons were not unique. They were simply the best-resourced example of a universal principle: when information is scarce and slow, the merchant who moves it fastest captures the spread. Every commodity trader, every securities broker, every wholesale merchant in the pre-telegraph economy operated some version of this model. The entire market structure was organized around information asymmetry.
The wire changes everything
Samuel Morse’s first telegraph message traveled from Washington to Baltimore on May 24, 1844. Within a decade, the economic geography of the United States began to reorganize.
The effects were measurable almost immediately. Richard DuBoff, in a 1983 study of agricultural markets, found that price differentials for farm products across major eastern US cities shrank as much as 50% between 1844 and 1854. Because the railroad network was not yet extensive enough to explain this convergence, DuBoff attributed it to the expanding telegraph system. The telegraph did not move the goods. It moved the information, and the information was what had sustained the price gaps.
JoAnne Yates documented a parallel phenomenon in grain markets: wheat and corn prices between Buffalo and New York City synchronized within four years of the telegraphic connection between those cities, collapsing from a four-day price lag to near-simultaneous pricing by 1848. The Chicago Board of Trade, founded in that same year, introduced standardized futures contracts by 1865. As Alexander Engel later argued, futures markets emerged precisely to bridge the gap between fast-traveling information and slow-traveling goods. The telegraph made price transparency instantaneous; the goods still moved at the speed of a barge.
The transatlantic cable, completed on July 28, 1866, left the clearest evidentiary trail. Claudia Steinwender’s 2018 study in the American Economic Review used the cable as a natural experiment. Before the cable, information between New York and Liverpool traveled by steamship, a ten-day voyage. After the cable, it traveled in minutes. Steinwender found that the average cotton price gap between the two markets fell by more than a third. Price volatility fell by more than two-thirds.
The behavioral shift was just as telling. Daily cotton exports from New York rose 37%, while export volume became 114% more volatile. This looks like a paradox until you realize what it means: merchants were no longer shipping into an informational void. They were responding to actual demand signals. Steinwender estimated the efficiency gains at roughly the equivalent of abolishing a 7% tariff on cotton, or about twice the average trade impact of NAFTA.
Christopher Hoag, studying capital markets, found that the cable compressed the information lag for securities prices between New York and London from ten days to zero. Price differentials on dual-listed stocks like the New York and Erie Railroad fell from 5-10% to 2-3%. Kenneth Garbade and William Silber documented the broader pattern: the telegraph “quickly cut price differentials” between every pair of markets it connected.
What died, what consolidated
The businesses built on information scarcity did not adapt gradually. They were exposed.
Consider the Pony Express. Launched on April 3, 1860, it offered ten-day mail delivery across the western United States at a moment when that speed advantage had real commercial value. Eighteen months later, on October 24, 1861, the transcontinental telegraph reached completion. Two days after that — on October 26 — the Pony Express announced its closure. In its entire existence, it grossed $90,000 and lost $200,000. The service was economically viable for exactly as long as it took a faster technology to arrive. Once the wire reached Salt Lake City, every dollar invested in relay stations and horses became a sunk cost with zero residual value.
The telegraph industry itself followed a pattern that would repeat in every subsequent cycle: the technology that destroyed information scarcity quickly consolidated into its own monopoly. In 1851, seventy-five telegraph companies operated across the United States. By 1857, six regional firms had formed a cartel — the Treaty of Six Nations. By 1866, Western Union had absorbed its remaining major rivals and controlled over 90% of US telegraph traffic, becoming the first nationwide industrial monopoly in American history. It would eventually incorporate more than 500 companies into its system over its lifetime, while maintaining profit margins of 30 to 40 cents on every dollar of revenue even as per-message rates fell from $1.09 to $0.30.
The news industry consolidated along similar lines. In 1870, Reuters, Havas, and Wolff’s Telegraphic Bureau formalized the “Ring Combination,” dividing the world into exclusive territories for news distribution. Reuters took the British Empire and the Far East. Havas took France, the Mediterranean, and Latin America. Wolff took northern and eastern Europe. The Associated Press joined through an agreement with Reuters, extending the cartel into the United States. These four organizations held quasi-monopolies over telegraphic news dispatches in nearly every newspaper in their respective territories.
Financial markets concentrated in the same way. Before the telegraph, New York, Philadelphia, and Boston each operated independent stock exchanges serving local markets. The telegraph connected them, and what had been three separate markets became, in effect, one. New York was the center of gravity. By 1910, the NYSE handled 90% of all bond trades and two-thirds of all stock trades in the United States. The regional exchanges did not disappear overnight. They withered as liquidity concentrated where price transparency was greatest.
The pattern
The telegraph made information transmission cheap. Businesses built on information scarcity — the Sassoons’ trading empire, the Pony Express, commodity arbitrageurs exploiting price gaps between cities — were exposed within years, not decades. But cheap information did not produce a permanent state of open competition. It produced new monopolies around the next scarce resource. Western Union controlled the wires, the Reuters-Havas-Wolff cartel controlled the news, and the NYSE controlled the market. Infrastructure, aggregation, liquidity: whoever owned the new bottleneck captured the value that information asymmetry had previously held.
The input changed. The competitive dynamics followed. The cycle from fragmentation to reconsolidation took roughly thirty years: seventy-five telegraph companies in 1851, a single monopoly by 1866, and stable new market structures by the 1880s.
This is the first historical precedent. The second begins on a dock in Newark, New Jersey, in 1956.
On April 26, 1956, a converted World War II tanker named the Ideal X sailed from Port Newark, New Jersey, bound for Houston, Texas. It carried fifty-eight aluminum truck bodies, each thirty-five feet long, locked onto a steel deck. A hundred dignitaries watched the loading, which took less than eight hours. The man who had arranged the voyage, a trucking entrepreneur named Malcom McLean, was not interested in ships. He was interested in moving freight.
McLean’s accountants had calculated that loading cargo onto a conventional break-bulk freighter cost $5.83 per ton. Loading the Ideal X’s containers cost 15.8 cents per ton. A 97% reduction in the single largest friction in global trade.
The old economics of distance
To understand what that cost reduction meant, you have to understand what shipping looked like before the container.
In the early 1950s, a break-bulk freighter arriving in New York or London would tie up at a pier for weeks. Longshoremen carried, stacked, and sorted every item by hand. The actual cargo manifest of the SS Warrior in 1954 listed 194,582 individual bags, barrels, wooden crates, and paperboard cartons, as Marc Levinson documented in The Box. Loading and unloading consumed more than a third of the total cost of the voyage. Half the total cost of a four-thousand-mile shipment could be consumed by just the two ten-mile movements through two ports. Pilferage was endemic, breakage routine, insurance expensive.
This inefficiency was not merely a cost. It was a protective barrier. Ocean freight charges represented 10 to 30% of the cost of imported goods. A manufacturer in Manchester or Milwaukee did not need a tariff to be protected from a competitor in Seoul or Taipei. The cost of moving physical goods across an ocean was itself a tariff, one that geography imposed automatically, without legislation and without expiration. Every factory that operated within a few hundred miles of its customers benefited from this protection whether it knew it or not.
What the box did
The container eliminated the bottleneck at the dock. Ship turnaround collapsed from weeks to under twenty-four hours. Sealed steel boxes ended the pilferage that had been a feature of every port since antiquity. Intermodal transfer meant that goods could move from a factory floor in Shenzhen to a warehouse in Stuttgart, from ship to rail to truck, without a human hand touching the cargo.
But the headline cost reduction understates the real economic impact, and getting this right matters for the argument. David Hummels, in a 2007 study in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, showed that ocean shipping rates in ad valorem terms were not dramatically lower by 2004 than in the 1950s. The liner shipping price index had actually increased 2.4 times between the late 1950s and 1985. Rising fuel costs, larger ships, and more expensive port infrastructure consumed the direct savings from containerization nearly as fast as the technology produced them.
The real impact, Hummels argued, was in the dimensions that the price index did not capture: speed, reliability, and the elimination of handling costs. Levinson calculated that each day a shipment spends at sea raises the exporter’s costs by 0.8%. A thirteen-day voyage from China to the United States therefore carries the equivalent of a 10% tariff. If that is right, then cutting port time from three weeks to one day is worth more than cutting the freight rate. Containerization did not simply make shipping cheaper. It made distance less expensive in ways that compound: faster transit, less damage, less theft, seamless intermodal transfer, and the ability to build supply chains that span continents.
The combined effect was measured by Daniel Bernhofen, Zouheir El-Sahli, and Richard Kneller in a 2016 study in the Journal of International Economics. They found that containerization increased North-North bilateral trade by roughly 700% over twenty years. The effect was larger than all GATT tariff reductions and regional trade agreements combined. Kerem Cosar and Banu Demir, in a 2018 follow-up, estimated that global trade would be approximately one-third lower today if container technology did not exist. For the most remote trading partners, the figure was 78%.
What was exposed
The protective tariff of distance dissolved, and the manufacturers who had relied on it were exposed.
The pattern was global. South Korea’s exports grew from $55 million in 1962 to $27 billion by 1982, nearly a five-hundred-fold increase in twenty years. The economy shifted from exporting raw materials to exporting manufactured goods: clothing exports alone went from $2,000 in 1961 to $213.6 million in 1970. Japan’s seaborne exports surged from 27.1 million metric tons in 1967 to 40.6 million in 1969. US-bound shipments specifically rose 21% in a single year, coinciding with the expansion of transpacific container service.
In the United States, manufacturing employment peaked at 19.4 million in 1979 and never recovered. The sharpest decade of decline was 2000 to 2009, when the sector lost a third of its remaining workforce. New York’s garment industry, which had employed tens of thousands of workers in Manhattan, saw its number of manufacturing firms cut in half between 1958 and 1977, from 10,329 to 5,096. The geography of the waterfront itself reorganized: Manhattan and Brooklyn’s finger piers could not accommodate container cranes, so the cargo industry relocated across the Hudson to Port Newark-Elizabeth, where flat land and rail connections suited the new technology. The workforce in the Port of New York shrank from roughly 50,000 in the early 1950s to 4,500 by the mid-1970s. Ninety percent of the jobs vanished in about fifteen years.
London’s story mirrored New York’s. Between 1967 and 1981, every dock in London closed: East India, St Katharine’s, Surrey Commercial, West India, Millwall, and finally the Royal Docks. The shipping industry relocated to deep-water ports at Tilbury and Felixstowe that could accommodate larger vessels and container gantries. Eight square miles of waterfront in East London were left derelict, an emptiness so vast that it took the London Docklands Development Corporation a decade to begin redeveloping it.
The new bottleneck
As with the telegraph, the technology that destroyed one form of scarcity quickly consolidated around the next. The container made moving goods cheap, but the infrastructure required to move containers was expensive and concentrated. Only ports with deep water, flat backland, rail connections, and massive capital investment could handle the new ships. Singapore, which opened Southeast Asia’s first container terminal at Tanjong Pagar in 1972, went from handling 25,000 container units that year to 5 million by 1990, becoming the world’s busiest port. Rotterdam built the Maasvlakte by extending into the North Sea itself. Container port adoption went from 1% of countries in 1966 to 90% by the end of the 1980s, but the throughput concentrated in a handful of megaports that functioned as chokepoints for global commerce.
Shipping lines consolidated in parallel. Where dozens of independent carriers had competed on major routes, nine ocean carriers now control roughly 80% of global container shipping. The industry that had been a craft, longshoremen carrying individual barrels, became a capital-intensive logistics operation. A single ship carrying 9,000 forty-foot containers might cross from Hong Kong to Germany with twenty people on board.
The input changed. Geographic distance ceased to be a reliable barrier to competition. Manufacturers who had survived on proximity to their markets were exposed to competitors who could ship goods across an ocean for less than it cost to truck them across a state. But new advantages consolidated around port infrastructure, logistics networks, and the capital required to operate at container scale.
The pattern from the telegraph repeated: a fundamental input becomes cheap, barriers built on its scarcity dissolve, competition intensifies, margins compress, and new monopolies form around the next bottleneck. The cycle from the Ideal X in 1956 to worldwide container port coverage took roughly twenty-five years. By the 1980s, the new steady state was in place.
The third precedent moves faster still.
The internet made a third input cheap: distribution. Before the web, distributing information, media, entertainment, or a financial transaction to a mass audience required owning expensive infrastructure. A newspaper needed printing presses, delivery trucks, and carrier routes. A record label needed pressing plants, warehouses, and shelf space at Tower Records. A brokerage needed branch offices, licensed representatives, and a seat on an exchange floor. A retailer needed a lease on a storefront in a town where its customers lived. Each of these was a barrier to entry. Each was load-bearing. And each rested, ultimately, on the same economic foundation: the cost of getting something from the person who made it to the person who wanted it.
The internet drove that cost toward zero. The marginal cost of distributing a digital copy of a newspaper article, a song, a stock trade confirmation, or a product listing became, for practical purposes, nothing. The consequences arrived industry by industry, in a rolling wave that took roughly twenty years to reach full force.
The first casualties
Newspapers were hit first, and hardest. US newspaper classified advertising revenue peaked at $19.6 billion in 2000. By 2012, it had fallen 77%, to $4.6 billion. Total newspaper advertising revenue, including display and digital, peaked at $49.4 billion in 2005. By 2020, it had fallen to $8.8 billion, an 82% decline.
The mechanism was precise and measurable. Robert Seamans and Feng Zhu, in a study published in Management Science in 2014, tracked what happened each time Craigslist entered a new local market. Their sample covered more than 900 US daily newspapers from 2000 to 2007. In each market Craigslist entered, classified advertising rates at the local newspaper fell an average of 20.7%. The secondary effects compounded: subscription prices rose 3.3% as papers tried to compensate, circulation fell 4.4% in response, and display advertising rates dropped 3.1% as the shrinking audience made ad space less valuable. Seamans and Zhu estimated the total transfer from newspaper revenue to consumer savings at $5 billion in year-2000 dollars across the study period. Craigslist was a website run by a few dozen employees. It did not set out to destroy an industry. It simply made distribution free for the category of advertising that had subsidized American journalism for a century.
By 2025, nearly 3,500 US newspapers had closed, more than 270,000 newspaper jobs had been eliminated, and 213 counties had no local news source at all.
The wave moves
The music industry’s revenue peaked in the same year that Napster launched: 1999. This was not a coincidence. US recorded music revenue hit $14.6 billion that year, driven almost entirely by CD sales. Napster, created by a nineteen-year-old college student, went live on June 1. Within two years, the recording industry’s revenue was in free fall. Physical sales declined more than 60% between 2001 and 2010. Revenue hit its trough at $6.97 billion in 2014, a 52% decline from the peak. The industry eventually recovered through streaming, but it took until 2024 to surpass 1999’s nominal revenue. Adjusted for inflation, the industry is still smaller than it was when Shawn Fanning wrote his code.
Travel agencies followed a similar arc, compressed into an even tighter timeline. Before the internet, airlines paid travel agents a 10% commission on every ticket sold. In February 1995, Delta Air Lines capped commissions at $50 per roundtrip. American and Northwest matched the next day. By 2002, Delta had eliminated base commissions entirely, and every major carrier followed within months. The number of travel agency establishments in the United States fell from roughly 23,000 in 1997 to under 10,000 by 2013, a 59% decline. An estimated 60,000 agents exited the profession between 2000 and 2020. The internet did not make travel agents incompetent. It made their core function, accessing airline inventory and issuing tickets, something a consumer could do from a browser.
Retail’s exposure was slower but no less structural. E-commerce represented 0.9% of total US retail sales in 2000. By 2024, it had reached 16.1%. In the peak years of what the industry called the “retail apocalypse,” more than 23,000 store closures were announced between 2017 and 2019. Toys R Us filed for bankruptcy in September 2017. Borders, which had outsourced its online sales to Amazon in 2001, liquidated in 2011. Sears, once the largest retailer in the United States, filed for bankruptcy in October 2018.
The forty-four-year arc
The most telling case may be financial services, because the timeline was long enough to see the full competitive arc.
Before May 1, 1975, stock trading commissions in the United States were fixed by the New York Stock Exchange. A typical 100-share trade cost a minimum of $49. On that date, the SEC deregulated commissions. Charles Schwab opened his first discount brokerage branch five months later, offering trades at roughly $70, a fraction of the full-service price. By the early 1990s, online brokerages had driven the price to $14.95 to $39 per trade. Robinhood launched in 2015 offering zero-commission trades. For four years, the rest of the industry watched and waited.
Then, on October 1, 2019, Charles Schwab announced it would eliminate commissions on US stock and ETF trades. TD Ameritrade matched within hours. E*Trade followed the next day. Fidelity held out barely a week. The entire industry’s pricing structure collapsed in ten days. TD Ameritrade lost $220 to $240 million per quarter, roughly 15 to 16% of its net revenue, overnight. Within two months, Schwab announced it would acquire TD Ameritrade for $26 billion. The company that could absorb the margin compression swallowed the one that could not.
From $49 per trade to $0. From a fixed-commission cartel to an industry where the product itself was free. The arc took forty-four years. The final collapse took ten days.
What the internet exposed
The pattern held for the third time. Distribution became cheap, barriers built on distribution scarcity dissolved, competition intensified, margins compressed. Newspapers that had monopolized local classified advertising were exposed. Travel agencies that had controlled access to airline inventory were exposed. Retailers that had relied on the advantage of physical location were exposed. Brokerages that had charged for the mechanical act of executing a trade were exposed.
And, as in the previous two cycles, the result was not permanent open competition. New monopolies formed around the next bottleneck. Google captured more than 90% of search, becoming the gateway to all distributed information. Amazon captured roughly 40% of US e-commerce, becoming the default distribution infrastructure. Facebook accumulated a social graph that no competitor could replicate. By 2020, a US House Antitrust Subcommittee report concluded that Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google each possessed “monopoly power.” The internet dissolved the old distribution moats. Data and network effects built the new ones.
But there is one feature of the internet cycle that matters more than the pattern itself: it was sequential. Newspapers fell first, starting around 2000. Music overlapped, from 1999 to 2014. Travel agencies were exposed between 1997 and 2013. The broad retail wave crested between 2005 and 2019. Financial services completed the arc in October 2019. From the commercialization of the internet in the mid-1990s to the last major industry capitulation, roughly twenty years elapsed. Each sector was exposed in turn, with five-to-ten-year gaps between the earliest casualties and the latest.
This sequential character gave incumbents something valuable: time. The music industry could watch newspapers struggle and assume the internet was someone else’s problem. Retailers could watch travel agencies shrink and believe that physical stores were different. Brokerages could watch Robinhood for four years before the pricing floor caught up to them. The industries fell in sequence because distribution costs fell in sequence: digital goods first, services second, physical goods last.
The input changed. The competitive dynamics followed. And the cycle, from early casualties to broad restructuring, took roughly twenty years.
The fourth input is intelligence. It is not falling sequentially.
Three inputs, three eras, one sequence.
The telegraph made information transmission cheap. Containerization made moving physical goods cheap. The internet made distribution cheap. In each case, the businesses that had relied on the scarcity of that input were exposed within years. In each case, competition intensified and margins compressed. In each case, new monopolies formed around the next bottleneck: infrastructure after the telegraph, logistics networks after the container, data and network effects after the internet.
The pattern is not a metaphor. It is an observable, measurable sequence, and it has repeated with enough consistency across 180 years that treating it as coincidence requires more intellectual effort than treating it as a regularity.
What survived
In each era, the question of what survived is as instructive as the question of what fell.
The businesses that collapsed were those whose competitive position depended on the input that had just become cheap. The Sassoons’ intelligence network. The Pony Express. Local manufacturers protected by the cost of ocean freight. Classified advertising monopolies. Fixed-commission brokerages. Each was built on a specific form of scarcity, and each was exposed when that scarcity evaporated.
The businesses that survived, and often thrived, were those that controlled the new bottleneck. Western Union did not succeed because it was good at transmitting information. It succeeded because it owned the wires. Singapore did not become the world’s busiest port because it had the cheapest labor. It became the world’s busiest port because it had the deepest water, the best location, and the capital to build terminal infrastructure before anyone else. Google did not win because it was the best search engine in 2002 (though it arguably was). It won because it accumulated a data advantage and an advertising infrastructure that no competitor could replicate.
The surviving entity in each cycle controlled whatever was scarce after the old scarcity disappeared.
The acceleration
The cycles are getting faster.
After the telegraph’s arrival, price convergence across markets happened within a decade. The consolidation from seventy-five telegraph companies to Western Union’s monopoly took fifteen years. The full cycle, from fragmentation to stable new market structures in the 1880s, took roughly thirty years.
Containerization moved faster. The Ideal X sailed in 1956. Transatlantic container service launched in 1966. Ninety percent of countries had container ports by the late 1980s. Manufacturing employment in the United States had peaked and begun its decline by 1979. The cycle from first deployment to worldwide restructuring: about twenty-five years.
The internet moved faster still. The World Wide Web reached 100 million users in roughly seven years. Newspapers, the first casualties, began declining around 2000. The last major industry capitulation — zero-commission brokerage — happened in October 2019. But the period of rapid restructuring compressed into about fifteen years, from newspaper classified collapse around 2000 to broad cross-sector impact by roughly 2015.
Each cycle is shorter. And within each cycle, the late stages compress more than the early stages. The brokerage industry’s final collapse took ten days after forty-four years of gradual price decline. London’s docks closed over fourteen years. The telegraph’s consolidation into monopoly took fifteen years. The rate of change accelerates as the cycle matures, and each new cycle starts from a higher baseline of speed.
The fourth input
AI is the fourth input. And by the metrics that have tracked adoption speed across these cycles, it is arriving faster than any of its predecessors.
The World Wide Web took seven years to reach 100 million users. ChatGPT reached 100 million users in two months. A Harvard and NBER study by Alexander Bick, Adam Blandin, and David Deming found that 39.4% of Americans aged 18 to 64 had used generative AI within two years of ChatGPT’s launch. The Cloud Security Alliance, surveying enterprise adoption in early 2025, concluded that the traditional technology adoption curve “doesn’t work for AI” because the early majority adopted “almost simultaneously with early adopters.”
The adoption data alone would be notable. But the deeper difference is not speed. It is scope.
The telegraph made one type of economic activity cheap: transmitting information. Containerization did the same for moving physical goods. The internet did the same for distributing digital content and services. Each was powerful precisely because it was a fundamental input. But each was still one input. The industries it restructured were those that depended most heavily on that specific input. Other industries — the ones that depended on different inputs — had time. Newspapers could watch the telegraph destroy the Pony Express without worrying about their own business model. Garment manufacturers could watch containerization expose their competitors without thinking much about their distribution costs. The restructuring was real, but it was sequential.
Intelligence is not one input in this sense. It is the input to generating, processing, and acting on information across every domain. Legal analysis, software engineering, financial modeling, drug discovery, customer service, marketing copy, logistics optimization, product design — these are not one industry. They are cognitive work, and cognitive work is what AI makes cheap.
When information transmission became cheap, information-asymmetry businesses were exposed. When moving goods became cheap, geography-dependent manufacturers were exposed. When distribution became cheap, distribution-dependent businesses were exposed. When intelligence becomes cheap, every business built on the scarcity of cognitive work is exposed. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
This is the distinction that the previous three precedents establish. The pattern is the same: a fundamental input becomes cheap, barriers dissolve, competition intensifies, margins compress, new monopolies form around the next bottleneck. But the scope is different. The previous inputs each dissolved barriers in specific sectors of the economy. Intelligence on tap dissolves barriers across all of them at once.
The next essay examines what this looks like when it is no longer a historical analogy but a measurable, present-tense phenomenon. The evidence is already here.