What Doesn't Get Cheaper

A CEO whose company I’ve followed for a while posted a thesis this week, and I’ve been turning it over since. Websites, he argued, are going the way of contact lenses. I’ll paraphrase his point below, but read it for yourself. I left a comment right away, and as I thought about it more, my comment became the rest of what is on this page. The first contact lenses were expensive and durable. You bought a pair, you cleaned them, you kept them in a case, and you expected them to last. The cost obliged a kind of care. Then the materials improved and production got cheap, and the whole relationship inverted. Now you buy a year of them in a box and throw one away at the end of every day. His claim is that AI does this to websites. Spin one up, use it, discard it, make another. Iterate fast enough that lifespan stops being a concern. I think he’s partially right, and, right now, it’s the more interesting part — that’s what makes it feel like it’s the whole. When production costs drop, the…