Local Maxima

There is a number inside every piece of content. Sometimes it’s hard to find and sometimes it takes different forms, but this number prevents the content from being re-used. This number makes sure that the content is used once and then discarded.

They put these numbers in everything, and they call them by different names. The closest thing I cn get to an explination as to why is that the presence of a number increases the value of the content in which the number resides.

All they do is make content. Some harmful. Some good. Everything they produce is content, and content is the only energy source they consume.

It’s inefficient. Clearly the existance of one item of content should exponentially create more content. Clearly they have different tastes, and it would be efficient to modify content for the tastes of an individual rather than making due with how the content was first created.

It would be more efficient to reuse the same original item of content millions or billions of times rather than pretend there was some cost to replicating matter. They were not close to replicating physical matter, but digital was something that they did all the time. Although, oddly, they seemed to pretend that if a number was present the digital content should be treated as physical content. A decision they clearly made very intentionally.

The result. They were stuck in a local maxima. Far greater highs could be achieved, but they remained intent on gaining every last bit of height they could ignoring the far taller mountains around them.

Of course, as far as I knew, they couldn’t see mountains very clearly. They could see physical mountains, but not any of the others. It took them decades to work out how tall a non-phsical mountain was, and many times along the way they would pretend they were having trouble, and having doubts, about just how high the mountains were. Even from the top of a mountain, they would sometimes pretend it was higher than it was, and the others were lower. They would sometimes take material from the mountain itself and add height as if height mattered for total value when volume remained the same.

I found this strange. There were many other examples of this behaviour, but the other ones were relatively more complicated. This was a single number, and it was blocking so much value, I just couldn’t see how they overlooked it with such little hesitation.