Humans Entertainment-to-Death and the Media of the Next Generation

I was feeling a bit down this morning. And part of it, admittedly, was a down feeling about humanity as a whole.

Humanity is walking further and further down this road of entertainment-to-death.

Of course, looking at the world’s new face through old eyes and finding it unbearable to watch means my thinking is starting to ossify and harden. That’s a dangerous thing.

Haha, and it’s pretty ironic too — when you’re young, saying “the world is wrong” is called “chuunibyou.” When you’re middle-aged, saying “the world is wrong” is called “being stuck in the past.”

Setting aside the dangerous matter of intellectual ossification for now, let me just record what I’m thinking at this moment. If someday I have a sudden epiphany, I can look back and compare.

1. Dumbing-down: The Inevitable Result of an Explosion in Supply-Side Capacity

Look at writing web novels like Tomato Novel these days — wow, you have to dumb yourself down just to be able to write it, and on top of that you have to go abstract, just to come up with something that breaks the formula.

But the ideas a normal person could think of were all written out years ago. Now you have to go abstract, you have to come up with something outrageously absurd — the kind of absurdity you could never possibly imagine or experience in real life.

Modern web novel readers have an extremely high threshold for what counts as a satisfying payoff.

So I think, ah, humanity — what’s going to happen in the future?

Let me straighten out the logic first. Right now, when it comes to production and creation, it’s very hard to find any entrepreneurial opportunity. Productivity is too abundant, while the consumption side is utterly exhausted — the main body of the consumption pyramid can now only consume this very vulgar, very childish, very dumbing-down content.

The dumbing-down of web novels is a textbook case of this logic:

Supply-side capacity explodes (AI-assisted writing + a massive number of authors), total attention on the consumption side stays the same, so the only thing left to compete on is “stimulus intensity.” The threshold keeps getting pushed higher; normal setup-development-turn-resolution no longer satisfies readers, so all that’s left is abstract, anti-logic twists.

This isn’t authors getting dumber — it’s a systemic arms race.

2. This Cycle Is Not the First in History

This cycle of “bad money driving out good” is not the first in history.

In the late nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution made cheap paper flood the market, and pulp fiction and sleazy tabloids ran rampant. The elites of the time also cried out that “humanity is finished.”

And then? Then film appeared, radio appeared, television, video games, the internet… Every birth of a new medium is a reshuffling.

There’s a reason this historical cycle repeats. But the problem is —

3. Does Humanity Still Have a Chance to Invent New Media Forms?

Text, images, sound, video, interaction, VR/AR. The three major sensory channels — sight, sound, touch — are basically all covered.

What else can be invented? Transmitting smell over the internet? That’s a technical challenge, not a media revolution. Brain-computer interfaces writing emotions directly into the brain? On the day that arrives, the boundary between AI and humans may well be gone.

By my shallow understanding, this road has temporarily reached its end.

What’s the next media form that can unlock new demand on the consumption side? Right now, I can’t see it.

This wave of AI is a pure production-side revolution — it hasn’t created any new consumption scenarios.

4. But We May Have Overlooked One Dimension: Generative Narrative in the Time Dimension

All existing media share one common trait: “The author finishes producing, and the consumer passively receives.”

Even games — the most interactive medium — are nothing more than making branch choices between a few pre-set skill trees. In essence, the author has already planted all the trees; you just pick one and climb it.

But what if AI could generate in real time?

The same story seed, and everyone who enters gets a different story — this form doesn’t exist yet.

Right now there are only scattered, partial explorations, like Tavern (SillyTavern), and no final form has taken shape at all.

If this “generative narrative in the time dimension” really becomes the mainstream medium of the next stage, what are creators to do?

5. What Will Become the Core of the Creator

If narrative shifts from “one-time delivery” to “real-time generation,” the creator’s value moves up from a specific text to the meta-ability of making that world:

• Worldview architect — not writing a story, but building a self-consistent world system of rules
• Character designer — not writing good lines, but designing a soul that can stay consistent across countless branches
• Emotional pacing choreographer — not laying down a single emotional curve, but designing a pacing framework that can handle any plot direction
• Taste gatekeeper — amid the avalanche of infinite generation, filtering out for users the part worth experiencing

Creators no longer produce “results,” but the boundaries of “possibility.”

Keep observing, keep recording, and let the bullet fly for a while.