Conjecture

When generation is effectively free, the scarce input is a reason to believe rather than a reason to watch. The asset that captures the value is excludable reputation for judgement, held by a named curator, and not the provenance record that makes a reason to believe checkable. Shapiro places curation value with the platforms that control distribution, and where consumers self-curate he has them outsourcing to "their most reliable friends on Facebook, favorite inuencers on Instagram or TikTok, tastemakers on Spotify or chosen thought leaders on Twitter/X", all named holders of reputation. Dixon, designing attestation infrastructure, treats excludable control of it as the defect to engineer out ("If a company controlled the attestation database, it could leverage this control to restrict or charge for access") and puts the differentiation one layer up, in "reputation systems that evaluate the track records of attesters". Traceable provenance is therefore the non-excludable complement: necessary, probably universal, and plumbing. The earlier version of this claim asserted that provenance-backed curation becomes a media asset in its own right, and that half is retired.

Narrative and audience