Build Your Personal Monopoly

Table of Contents

• The Web is Turning Beige
• The Economics of Infinite Content
• Play a Different Game, not the Losing Game
• Authenticity is the New Objective Function
• Optimize For Conviction, Not Correctness
• The Market Rewards Authenticity
• Build Your Personal Monopoly

The Web is Turning Beige

There’s a sensation you’ve probably felt recently. You’re scrolling LinkedIn, and you come across a post from someone on the edge of your network. It’s grammatically perfect, hits all the right professional notes, and is optimized for engagement. And yet, it feels completely hollow. You can’t quite tell if a human wrote it or if it was generated by a prompt like, "Write a LinkedIn post from the perspective of someone successful that’s optimized for building my personal brand." I've found myself doom-scrolling and cringing at how every post sounds like the same self-promoting chatbot hyping up the grindset.

This feeling isn't a bug; it's a feature of our new landscape. AI is succeeding, perfectly, at achieving the wrong goal. The internet is now saturated with content that is flawlessly optimized, but intellectually and emotionally vacant. The result is a sea of sameness. Beige.

The Economics of Infinite Content

This pattern is familiar in technology. When a core resource becomes cheap, the economic constraining factor shifts and becomes the new opportunity. Cheap transistors made software the constraint. Cheap bandwidth made attention the constraint. And now, cheap, infinite content is making trust the new constraint.

The scale of this shift is staggering. In the last year alone, over 1,200 AI-generated news sites have launched. More than half of all long-form posts on LinkedIn are now AI-assisted. With nearly 50% of all web traffic coming from bots, it's becoming impossible to know what content actually resonates with real humans.

LinkedIn, Twitter, and other platforms that once rewarded posting frequency will likely need to surface content based on authenticity and uniqueness rather than volume (or face competition from new platforms that engage their users better). This trend will accelerate as AI-generated content floods feeds. In fact, in just the past few days, YouTube announced that it would be limiting monetization for inauthentic content in response to the proliferation of AI-generated content.

We’re creating a feedback loop where AI trains on its own output, spawning a kind of intellectual inflation where more content carries less signal. The web is eating itself.

Play a Different Game, not the Losing Game

The intuitive reaction to this flood is to try to be "better" than the machines. To have "better judgment," "better timing," or more "emotional weight." But this is a losing game. It assumes a static target and bets against exponential technological progress. Arguing for some ineffable human advantage that AI can never replicate is a fragile position.

The more durable strategy is to play a different game entirely.

AI is a tool for optimization. It is the ultimate intern, capable of achieving any well-defined metric you give it. But the one game it cannot play is the game of being you. The goal, then, is not to be a “better” optimizer than the machine. The goal is to choose a different objective function. AI optimizes for a prompt; you must optimize for something else.

Authenticity is the New Objective Function

The PM in me is fearful. What would we optimize for other than metrics? Authenticity.

I used to think insight came from having more information. But now I feel that the best insights come from seeing the same information filtered through a lens that's been shaped by years of accumulated experience and multiple instances of getting things wrong.

This is an operational strategy, not just some vague virtue. It means optimizing for your own conviction rather than for external metrics. You can measure it. You know you're being authentic when you're willing to be publicly wrong about something you believe. It’s a commitment to your own taste; a perspective filtered through years of accumulated experience and the emotional weight of getting things wrong. Sarah Guo wrote a wonderful piece on “taste” in software. I’m arguing that personal taste is equally important in content and decision making at large.

This is what creates trust. Trust is a rational response to perceived risk. Authenticity is a costly signal. By putting your reputation on the line for an idea, you signal to others that you genuinely believe it. An AI has no reputation to risk and no cost in being wrong, so it cannot generate this signal. This is why we still trust people over prompts.

When you optimize for authenticity, resonance is the result. Instead of appealing broadly with generic content, you connect deeply with a smaller audience that shares your specific, non-optimized worldview. This is the foundation of your personal monopoly. AI cannot replicate this, not because of a capability gap, but because it is fundamentally not its goal. Your average AI content creator is always trying to reach more people. It has no skin in the game, no values, and no personal lived experience to draw from.

Optimize For Conviction, Not Correctness

Our natural judgment develops through a process that can't be rushed: collecting ideas, letting them interact, and gradually building a worldview that shapes us into who we are and what matters to us. This very essay started as disconnected observations about AI content quality, LinkedIn fatigue, and the success of newsletter creators. Only after months of letting these ideas interact did a cognitive framework emerge.

The process of turning information into insight looks similar on the surface for both humans and machines: Collect → Synthesize → Test → Reflect → Iterate.

But crucially, the difference is in the objective function, not the process.

An AI optimizes for the statistically best answer based on its training data. You, on the other hand, should optimize for the answer you can live with being wrong about. Because that answer represents you, your beliefs, and what you care about. This reframes the entire process. It becomes an engine for generating personal conviction, not just correct answers. The output is a stronger, more refined version of your own worldview. This is your unique source code.

The Market Rewards Authenticity

We can see this shift happening in real-time. While most creators compete on volume, a few are building empires based on this exact principle.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, with over 40,000 subscribers paying $100 a year, generates millions in revenue. His subscribers pay to see the world through his specific frameworks, getting their generic news from the infinite alternatives available. An AI could summarize Apple's earnings, but it cannot produce Thompson's opinion on it. That is his product; he has established a personal monopoly on a specific way of analyzing the tech industry.

Lenny Rachitsky built his product management newsletter into a seven-figure business by synthesizing his personal experience with community insights. And beyond newsletters, NerdWriter's video essays attract millions of views by connecting art history with contemporary culture. They are each monetizing a unique perspective that resonates. They are trusted curators of a particular worldview. People pay for their taste.

The common thread among these creators is their systematic approach to developing perspective over time. They've all built personal systems for turning consumption into unique insight, fueling their authentic content.

Build Your Personal Monopoly

The path forward presents a clear choice. You can take the commodity path, using AI to compete on volume and speed in the game of optimization. This is a race to the bottom.

Or, you can take the monopoly path: build a personal monopoly on your own unique perspective. This is a long game. It's slower and less predictable, but it's the only durable moat.

Ultimately, it is not going to be our job to make the "best" decision or content every time, but rather to make things that are consistent with our humanity.

Day-to-day, this means writing not to perform, but to figure out what you actually think. It means testing ideas in public, even when they're half-formed, to see if they withstand scrutiny. And it means systematically connecting new information to your existing worldview, strengthening your unique perspective over time.

You can still use AI, just be thoughtful about how you use it. I use it to find connections in ideas that I've already explicitly chosen to care about, not to give me things to care about. I use it to quickly surface source information for positions that have been slowly percolating in the back of my mind. I use it to refine ideas I’ve already placed importance in. Use AI as an organization companion without replacing your thinking process and affecting your long-term ability to think critically.

In a world of infinite, low-effort content, the scarcest resource is conviction, not insight. The future of knowledge work won't be about having the right answers. It will be about having a perspective that others choose to trust.

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This topic is more than just an essay for me. It's the reason I'm building Echo, my own attempt at creating a system for building conviction. It's a tool for turning ideas into a personal knowledge graph. If you're wrestling with similar problems, I'd love to hear from you at reuben@echonotes.ai.