Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies' Paradise)

Benedict Evans: You know, our world as "content creators" is a very wide spectrum of people who do very different stuff. There are people doing AI slop and there are people doing, you know, what is it called, the passive income thing. But there are people who do very different kinds of content coming from different places for different reasons. You know, Scott Galloway does very different kinds of stuff to me. Mary Meeker does very different kinds of stuff than me. You do very different kinds of stuff to me. It's just part of that is about who you are and your story and the authenticity of it. And some of it is about no one cares who you are, but you're saying interesting stuff and some of it's a recommendation algorithm or something else.

There's a book by Zola about the creation of department stores called Au Bonheur des Dames, which means "The Ladies' Paradise." It's basically about a 19th-century Jeff Bezos calling a department store into existence out of thin air through force of will. He invents fixed prices so that you can have discounts and loss leaders, and mail order and advertising. He puts the slow-moving, expensive stuff at the top of the store and he puts food and makeup on the bottom of the store. There's nothing new under the sun.

And meanwhile, the shopkeepers on the other side of the street are saying, "Have you seen what that maniac's doing now? He's selling hats and gloves in the same shop. He's got no morals. He'll be selling fish next." And of course, he's got the character. There's a whole plot point about loss leaders. So you can step back and think, "Well, people have freaked out about industrialized, mass-produced products before. People have freaked out about there being too much content."

There's a line that Erasmus was the last person to have read every book, right? There's too much AI content slop on the internet now. How many books do you think were being published in 1980? Do you think everyone was reading all the books then? It's the same thing, just different scales, I guess.