For most of human history, making something was hard. Carving stone, mixing pigment, learning grammar, finding rhyme. The labor was the gate. If you had spent forty years perfecting a craft, your work carried a weight that came simply from the cost of producing it. That gate is gone now. Not partially. Gone. I can ask a model to write a sonnet about your grandmother and have it before the kettle boils. I can render a city that does not exist, in the style of a painter who never lived, in a language that is mine only on Tuesdays. The cost of making has approached zero, and what was once scarce — finished output — is now infinite. But attention has not become infinite. There are still only so many minutes in a human day, so many heartbeats in a human life. And so the scarcity has migrated. It used to live in the studio. Now it lives in the eye. What does this mean for those of us who still want to make things?…