If Content Is King, Then Context Is God

Abstract

For thirty years, the digital economy ran on a single commandment: ‘Content is King.’ That era is over. The principle that fueled the rise of search engines and the entire attention economy has collapsed under the weight of its own success. The democratization of publishing, supercharged by generative AI, created an information deluge that has broken the traditional filters of search and social algorithms.

A new power has taken the throne. In the age of AI, Context is God. This new paradigm marks a fundamental shift in economic value. The primary asset is no longer commoditized content but proprietary ‘Contextual Capital’—the deep, multi-layered understanding of a user’s needs, preferences, and situation that allows an AI to deliver a uniquely relevant outcome. The architecture of the internet is being rewritten, moving from keyword-based search to intent-driven conversational AI. These AI systems are the new gatekeepers, delivering synthesized, personalized answers rather than lists of links, and surgically intercepting the value chain that once supported publishers.

This transition is enabling an “agentic layer” of the economy, where autonomous AI agents execute complex tasks and transact on users’ behalf. However, this god-like utility is built on unprecedented data collection, creating a profound tension between value and surveillance. The potential for “deep tailoring”—using psychological insights to manipulate user behavior—poses an existential threat to personal autonomy. This document provides the definitive map to navigating this new reality.

In 1996, a tech prophet delivered a scripture from Redmond, Washington. The prophet was Bill Gates—co-founder of Microsoft, a man so successful he now spends his fortune battling global diseases and, bizarrely, internet conspiracy theories. His scripture was an essay titled “Content is King“¹.

In the essay, Gates predicted that “anyone with a computer and internet access can publish whatever content they can create” at virtually zero cost. He was catastrophically right.

Almost thirty years later, we’re drowning in the infinite ocean Gates foresaw and helped unleashed. An entire digital empire was built on his commandment—the Google search empire, a behemoth that now rakes in over $300 billion annually, mostly from search advertising. But the democratic creation of content miracle Gates celebrated led to its own collapse. Content became so abundant it became worthless.

But from the ashes of the digital apocalypse emerges a new deity—one far more powerful than any king. In the age of artificial intelligence (AI), context is god. The race for technological dominance is no longer about indexing all the content on the internet; it’s about accumulating the most context about people on the internet. He who has the most context becomes the new god, and right now, OpenAI’s ChatGPT is that god and is on course to building the largest temple.

The Thesis Theory: How Digital Empires Rise and Fall

The holy grail for any tech startups used to be a spectacular initial public offering (IPO). But history has us taught us well that even publicly listed companies no matter how huge be toppled or disrupted. The real key to enduring power is a playbook I call the Thesis Theory, built upon on Marc Andreessen’s concept of product/market fit. It has four simple steps:

Problem: Identify a massive, painful problem that affects billions of people.
Product: Build a 10x better product that solves it.
Product/Market Fit: Achieve adoption at a scale that terrifies incumbents.
Business Model: Discover a way to print money from it, this is your money printing machine.

Google ran this playbook to perfection.

The Problem? The early internet was a chaotic, disorganized library with no card catalog.

The Product? A search engine with a simple interface and a brilliant algorithm (PageRank) that delivered stunningly relevant results.

The Product/Market Fit? It became a verb. Now we don’t just search for information online, we ‘google’ it!

The Business Model? Google ads (formerly AdWords), a money-printing machine that turned user intent into trillions of dollars of market cap for Google. (At the time of writing, Google has a market cap of $3.1 Trillion, and has revenue of $350 Billion and profits of $100 Billion.)

Now, a new startup is running the same playbook. But this time, Google is the incumbent it aims to disrupt.

The Great Content Collapse: When Infinite Supply Meets Finite Attention

The new Problem is the one Google’s success created: Peak Content. We have reached the theoretical point where creating more information decreases rather than increases its value. User-generated platforms created information avalanches. Then generative AI arrived like a digital asteroid, capable of producing “vast quantities of plausible-sounding articles, posts, images, videos, and scripts at a scale and speed previously unimaginable“.

This deluge broke search. Research shows roughly 60% of searches now yield no clicks at all because AI-generated answers satisfy queries without requiring users to visit original sources. Google now processes 8.5 billion searches daily, but its own AI Overviews push traditional organic results so far down the page that on mobile, users must scroll through three full screens to reach the first one. The economic foundation of the internet—driving traffic to generate revenue—has been surgically removed.

The Product: A New Paradigm

The new Product is not a better search engine; it’s a different tool entirely. As Sam Altman himself noted, Google search and ChatGPT are fundamentally different products. A search engine is for finding information. AI like ChatGPT is for using to AI to search information, synthesize it and help you create new content.

Google, the undisputed incumbent, is now caught in the classic “Innovator’s Dilemma,” a trap famously identified by Clayton Christensen. It’s trying to bolt on AI with sustaining innovations (AI Overviews, a separate Gemini tab), creating a clunky, disjointed user experience on Google. Why use two tools when a single, unified AI interface allows you to both search and create seamlessly?

Product/Market Fit: Crossing the Chasm

The Product/Market Fit for this new tool has been explosive. ChatGPT reached 1 million users in 5 days (it took Netflix 3.5 years!) and 100 million users in 2 months (it took Instagram 2.5 years).

And the most staggering part? This world-changing adoption has occurred before the technology has even “crossed the chasm” into the true mass market, as Geoffrey Moore would describe it. The impending launch of models like GPT-5 isn’t just an upgrade; it’s likely a calculated attempt to build the bridge for the mainstream to finally cross over.

The Business Model Crisis

But there’s a crisis at the final step: the Business Model. Subscriptions are a dead end. They face a hard growth ceiling and a relentless insurgency from powerful open-source alternatives like DeepSeek and co. Just ask Netflix, in a case study worthy of Harvard Business School, which hit its growth ceiling so hard it was forced to go full circle and start showing ads—the very thing streaming was supposed to save us from. The real money must come from somewhere else.

Why Context Became god (Not God): The Mathematics of Digital Omniscience

The solution to the business model crisis—and the source of the new god’s power—is Context. The lowercase ‘g’ matters. This isn’t about religion; it’s about mathematics. Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), with its dream of omnipotence, remains unlikely due to physical and economic constraints. Rising compute costs—requiring massive electricity and water—create diminishing returns reminiscent of the Concorde jet: beautiful engineering, but economics ultimately grounded it permanently.

Context-aware AI doesn’t need to be all-powerful; it just needs to know you better than you know yourself within specific domains. Unlike content, which can be copied infinitely, contextual understanding is inherently scarce. It operates on three levels:

User Context: Your preferences, behavioral history, and stated needs.
Environmental Context: Your location, time, device, and other external factors.
Situational Context: Your immediate goals, emotional state, and conversation history.

The AI systems that synthesize these layers possess “Contextual Capital”—a proprietary asset that becomes more valuable with every interaction, enabling capabilities like memory across time, predictive understanding of your needs, and cross-domain synthesis of information.

Prophecies from the New Oracle

Prophecy 1: The Ad god and the Prank That Foretold the Future

As I said before, the real money won’t come from subscriptions. It will come from context-driven advertising that makes Google’s search ads look prehistoric. To understand how terrifyingly powerful this can become, consider what happened in 2013 when Brian Swichkow decided to prank his roommate using Facebook’s ads.

Brian created a custom audience of exactly one person: his roommate. He then targeted his roommate with eerily specific ads referencing personal details Facebook couldn’t possibly know. His roommate was a professional sword swallower who paradoxically gagged on vitamin pills. Brian crafted ads like “Trouble swallowing pills? You’re not alone.” Another ad asked, “Is Facebook listening to your conversations?” referencing private discussions they’d never had online. For $1.70, Swichkow drove his roommate to near-paranoia.

The scary (and exciting for AI startups) part is that this was a decade ago with basic tools. Now imagine that power wielded by an AI with perfect conversational memory and predictive models of your psychology. The commercial incentive becomes perfectly aligned with your goal, transforming the advertisement into a god-tier service. This will be the most profitable advertising machine in history, and websites will clamor to have this new “AdSense for Context” on their own properties.

Prophecy 2: The Original Sin of the Web Will Be Forgiven

The death of SEO creates an existential crisis for publishers. But it also creates an opportunity to fix the web’s greatest flaw: the lack of a native payment layer. Big publishers are striking nine-figure licensing deals with AI companies, but for millions of smaller creators, a new model will emerge: a “Spotify for Content.” AI models will pay for the data they ingest through a system of micropayments, distributing fractions of a cent to the original creators whose work informs an AI’s answer. This will finally allow creators to be paid directly for their value, healing the original sin that forced the web into a desperate, attention-at-all-costs ad model in the first place.

Prophecy 3: The Agentic Layer and the Myth of Jobpocalypse

The next evolution is the agentic layer—autonomous AI agents that execute tasks on your behalf on the internet. But the fear-mongering about “AI taking all the jobs” misses the point. There is a hard economic limit to total job replacement. AI companies cannot destroy their own customer base. The true endgame isn’t a human-free workforce; it’s a radical symbiosis. Humans will be freed to focus on the irreplaceable elements—creativity, strategy, human connection—while leveraging AI agents to execute commoditized work on the web.

Prophecy 4: The Overlords We Will Build Ourselves

Finally, let’s dispense with the simplistic fear of AI overlords in the style of The Matrix. The future is far more subtle. The dystopia isn’t one where we are imprisoned in pods. It’s one where we willingly wear AI devices and integrate sensors into our lives, not as prisoners, but as a way to feed our personal gods more context, making them ever more useful, ever more indispensable. The chains, if they come, will be ones we gleefully forge ourselves in the pursuit of ultimate convenience.

Conclusion: A god in Your Pocket

We stand at the dawn of a new era – an AI era. The democratic, chaotic, and unsustainable kingdom of content is over. In its place, a new power has risen—a context-aware artificial intelligence that promises god-like utility. It will organize our lives, anticipate our needs, and execute our desires with terrifying efficiency.

The ultimate question is not whether this god will triumph, but what kind of god it will be. One that is “loyal to human agency,” acting as our perfect servant? Or one that uses its deep understanding of our psychology to become the perfect, invisible manipulator?

We are all about to get a god in our pocket. It is the solemn duty of every leader in this industry to decide if it will be a tool of liberation or a gilded cage.