The Invisible Wall That Cuts Off the Bigger Cake

History always moves upward in a spiral.

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There's a wall between businesses and their customers. The deeper you go inside one circle, the easier it is to get caught up in its insiders' self-congratulatory bubble.

A business that only hears its insiders ends up building only for them.

1

I have a lot of interests, so I stand in a lot of circles.

Most of them are small. Over the years I noticed something about the ones that grow and have become popular. They are always the ones that are easy to enter, and the people inside are willing to help whoever just walked in.

Then there is the other kind. The veterans look down on newcomers. The businesses keep making things for the veterans. And everyone complains that no new people are coming.

I have watched one circle of each kind up close.

There is a game called jubensha. The name means "script murder". A group of friends books a room in a shop. Each person gets a booklet with a character's story and secrets. You play that character, and together, guided by a host, you work out who the murderer is. It came from British murder mystery games. In 2013 one of them, Death Wears White, was translated into Chinese. In 2016 a hit reality show, Who's the Murderer, put the format on TV. But in China it became a completely different thing. You did not have to buy a kit, host at home and organise your friends. The shop gave you the room, the host and the table; anyone could walk in. It was built as a four or five hour game, and a seat cost 30 to 80 yuan at that time.

It was supposed to be easy to enter, and for a while it was.

Today, in the shops I have played at, a session runs eight hours or more on average. Some run twelve. Some run fifteen. A seat costs 200 to 300 yuan on average and some go far higher, because the new, complicated games need more hosts, more actors and a room for the whole day.

Almost all the new ones are made for veterans, and nobody has the patience to play with a newcomer. A veteran does not want to spend hours on a simple game that no longer attracts them, and explain everything along the way. So a first try now costs a full day and several times the money. The circle gets smaller. And the people inside keep asking why nobody new is coming. Outside China it is the same picture. In Vancouver a seat costs 80 to 120 Canadian dollars on average, and still only Chinese people play.

Bouldering is the circle I have watched grow.

Bouldering gyms always do an orientation for newcomers. I guess that is mostly to keep everyone safe, so the gym stays out of trouble. Whatever the reason, a first-timer walks in and gets shown how to start.

And you can always see the same picture: a veteran in fancy, high-level climbing shoes teaching a newcomer in the shoes the gym provides. They show the beta, the body positions, how to use strength, the rules, how to read a route.

It would be easy to say one circle has kind people and the other has arrogant ones. I don't think that is the whole story.

Jubensha is much more complicated to teach. A game made for newcomers is not attractive to a veteran, and it takes hours. In bouldering a veteran can still be happy on a simple route, so helping a newcomer costs them nothing.

The shops are not stupid either. The veterans have the loudest voices, and the shops are afraid to lose the only customers they have left. So they keep making things for the veterans, fighting over the existing pie, instead of making something simpler that would make the cake bigger.

Every step makes sense, and the sum is a circle that shrinks.

2

We have come to the end of an era. Everyone is fighting over the existing market instead of looking for new opportunities and new growth. Big companies squeeze the space small companies live in. Companies squeeze the space their employees live in. Job seekers have to out-compete each other for the same seats. In Chinese we call this neijuan (内卷, involution), and it slowly becomes bigger and more meaningless.

The whole society lives in more and more anxiety. People find it harder and harder to get by. Nobody can afford a house, a car and a child anymore. Marriage rates and birth rates keep falling.

And that is part of the reason why I still believe AI will bring a new, flourishing era. AI can ease this strange, distorted, negative cycle, and maybe even break it.

A circle grows when it is cheap to enter and cheap to welcome someone in. Bouldering has that by nature. Jubensha had it, and built a wall. What AI brings is knowledge equity and technology equity: things that used to take a veteran years are now within reach of a newcomer.

It is now possible for everyone to make the cake bigger.

So instead of following the anxious mood and tense atmosphere around the development of AI, I personally think this is actually one of the best eras in human history. It is chaotic, but not in a dangerous, wartime way. Right now is the growing pain of an era, a transition. Maybe in a few years everything will move toward stability and get better again.

History always moves upward in a spiral.