Or perhaps they have already destroyed it.
A few days ago, while listening to a VTuber program, they talked about today’s short-drama factories and light novels. Both show a similar pattern: once value becomes completely tied to commercial results, creation turns into a standardized industrial product.
YouTube’s CEO recently announced, with great pride, that views on Shorts had multiplied several times over. But in reality, many creators are leaving, or trying to leave, YouTube, because the platform is no longer a place where creation and talent win. There is now a very fixed playbook for getting traffic: follow certain topics, produce certain effects, make little skits that are easy to edit, and everyone roughly knows the ROI of each individual item. The question is, once the entire platform is filled with this kind of mass-produced output, who is still going to watch?
Light novels are more or less dead. Around the Haruhi era, every light novel had a strong authorial identity. Or rather, what people bought in that era was the author. Hikaru Sugii, Isuna Hasekura, Kei Sazane, Siro Shiratori, Ao Jyumonji, Nisio Isin, Ryohgo Narita, Keiichi Sigsawa, and so on. Each of them carved out a path with their own style. Each of them stubbornly believed they were the best, and proved it with their own life. What about now? There is already a rough formula: another world, reincarnation, leaving the party, the strongest in the world, an ordinary retired life. These finished products are basically things that accurately satisfy market demand. The author is merely something like glue, responsible for sticking these tags together.
Blizzard is another classic example. A shared memory of an era was ultimately turned by professional managers into the classic “Do you guys not have phones?” meme. After squeezing dry the brand left behind by others, these people still have the nerve to talk about the “growth achievements” under their leadership. Everything is for the numbers. Achievements that cannot be quantified do not matter.
The software market is now full of the same phenomenon: landing pages have best formulas, SEO has a fixed process, and everyone is shouting lines taught to them by VCs: “ship fast,” “keep publishing,” “test the market first,” “don’t pursue perfection.” And so the market is flooded with half-baked software and services that use consumers’ trust in the entire industry to “test the market,” while covering up the fact that the authors lack knowledge, confidence, and courage. Startups in the traditional sense, the ones carrying insane and innovative ideas, are becoming rarer. What we see more often is the factory path of “find an entry point” and “start with services, then package them into a product once there are enough of them.”
Are metrics bad? No, of course not. They can help us clarify vague feelings. But like the old saying goes: “When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Managing human ambiguity with extremely detailed data has always failed. It merely moves the argument from “what is a good outcome” to meaningless abstractions like “how should the metric be defined” and “who gets to define the metric,” which only pushes us further away from the final result. When everything is quantified, what happens to the value of the people and things that cannot be quantified?
Maybe one day, we will no longer have “creation” that is flawed, imperfect, sharp-edged, biased, excessive, insufficient, personally projected, mixed with selfish desire, dreams, wishes, and trauma; creation that will be loved, and will be hated; creation that is real, human, and belongs only to humans.
“This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”