Source: WeChat Official Account "Wang Bo"

—As Content Gets Faster and Faster, What Exactly Are We Losing?

If the previous piece asked, "When AI gets better and better at creating, why should humans still create?", this one wants to take on an even bigger question: when content becomes easier and easier to obtain, why do humans still need content?

These two questions look different, but they may ultimately lead to the same place:

I. Film's Real Competitor Is All Content

We often say film is being hit by short-form video, micro-dramas, streaming, games, and AI, but I think that framing makes the problem too small. Film's real competitor has never been micro-dramas, or AI, or even games. Film's real competitor is anything that can occupy human time and attention. A person only has twenty-four hours in a day. They can watch a film, scroll short videos, watch micro-dramas, play games, listen to music, travel, chat with friends — or even do nothing at all. So what film is really competing for isn't some content market; it's human time.

More precisely: it's human life.

From a survival standpoint, humans don't actually need film. Film can't put food in our mouths, TV dramas can't help us avoid danger, and short videos can't directly extend our lifespan. Yet from very early on, humans have been creating and consuming content.

Painting in caves, telling stories around a campfire, watching plays in theaters, reading novels, listening to music, watching films, playing games.

So why do we do these things?

If we understand content as "information," this question is actually hard to answer, because much content has no survival necessity at all, yet people still need it. Perhaps because what people need has never been information, but stories, emotions, imagination, experience, resonance, companionship — and the ability to enter another world.

So content may never have been just information.

Content is an experience.

II. But We Are Consuming Content Faster and Faster

One change has been very obvious in recent years: we are consuming content faster and faster.

In the past, watching a film meant two hours. Then streaming brought playback speed controls — 1.25x, 1.5x, 2x, even 3x. Then came short videos, then micro-dramas.

A story that once took dozens of TV episodes — or even several hours of film — to tell can now be told in a few dozen minutes. From an efficiency standpoint, this is of course progress: in the same amount of time, we get more information; in the same amount of time, we can know more stories.

But here's a very interesting question:

Are we getting more content, or more information? A story isn't just "what happened."

If a story is just A happened, then B happened, then C happened, then of course it can be compressed — you could even compress a two-hour film into ten minutes. As long as you keep the key events, the story still holds.

But is what film truly conveys really just that?

An actor says, "I'm fine." Just two words.

But when he says it — if he pauses, doesn't look the other person in the eye, lowers his voice a little, and then stays silent for two seconds afterward — that "I'm fine" and a normally delivered "I'm fine" may no longer be the same thing at all. It might mean I'm sad, I'm angry, I don't want you to know, I want you to keep asking, or even I want you to stay.

None of this is written in the lines, but the audience understands it. This is tone, performance, context, and subtext — and these are precisely the hardest things to compress.

Information Can Be Compressed; Meaning May Not Be

We seem to be building an ever more powerful content technology:

compressing more and more into shorter and shorter spans of time. An hour into thirty minutes, thirty minutes into ten, ten into one — until finally a single sentence can tell you: "This is a story about a man who, after losing the love of his life, finds meaning again."

The information isn't wrong, the story isn't wrong, even the plot isn't wrong. But have we really experienced the work? I don't think so. What we've gained is information about the work, not the work itself — because experience itself is time.

This is an easily overlooked point: some things are, in themselves, time.

Waiting, grief, fear, love, loneliness, farewell — these things can't simply be accelerated by increasing playback speed. A person waiting for a phone call, waiting for someone to turn back, waiting for an answer, waiting for someone to leave — if you compress away the waiting, the story can still go on, but the meaning of the waiting itself gets compressed away too.

So information can be accelerated, but experience may not be — because experience isn't information. Experience is you personally living through a stretch of time.

We may be turning "story" into "information." This is what I find a very interesting change brought about by short videos, micro-dramas, and content platforms of all kinds. Content increasingly emphasizes conflict, reversals, suspense, emotion, stimulation, and instant feedback — but it may come with a side effect: we're getting better and better at knowing what happened in a story, while having less and less time to live inside it.

A film can tell you: this man lost his wife, he was in great pain, and later he began to rebuild his life. That information can be conveyed in a few sentences. But that's not the same as having experienced the film.

Because what the film truly offers isn't that conclusion — it's letting you live through the process yourself.

And Now We've Started Compressing Emotion Too

This may be worse than compressing the story itself. A complicated relationship gets summed up by a label; a complicated emotion by an emoji; a person's life by a few keywords; a film character by a one-line "character setting"; a work by a single "was it satisfying or not."

We're getting better and better at making quick judgments: Is it good? Is it fun? Did it move me? Is it worth it?

But we're losing patience for understanding: why.

Why this person is like this, why this line made him sad, why this shot has to hold right there, why someone who clearly loves another person still chooses to leave.

These questions all require time — and we're becoming less and less willing to give it.

When Emotion Is Compressed into Information Too, What Are We Losing?

I think what we may be losing is the complexity of emotion itself. Real emotion is never a label.

Inside love there may be fear; inside anger there may be sorrow; inside indifference there may be hope; inside leaving there may be reluctance. A person can love someone and hate them at the same time; can want someone to stay and want them to leave.

These contradictions are precisely what make a person.

But information systems like to turn complex things into simple categories: like or dislike, good or bad, success or failure, positive or negative, satisfying or not — because categories are easier to spread, easier to understand, easier to compute, easier to recommend.

But: people are not labels.

III. AI Will Push This Compression Even Further

With AI, this may become even more obvious, because one of the things AI is best at is understanding, summarizing, distilling, and reorganizing.

You can have AI summarize a book into ten sentences, then into one sentence, then into a few keywords. It can be very accurate — even more accurate than many people's own understanding.

But here's a strange question: if all we ultimately need is the "conclusion," then why should humans still read books? Why still watch films? Why still listen to a full piece of music? Why still travel? Why still fall in love? Why still go through life firsthand?

Because:

A conclusion cannot replace experience.

This Is Also an Important Difference Between AI and Humans

In the previous piece, I raised a point: AI needs a purpose.

AI can have ever more powerful abilities — it can write, draw, shoot, edit, compose, analyze, even create an entire world. But it still needs a purpose: why do this thing?

And humans have a very strange trait: humans often do things that aren't "necessary."

A person can spend ten years learning an instrument, knowing full well they'll never become a master. A person can shoot a shot over and over for a single frame, when the audience may never see the difference. A person can spend hours adjusting a single color. A person can waste the most precious few years of their life on a dream. By any measure of efficiency, these behaviors are irrational.

But that's exactly why I've come to feel more and more:

It's precisely because humans pursue these "meaningless" things that humans create meaning.

This is a thought I never had before AI became widespread. So if everything gets compressed into "useful information," we may be losing the very traits that make us human. That's also why I've started to feel a certain wariness toward "efficiency."

Efficiency is of course a good thing. Technology of course should make us faster. AI of course should help us get more done. But if we measure everything by efficiency — what's shortest, what's fastest, what's most stimulating, what's most effective, what's easiest to understand, what's easiest to spread —

in the end we may get a highly efficient world.

But an efficient world is not necessarily a world with "meaning."

Because "meaning" often exists precisely outside of efficiency. The value of film may lie precisely in the fact that it isn't efficient enough.

From the standpoint of information transmission, film is actually a very inefficient medium: two hours, one story, a large number of shots with no direct information, a lot of silence, a lot of pauses, a lot of seemingly meaningless detail — a character may just be sitting there.

If all it wanted was to tell you "he's sad," one sentence would be enough. Why shoot for two hours?

Because film isn't meant to tell you "he's sad."

It's meant to make you feel his sadness.

There's a huge difference between those two things, because the transmission of information is replacing thought with conclusions — and along the way making you believe you've done a lot of thinking, when thinking is a process, a feeling, not a conclusion.

IV. So Why Might Cinemas Still Need to Exist?

If film were only content, cinemas truly wouldn't need to exist. TVs are getting bigger, home audio is getting better, streaming is getting more convenient — so why should cinemas still exist?

I think what they may offer is something increasingly scarce:

uninterrupted time.

You sit down in the cinema, the lights go down, you put your phone away, and for two hours you can't just skip out. You have to go through it. From an efficiency standpoint that's terrible, but from an experience standpoint it may be precisely a form of protection.

It protects a stretch of time that hasn't been compressed.

And Cinemas Have Something Else: Shared Experience

Cinemas don't just protect individual time; they create shared time. A group of strangers, the same space, the same screen, the same story — laughing together, falling silent together, tensing up together, crying together. Then the film ends, the lights come up, and everyone leaves.

This kind of shared experience is very ancient. Theater has it, concerts have it, sports have it, religious rituals have it, festivals have it.

Together they satisfy a very deep human need: I want to know that at this moment, other people are experiencing this with me.

So if cinemas still exist in the future, it may not be because they have the biggest screen, but because they have the capacity for shared experience.

But the Future Could Also Be the Exact Opposite: AI May Make Content Increasingly Personal

In the future, everyone may be able to have their own story, their own actors, their own world, their own ending — even their own emotions.

You could have AI generate a story based on your experiences, have it understand your personality, your preferences, your fears, and then give you the content that suits you best. This may be a very natural direction for the content industry to develop.

But if everyone only ever sees the content that suits them best, do we still need shared stories? This is a question without an answer. We may need two completely opposite kinds of content:

• One kind satisfies: it understands you, caters to you, accompanies you, makes you comfortable, gives you instant feedback. AI will be extremely good at this.
• The other kind breaks: it doesn't understand you, it may even make you uncomfortable. It tells you a story you don't want to hear, takes you into a life you don't understand, shows you a world completely different from your own. It may even make you question what you once took for granted.

And this kind of content may be precisely closer to art.

Because art is sometimes not meant to satisfy you, but to change you.

So What's Truly Scarce in the Future May Not Be Content

In the past we worried there wasn't enough content. Now we have too much. In the future, AI may even be able to produce content infinitely.

So what's truly scarce may become: human time.

A person's life has only so many hours. You can generate films infinitely, but a person can't watch infinitely. You can generate music infinitely, but a person can only listen to so much music in a lifetime.

So the real competition in the content industry's future isn't who can produce more content, but:

what is worth a person giving their life to.

V. This May Also Be the Real Crossroads Where Film Stands

So I increasingly feel that what film faces now is not film versus digital, live action versus AI, cinemas versus home theater, film versus micro-dramas. These are all surface issues.

The real question is: now that humanity has more and more content, what do people actually need?

• If what people need is stimulation, short videos will only get stronger;
• If what people need is efficiency, content will only get shorter;
• If what people need is personalization, AI will only get stronger;
• If what people need is interaction, games and virtual worlds will only get stronger.

But if people still need a complete stretch of time, a world they haven't experienced, a complex emotion that can't be summed up in one sentence, a chance to be truly changed by another person's thinking, a group of strangers experiencing a story together — then film still has a reason to exist.

Maybe What We're Losing Isn't Film

Lately I've been thinking: if film really disappears in the future, what exactly would we have lost?

Maybe not an industry, not a technology, not even an art form.

What we might truly lose is the capacity to let things happen slowly.

Allowing a character to be silent. Allowing a shot to hold. Allowing an emotion not to be explained right away. Allowing a story not to give an answer right away. Allowing ourselves not to know. Allowing ourselves to wait. Allowing ourselves to spend two hours simply to live through another person's life.

And in a world that increasingly emphasizes efficiency, these things are becoming more and more of a luxury.

I don't know whether cinemas will eventually disappear, whether the word "film" will still exist in a few decades, where AI will take content, or even whether people in the future will still be willing to sit in a dark room and watch a film for two hours.

But I think at this moment we shouldn't think about film starting from film. We should start from people.

From people's time, people's attention, people's emotions, people's loneliness, people's curiosity, people's imagination — and why people are willing to spend two hours of their life on a story with no practical use. Maybe that question is more important than "will film disappear."

Because If One Day We Can Get Everything Quickly

If AI can give us a story in a second, give us a piece of music in a second, give us a film in a second, tell us the entire contents of a book in a second, sum up everything complicated into a single sentence —

then what we really should ask may not be how much faster technology can make us, but:

why must we be so fast?

If all content can be compressed into information, if all emotions can be compressed into labels, if all stories can be compressed into conclusions, if all experiences can be compressed into a few keywords — then what we get may be an extremely efficient world.

But at the same time, we may also be losing some things that can't be calculated:

context, pauses, subtext, complex emotions, waiting, process, shared experience — and meaning.

VI. Maybe What People Truly Need Has Never Been Answers

AI is getting better and better at giving answers. Content platforms are getting better and better at giving answers. Algorithms are getting better and better at telling us what we should watch. Search is getting better and better at telling us what happened.

But the experiences humans truly treasure are sometimes not about getting an answer, but about walking a road yourself.

Making your own mistakes, doing your own waiting, coming to your own understanding, loving someone yourself, losing someone yourself, watching a film to the end yourself, suddenly realizing in some shot: so this is something I never understood before.

This kind of understanding can't be replaced by anyone else, and can't be summed up in a sentence, because it isn't information — it's your own experience.

If one day a new medium can meet people's needs better than film, then film's stepping aside may not be a failure.

Theater didn't fail because film appeared. Books didn't fail because film appeared. Music didn't fail because recording technology appeared.

Media keep changing. What doesn't easily disappear is the human need for stories, the human imagination of another world, human curiosity about other people's lives, the human experience of emotion, the human longing for shared experience — and the human questioning of meaning.

So I don't want to predict what film will ultimately become, and I'm not capable of giving a definitive answer.

I just increasingly feel that, standing at this crossroads, what we really need to think about may not be where film should go, but:

where do people actually want to go?

If we don't know that, then no matter how advanced the technology, no matter how much content AI can create, we're just producing and consuming faster and faster things we don't even know why we need.

And if we can answer that question, then whether film is still called film, whether cinemas still exist, whether content is created by humans or AI — none of that matters so much anymore. Because what ultimately matters has never been how we tell stories, but:

why we're still willing to listen to them.

Perhaps it's precisely because humans pursue those unnecessary things that they become human.

Take this article. Ten years ago it might have been considered wonderful content. Today, as people increasingly want information in ever shorter spans of time, fewer and fewer are willing to spend ten or twenty minutes — half an hour — reading a few thousand words. But for some questions, beyond the conclusion, the thinking and the argument are actually more important. That's why this piece has to be an essay of a few thousand words, and not a one-minute or three-minute distilled summary.

Perhaps when we compress everything into efficiency, information, and results, what we truly need to be wary of goes far beyond the disappearance of film.

It's our gradually diminishing capacity to experience the things that can't be compressed.

Colorist — Wang Bo

2026.08.09