Act III · Follow the bottleneck
The industry can survive while control moves to another layer.
Do not ask only whether an asset remains useful. Ask which interface, input or permission still constrains participation—and who owns it.
A network and the interface that captures its value are different assets.
Participants can remain in incumbent systems while discovery, comparison and intent move above them. Real counterparties and legal access resist this migration more strongly than information aggregation.
Transforming a field does not transfer its historical expenditure to the transformer.
Frontier systems open new work.
Transformed work specializes and becomes cheaper.
Durable capture depends on which side of that race moves faster.
Historical investment is not the cost of sufficient entry.
Incumbent
Accumulated plants, software, teams, workflows and distribution.
Entrant
Current components required to deliver an adequate outcome by any route.
A breakthrough can be revolutionary and still face a price set by alternatives. High ROIC can remain available while becoming accessible to more producers.
A bottleneck must survive three different attacks.
Compute, energy, data, distribution, trust, networks, regulation and physical resources all face the same test. The one that resists becomes the candidate home of rent.