Tumbling Down
What a crazy time. Twitter went into the shitter, Crypto bros tried to convince everyone they could get rich off a scam they created, and now the shiny new toy is a digital bullshit artist everyone is calling “AI.” In addition to all that nonsense, we’ve also seen the drive to make everything a subscription and then constantly squeeze users with increasing rates.
When they’re not trying to monetize every single aspect of human existence, they’re also trying to lock us all into their own ecosystems and extract as much value from us as possible. We all know the root cause for this is capitalism; specifically, the metastatic form that demands ever increasing revenues, sacrificing everything from quality to labor to safety to feed the C-Suite’s and shareholders insatiable appetite for more filthy lucre. What we receive in return feels like a concerted effort to make contemporary life as difficult and intolerable as possible so a few dozen people can buy some more yachts.
The tech industry in particular has coalesced into an oligopoly, with a handful of companies controlling nearly every aspect of the market by litigating potential competitors out of business or luring them into their warm embrace and smothering them under the corporate pillow. It’s why we’ve really only seen iterative products rather than revolutionary paradigm shifts for the past decade, and it’s why the VC elite and these companies are chasing every fad that comes down the pike: they don’t have anything to really offer anymore and the demands to increase profits every year requires that they do something–anything–to move the needle.
A couple of years ago it was The Blockchain and its infernal spawn, the NFT (non-fungible token — tech bros love the word “fungible”). This magical technology was going to revolutionize finance, gaming, and intellectual property rights. Crypto currency was going to free us from the tyranny of the financial system, allowing everyone to get rich off a limited and highly-speculative commodity that these same VCs and their ilk had already purchased on the cheap . All they needed was to find some suckers to buy the virtually worthless data at inflated prices, who’d be left without a chair when the music stopped.
Of course, Silicon Valley went buck wild. They incorporated the magical words blockchain, NFT, and crypto into their various bullshit stunts so the brain trust of VCs would feed them more dollars like little baby birds and witless financiers would buy more of their stock. Suckers who bought an Ape or other worthless trinket hustled on social media to evangelize this amazing new technology and convince themselves that they hadn’t just spent thousands of dollars on a PNG file.
Anyone outside the reality distortion field could see that the wheels were coming off the cart. The tech industry had just admitted they were out of ideas and had nothing to offer. The days of new ideas and tools emerging organically, all competing in a dynamic marketplace to find success among users were long past.
We now live in a world where VCs and the Tech Oligopoly force feed “innovation” on us from the top down.
With the blockchain scam in the rear view mirror, “AI” is the new hotness and we see the same sad play staged for our benefit as everyone scrambles to incorporate a CEO’s wet dream into every aspect of software: a bloviating con artist spouting mostly useless information that also happens to makes shitty, derivative art. It must be like looking in a mirror. They love it.
The internet was originally built to survive a nuclear attack. Now it’s just…this, and it feels like we’re finally at the end of of a run that began in the mid-2000s. We’re at a crossroads. The way forward leads to mediocrity and rapidly degrading services squeezing us for every last cent. The way back has been nearly obliterated. The road to the right leads to the future where authoritarians finally complete their mission, restricting internet usage and locking us all within the Great American Firewall.
The last remaining path is the great unknown. There could be quicksand or a sheer cliff that way, for all we know. But where can we go from here? How do we escape the trap that’s been built for us?
Maybe we can retreat to move forward.
-
💬 Paulie