It Could Happen Here - CZM Rewind: The Tech Industry is a Failure
Episode Date: September 25, 2023Cool Zone is taking a week off! Here's a rerun episode, where Robert discussed how the tech industry became a failure despite massive advanced in consumer tech.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy ...information.
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Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show,
where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more.
After those runs, the conversations keep going.
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brought to you by an industry veteran with nothing to lose. Listen to Better Offline
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Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here. And, you know, this is you're hearing this because this is
running during the week that everyone in in ghoul zone media takes off
and here's the thing we don't technically have to work during a week for you to get new episodes of
stuff but if we just take a week off and then we put out new episodes that week we have to catch
up at some point right like we like at some point those episodes and extra episodes have to continue
being made so we're just actually taking this week off.
We're not going to do anything.
We've done this before.
This is not a new thing for us.
There will be no new episode of Bastards or Hood Politics or could happen here this week.
What we will be doing is we've asked everyone on the team to pick their old episodes of the show that they like and wanted to re-highlight to people.
the show that they like and wanted to re-highlight to people. So we will be dropping old episodes with this little bit of commentary at the start this week. If you think everything's a rerun,
that's because it is. We're in reruns this week, folk. You remember those? You probably don't.
If you're not an old piece of shit like me, maybe you don't remember the world in which
reruns were a thing. It's a thing they used to do on TV because of the same basic reasons, people needing a break, but something needing to go out to fill the gaping maw of content that is the internet.
It's eternal hunger, the great devourer that is our collective consciousness as a species.
consciousness as a species. So anyway, here's an episode I wrote last year about the tech industry and why it is fundamentally a failure, despite what would seem to be numerous accomplishments.
So check that out. And then, I don't know, maybe go watch the show Halt and Catch Fire.
That'll be a good time for you. Here it is.
Here it is.
Hey everybody, Robert Evans here, and welcome to It Could Happen Here.
You know, when we started this show, when I did the first season of it, you know, the one about all the Civil War stuff back in 2019,
this was basically a place for me to write long essays explaining my vision of the future and the present.
And people seemed to like that a lot. We did a little bit of that at the start of this new eternal daily season of the
show. But obviously over the last year or so, it's morphed into something very different and
something wonderful and successful. And it's brought a lot of new voices, or at least voices
people maybe hadn't heard from as
much out in front of the audience. And I've been really happy about that. But what I also haven't
been doing is writing any more essays about the world and how fucked up shit is. Because, you
know, I've been managing a bunch of stuff, and there's been a lot of work to do. But I like doing
that stuff. And I think you people like it.
So I'm going to try to do more of that.
And I wanted to kind of start
by talking a little bit about Silicon Valley.
And I'm going to say something
at the start of this essay
that a lot of people are probably instinctively
going to want to disagree with,
which is that Silicon Valley
and the tech industry
have been gigantic failures
by every metric that matters.
They have made life comprehensively worse for humanity, and there is no real fact-based
counter-argument to that statement. This is a hard pill for people to swallow. I'm sure a lot
of folks are frustrated at me for saying it right now and are thinking up counter-arguments.
Most people today are critical of the tech industry, obviously, particularly major social media companies, but they still tend to acknowledge the tremendous wealth created by
Silicon Valley as if there's some sort of inherent value to that behind a number on a spreadsheet.
Collectively, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, the so-called Big Five,
had a $7.5 trillion market cap in 2020. Every person listening to this keeps a device in their
pocket made by or using the software of one or more of these companies. And so when people want
to make the counter argument to what I just said, they'll tend to point out some version of this.
Yeah, companies like Facebook have done bad things, but the internet's still a tool for good.
It connects people, yada, yada, yada., smartphones empower us, you know, there's all these positive things about the internet, to which I will say, present me with your fucking
evidence that that has mattered for people. Really, in terms that actually, in aggregate,
improve their lives. I will show you my arguments to the contrary. In the period of time from Harry
Truman's election to the end of the Nixon administration, American productivity on a
per capita basis increased at a faster rate than it did at any other point in history.
But then something happened. From 1973 to 2013, income growth was 80% slower than it had been in
the previous three decades. If productivity had continued to grow at the same rate from 1973 to 2013 as it did from 1946 to 1973, the economy in
2013 would have been 60% larger than it actually was. Now I'm going to guess a decent number of
the people listening to this grew up watching The Jetsons. I know I did, and for the most part it
was a silly, pretty harmless animated show. But at the center of it was a dream about the future
that seems unfathomable in light of current events. George Jetson, who is in the show a pretty normal working
class guy, worked three hours a day for three days a week. One of the running jokes in the show is
that he considered himself overworked despite this pretty idyllic schedule. Now, this was never
particularly a focus of the show. It was just kind of something that was mentioned from time to time. And that's because the idea that a workweek might just be nine hours in the future wasn't a joke. This was the direction futurists in the 1960s, looking at that surge in productivity I just mentioned, and all of the middle class wealth that had been created from the 40s through the early 60s, this is the direction they saw us heading in.
from the 40s through the early 60s, this is the direction they saw us heading in.
Around a decade ago, in a period that was still significantly more optimistic than our current age, the Atlantic's Alexis Madrigal went on a reading spree of some early 20th century
futurist novels. His conclusion was this, quote, technological optimists sold the world on
automation by telling people it would create unimaginable amounts of leisure for them.
The big question for the workers of the 21st century would be how to spend their copious
amounts of free time. Now, the future we've actually gotten has given us the opposite of
this dream. To try and cover up the rank and rampant ways modern technology has failed humanity,
think tanks funded by venture capitalists and tech gurus produce an endless stream of identical
futurist thinker types who
write columns about how the world is actually better today than it's ever been. A good example
of this would be this June 2020 Forbes column by Rob Asghar titled, The World's Getting Better,
Here's Why Your Brain Can't Believe It. It opens with this paragraph.
Life has improved for most people around the world over the past generation,
temporary pandemics aside.
The rub is that you can't get anyone to believe the good news, and the result is a toxic political environment and the potential collapse of democratic norms if too few people feel that a stressed system is worth saving.
Now, I might point out, for example, that if people don't actually feel like the system's good, perhaps it's not really working well.
There's a number of counter
arguments you can make to this. Now, two years later, this again was written in June of 2020,
we've got a massive war in Europe. People are worried about nuclear warfare as a result of
that. Again, we've got a degradation of democracy worldwide that's continued to pace from where it
was in 2020. We've got soaring inequality. We've got inflation, the likes of which a lot of people alive have never seen, myself included, prior to this point. And we still have a pandemic.
So it's clear that Rob is at least not as smart as he thinks he is, which is what I would say
about everyone who makes versions of the same claim that he was making. Now, this doesn't mean
I'm saying that life is worse now than it was at some imagined prelapsarian version of the past.
I actually think that's kind of a useless way to think about the past and the future.
There's different things people would have preferred.
There's things that are objectively better.
There's things that are objectively and debatably worse.
You know, it's hard to make those kind of claims about history, especially when they often rely on saying, well, X amount more people have been pulled out of poverty.
Well, X amount more people have been pulled out of poverty.
And the question to that is, well, I don't know, before colonization of Africa, would you say all of those people in what became the colonized parts of Africa were in poverty
or were they simply not part of a system that measures poverty?
And anyway, whatever, we can go on and on about that.
My point is that the metrics these people use to claim the success of our current system,
to talk about how wonderful things are today, are constantly shifting and they're widely arbitrary.
The same year Rob wrote his stupid column, an NORC study showed that Americans self-reported
being happy at the lowest levels in 50 years. You can quote juked statistics about wealth or
access to luxury goods all you want, but the modern world and the post 2008 financial crash economy, all of which was built in the shade of the tech industry,
is making people miserable. Now, happiness is obviously not a perfect measure of progress
either. Self-reporting is always dicey, but things like the consumer price index and per capita
income, which are often used by folks on the optimist side, are also juked and jiggered to
hell and back. So to provide a bit more of an international scale, I'm going to quote from the
Berkeley University's Greater Good magazine. Quote, Released annually on the International
Day of Happiness, the World Happiness Report ranks countries based on their life satisfaction
in the Gallup World Poll. Residents rate how satisfied they are with their lives on a scale
of 0 to 10, from the worst possible life to the best possible life.
This year's report also analyzes how global happiness has changed over time, based on data stretching back to 2005.
One trend is very clear.
Negative feelings, worry, sadness, and anger have been rising around the world, up by 27% from 2010 to 2018.
The others also found troubling trends in happiness inequality, which is the psychological
parallel to income inequality. How much individuals in society differ in how satisfied they are with
life. Since 2007, happiness inequality has been rising within countries, meaning that the gap
between the unhappy and the happy has been getting wider. This trend is particularly strong in Latin
America, Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa. And this is kind of getting at, I think, what is an incredibly important point. For one thing,
if you want to look at how people have self-reported their unhappiness rising,
this massive recent surge in unhappiness occurs almost at exactly the period of time that the
smartphone takes off and becomes ubiquitous. And the smartphone is such a bafflingly useful device,
I would never want to give mine up as a thing that I had access to. And the internet is an incredibly powerful
tool. I wouldn't want to give the internet up either. But the usefulness and the undoubtable
brilliance behind these products makes it seem inconceivable to argue that they haven't made
us better at accomplishing the things that matter to us. But the evidence on this is pretty clear. I want to quote now from a write-up in The Atlantic.
No matter how aggressively you torture the numbers, the computer age has coincided with
a decline in the rate of economic growth. When Chad Syverson, an economist at the University
of Chicago's business school, looked at the question of missing growth, he found that the
productivity slowdown has reduced GDP by $2.7 trillion since 2004. Americans may love their smartphones, but all those free apps aren't worth
trillions of dollars. The physical world of the city, the glow of electric-powered lights,
the rumble of automobiles, the roar of airplanes overhead and subways below, is a product of late
19th century and early 20th century invention. The physical environment feels depressingly finished.
The bulk of innovation has been shunted into the invisible realm of bytes and code.
All of that code, technology advocates argue, has increased human ingenuity
by allowing individuals to tinker, talk, and trade with unprecedented ease.
This certainly feels true.
Who could dispute the fact that it's easier than ever to record music, market a video game, or publish an essay? But by most measures, individual innovation is in decline. In 2015,
Americans were far less likely to start a company than they were in the 1980s.
According to the economist Tyler Cohen, the spread of broadband technology has corresponded
with a drop-off in entrepreneurial activity in almost every city and in almost every industry.
entrepreneurial activity in almost every city and in almost every industry. after those runs the conversations keep going that's what my podcast post run high is all about it's a chance to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories their journeys and
the thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together you know that rush of endorphins you feel
after a great workout well that's when the real magic happens. So if you love hearing real,
inspiring stories from the people you know, follow, and admire, join me every week for
Post Run High. It's where we take the conversation beyond the run and get into the heart of it all.
It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun. Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
you get your podcasts. Welcome, I'm Danny Trejo. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter
Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories
inspired by the legends of Latin America.
From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters
to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.
I know you.
Take a trip and experience the horrors
that have haunted Latin America
since the beginning of time.
Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows
as part of My Cultura podcast network,
available on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search, better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech from an industry veteran with nothing to lose.
This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone from Nobel-winning economists
to the leading journalists in the field,
and I'll be digging into why the products you love keep getting worse
and naming and shaming those responsible.
Don't get me wrong, though.
I love technology.
I just hate the people
in charge and want them to get back to building things that actually do things to help real
people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough. So join me every week to understand
what's happening in the tech industry and what could be done to make things better. Listen to
Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Check out betteroffline.com.
Now, you might think from all this that I'm about to head into some sort of techno-doomer
anti-civ-permittivist rant here. I'm not. Perhaps I should, but I'm not. I am a person
who loves technology. I got my start as a journalist, as a tech journalist. I've joyously traveled the world for years, visiting conventions, looking at new
gadgets. And a lot of this was in that pretty wondrous period, if you're a gadget nerd,
from 2008 to 2011, where there were just these amazing new weird sci-fi gadgets dropping every
single week. Stuff that you'd grown up watching and like Star Trek The Next Generation suddenly
getting mailed to your door for you to test out. I tested hundreds of tablets and smart
gadgets in that time frame, and there's some really great products that came out from that
period. Bluetooth speakers are wonderful. A lot of people, including me, use them happily on a daily
basis. But when it comes to legitimately life-changing applications of technology that's
come to us in the last 15 years or so.
I can really only think of three things. Number one is the ability to navigate by GPS basically everywhere. Number two is the ability to be in constant contact with people around the world.
And number three is the ability to store a shitload of media on a portable device.
So I'm not anti-technology, nor am I saying that big tech doesn't make things that are cool or useful, nor am I saying we should get rid of this stuff.
The point I'm making is that, viewed at 30,000 feet, the tech industry has produced very little of quantifiable value to the human race, and it has caused unfathomable harm at the same time.
Now, in my opinion, this has nothing or at least fairly little to do with how the technology inherently works, and instead has everything to do with the ideology behind the people who developed and who continue to marshal that technology.
In 1995, two of the smartest guys in the 20th century, by my estimation, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, wrote an essay about the ideology that animated the men who would come to dominate the 21st century tech industry. They titled their essay, The Californian Ideology, and I think it
still counts as one of the three or four most incisive, accurate essays of that century.
The gist of the idea was that, as the first wave of the digital boom started to hit in the mid-1990s,
the thinkers behind it were fueled by a mix of left-wing, egalitarian,
often anti-statist beliefs that got wedded to right-wing, free-market, fundamentalist,
libertarian ideology, and created this deeply toxic way of thinking about the future.
You can see this in the story of guys like Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the personal computer,
who was also a former phone freaker. He committed federal crimes as a kid, hacking the phone system, primarily because
fuck the man. But then, when he's a young man, the Woz hooks up with a guy named Steve Jobs,
and Jobs is a brilliant but heartless con man who cares about nothing but market dominance.
Jobs recognizes the naive brilliance of Steve Wozniak, and he turns it into an engine for wealth creation.
At one point, he steals money that Wozniak was owed for a project that they took on together,
money Wozniak probably would have just given him if he'd asked,
and he used it secretly to fund their business, which became Apple.
In their essay, Cameron and Barbrook, who are much better writers than I,
describe the Californian ideology this way.
The Californian ideology is a mix of
cybernetics, free market economics, and counterculture libertarianism, and is promulgated
by magazines such as Wired and Mondo 2000, and preached in the books of Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly,
and others. The new faith has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, 30-something
capitalists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats, and even by the president of the USA himself.
Now, the tech industry, as we know it, got its start courtesy of government money. Everyone
knows that the first version of the internet was developed as part of a Defense Department project.
But the entire computer industry, all of the coders and engineers who would form the first
generation of Silicon Valley profit engines, all these guys got their start working
for or as defense contractors. When the U.S. pulled out of Vietnam, thousands of these people
were left out of jobs and they were forced to move into the private sector. Everything worthwhile
that's come out of big tech has involved a titanic amount of public funding one way or the other.
I'm going to quote from that essay again. Almost every major technological advance of the last 200
years has taken place with the aid of
large amounts of public money and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies
of the computer and the net were invented with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example,
the first difference engine project received a British government grant of 517,470 pounds,
a small fortune in 1834. From Colossus to EDVAC, from flight simulators to virtual reality,
the development of computing has depended at key moments on public research handouts
or fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM Corporation built the first programmable
digital computer only after it was requested to do so by the U.S. Defense Department during the
Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention meant that Nazi Germany lost
the opportunity to build the first electronic computer in the late 30s, when the Wehrmacht
refused to fund Konrad Zuse, who had pioneered the use of binary code, stored programs, and
electronic logic gates. One of the weirdest things about the Californian ideology is that the West
Coast itself was a product of massive state intervention. Government dollars were used to
build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities, and other infrastructural projects which make the
good life possible. On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast high-tech industrial
complex has been feasting off the fattest pork barrel in history for decades. The U.S. government
has poured billions of tax dollars into buying planes, missiles, electronics, and nuclear bombs
from Californian companies. Americans have always had state planning, but they prefer to call it the defense budget.
Hey guys, I'm Kate Max. You might know me from my popular online series, The Running Interview Show,
where I run with celebrities, athletes, entrepreneurs, and more. After those runs,
the conversations keep going. That's what my podcast Post Run High is all about. It's a chance
to sit down with my guests and dive even deeper into their stories, their journeys, and the
thoughts that arise once we've hit the pavement together. You know that rush of endorphins you feel after a great workout?
Well, that's when the real magic happens.
So if you love hearing real, inspiring stories
from the people you know, follow, and admire,
join me every week for Post Run High.
It's where we take the conversation beyond the run
and get into the heart of it all.
It's lighthearted, pretty crazy, and very fun.
Listen to Post Run High on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill.
Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter
Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows
presented by iHeart and dare enter. Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum.
An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America.
From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters,
to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.
Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since
the beginning of time.
Listen to no tales from the shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network.
Available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Hi, I'm Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast.
And we're kicking off our second season digging into how Tex Elite has turned Silicon Valley into a playground for billionaires.
From the chaotic world of generative AI to the destruction of Google search,
better offline is your unvarnished and at times unhinged look at the underbelly of tech
from an industry veteran with nothing to lose. This season, I'm going to be joined by everyone
from Nobel-winning economists to leading journalists in the field, and I'll be
digging into why the products you love keep getting worse, and naming and shaming those responsible. Don't get me wrong, though. I love technology. I just
hate the people in charge, and want them to get back to building things that actually do things
to help real people. I swear to God things can change if we're loud enough, so join me every
week to understand what's happening in the tech industry, and what could be done to make things
better. Listen to Better Offline on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Check out betteroffline.com.
Now, this state of affairs is more or less unchanged today. Elon Musk is probably the
most celebrated modern tech visionary. Misundry
companies have taken nearly $5 billion in public funding, subsidies, and government support since
2015. All of these libertarian visionaries who push in their political lives for a world of
laissez-faire economics and corporate sovereignty only produce value with the help of taxpayer
dollars, period. The irrational exuberance of
public financing and the narcissism to ignore its role in innovation has given us a generation of
tech industry overlords who seem bound and determined to destroy their own creations.
Steve Jobs represented the most successful and probably the most intelligent manifestation of
the Californian ideology. Every tech industry ghoul currently
boiling away fortunes for the sake of their ego—I'm thinking of Zuckerberg and Musk most
prominently right now—is trying to be him. Steve's skill was being able to perfectly inhabit the form
of a visionary, and he was so good at doing this that he convinced this generation they could
follow in his footsteps. But Steve Jobs was only ever playing at being a creator,
at being an inventor. His skill was not in making things. He had other people to do the making.
Steve was an exceptional confidence man, and like all good confidence men, he was able to make
money because he understood on a deep level what other human beings wanted. This skill allowed him
to lock Apple into spending hundreds
of millions of dollars on R&D for what would become the first proper smartphone. And for a
while, he was just having them toss that money into an apparent chasm, repeatedly turning back
iterations of the product that weren't quite right on the strength of his belief that when they got
it right, it would be worth it. In the years since, we've seen many wannabe Steves try to
follow in
his footsteps, igniting tens of billions of dollars of venture capital for absolutely nothing.
One of the best examples would be Uber. They lost $8.5 billion in 2019, $6.8 billion in 2020.
Once upon a time, the understanding, the Jobsian vision of what Uber could be,
was that all of this ignited VC cash would be worthwhile
because eventually the company would succeed in replacing human drivers with autonomous cars,
cutting out the primary cost in the entire professional driving industry and making
the potential for a shitload of profit. But after investing more than a billion dollars
in self-driving cars, Uber sold their entire autonomous vehicle division off at a loss. All of that expense had resulted in self-driving cars that averaged one half mile
traveled per accident. Despite this, after a $2.6 billion loss in August of 2022, Uber's stock soared.
Now, the realities of what generates profit and loss in the tech industry have been completely divorced from productive reality or value created for quite some time. The delamination of real
value in big tech happens subtly. It's not hard to see why Apple, who created a device every human
being wanted to have in their pocket, became worth a shitload more money, right? Pretty obvious.
The value case for Google's core business, search, is also pretty obvious.
And as much as I hate Facebook, it became initially successful because it provided people
with something of real value, a way to stay in touch with human beings they had met over the
course of their lives. Younger folks may find this odd because they've grown up with the internet,
but as a kid, I can remember very vividly my parents talking about the friends they'd had
in high school and in college, and how a lifetime of moving regularly had severed many of the connections
they'd valued with these people. When I joined Facebook in my freshman year of college, I found
real value in the ability to maintain and sometimes even build stronger connections with people I
would otherwise have lost touch with entirely. There is the core of something good or something
at least valued inherently by people in Facebook. And that's true with most, if not all, of the big
five companies. When people reflexively leap to defend the tech industry as an engine of innovation,
they can point to these successes. But the point that I'm making isn't that no good ideas come out
of Silicon Valley or that there isn't anything valuable that is involved in what
these companies do. It's that the endless quest for profit and the narcissism of this Californian
ideology lead inevitably to the destruction of whatever value the industry creates. This is why
none of these innovations have actually led to surges in productivity, why none of them have
made us any happier, which I think might be more important. Any potential these creations had was smothered by the ideology that drives Silicon Valley money.
Facebook took the connections that they'd made with people and used them to feed those same people rage bait.
They destroyed the open internet, shuttered countless local news sites, put tons of people out of business, while algorithmically pushing millions of folks
around the world towards whatever kept them angriest and most online. Google spent billions
on an endless stream of spinoff products like Google Plus and Google Glass, which were nearly
all catastrophic failures, at least on a financial sense. And all the while, they gradually turned
the search results they'd prided themselves on into a sponsored ad feed. Google is less useful now than it was a couple of years ago. You'll
notice this immediately if you just get on there and start asking it questions.
Elon Musk has taken the visionary technology that underpins the Tesla, all created by other people,
and used the clout from that to shatter any chance of California developing a high-speed rail system. By the way,
in June of 2022, Tesla's stock value plunged $75 billion, which is substantially more money than
the company has ever actually made. Elucidating the full scale of the failure of Silicon Valley
and American techno-optimism would take more time than I'm able to spend right now. So instead,
I want to talk about the idea that's behind so much of the recent big failures that we've seen from big tech.
Stuff like Meta pissing away $10 billion, half the budget of NASA, in a year to create a worse version of VRChat.
The idea is called blitzscaling, and it basically means attempting to achieve massive scale at breakneck speed.
You take big risks and you spend huge amounts of money very quickly to try and force apps or other products onto the market that are then adopted rapidly by huge numbers of people.
This brings in a shitload of VC money and is a way that you can make a fortune.
In the years since Jobs brought the first iPhone out on stage, this has become the dominant model of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Everyone is looking for the next iPhone, right? Something that can take over an industry, something that can take
over the world that rapidly, that can change human life almost overnight. In funding calls,
Mark Zuckerberg says this very directly, comparing his company's metaverse dreams to the new
smartphone. The thing that Mark misses, because his ideology renders it invisible, is that Steve Jobs didn't make people want the iPhone. He was
able to figure out what they wanted already, what they had talked about wanting for decades,
starting with tricorders and communicators on Star Trek, and he lashed his dev team until they
built the damn thing. Now, the metaverse has some analogs in fiction, including the thing that it
gets its name from. But number one, most depictions of the metaverse in fiction are not aspirational
things people want. They're dystopian. There's no evidence that people actually want this thing,
that he's igniting a fortune to build, or that they'd spend meaningful periods of time in it
if it existed. There's not a lot of polling on this data, but one 17,000-person survey I found showed
less than 20% of respondents expressing an interest in a metaverse like the one Zuck is trying to
build. The last time Facebook provided any kind of information about how many people are on Horizon
Worlds, which is kind of the core of their metaverse efforts. It was somewhere around 300,000 people. In the most recent quarter, they declined to provide
an update to those numbers, which suggests the number has not increased. And if you just want
to look at what happens when people create a digital product that actually has a strong base
of interest, look at how quickly World of Warcraft went from, you know, a thing that very few people outside of nerds would have known much about to a thing that was entirely mainstream.
Millions of users, regular references to it on television.
You're just not seeing that with any of this metaverse shit because there's nothing in it that people actually want.
The sheer hollowness of big tech is starting to become financially obvious, too.
Facebook's stock has lost 57% of its value in the last year. Amazon is down 26%, Google by 29%, and even Apple has fallen by
14%. More to the point, I think any honest person has to look at the last 15 years or so in which
these companies have ruled our economic and social lives and ask, are we better off? Now, over the
course of the 19th century, productivity and income rose at unprecedented rates. There was a
lot of brutality in this process, right? We talk, you know, on Behind the Bastards regularly about
all of the horrible labor things that happened in the 19th century. It also marked the beginning of
the fossil fuel age, which may well kill us all. But while all this was going on, another thing
that happened is wages for the working class doubled in the first half of the 19th century.
In the second half, life expectancy rose faster than it ever had before as well, and that
continued through the first part of the 20th century. Now, near the end of the first quarter
of the 21st century, we're not seeing that kind of movement. The United States is now ending its
second consecutive year
of declining life expectancy for the first time in any of our lifetimes,
and real average wage adjusted for inflation
has remained flat for almost half a century.
Progress has flatlined,
and nothing about how brilliant the modern tech industry is
or how cool some of these gadgets and products are
can change those
fundamental facts. It's a failure. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media.
For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the
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Could Happen Here updated monthly at coolzonemedia.com slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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