Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here, and you know this is
Speaker 1: you're hearing this because this is running during the week
Speaker 1: that everyone in Gooul Zone media takes off. And here's
Speaker 1: the thing. We don't technically have to work during a
Speaker 1: week for you to get new episodes of stuff. But
Speaker 1: if we just take a week off and then we
Speaker 1: put out new episodes that week, we have to catch
Speaker 1: up at some point, right, like we like, at some
Speaker 1: point those episodes and extra episodes have to continue being made.
Speaker 1: So we're just actually taking this week off. We're not
Speaker 1: going to do anything. We've done this before. This is
Speaker 1: not a new thing for us. There'll be so no
Speaker 1: new episode of Bastards or hood Politics or could happen
Speaker 1: here this week. Well, we will be doing as We've
Speaker 1: asked everyone on the team to pick their old episodes
Speaker 1: of the show that they like and wanted to rehighlight
Speaker 1: to people. So we will be dropping, you know, old
Speaker 1: episodes with kind of you know, this little bit of
Speaker 1: commentary at the start this week. If you think everything's
Speaker 1: a rerun, that's because it is. We're in reruns this week, folks.
Speaker 1: You remember those If you're not not like an old
Speaker 1: piece of shit like me. Maybe you don't remember the
Speaker 1: world in which you know reruns. We're a thing, It's
Speaker 1: the thing they used to do on TV because of
Speaker 1: the same basic reasons. People needing, needing a break, but
Speaker 1: something something needing to go out to fill the gaping
Speaker 1: maw of content that is the Internet. It's eternal hunger,
Speaker 1: the great devour that is that is our collective consciousness
Speaker 1: as a species. So anyway, here's an episode I wrote
Speaker 1: last year about the tech industry and why it is
Speaker 1: fundamentally a failure despite what would seem to be numerous accomplishments.
Speaker 1: So check that out and then, I don't know, maybe
Speaker 1: go watch the show Halt and Catch Fire. That'll be
Speaker 1: that'll be a good time for you. Here it is. Hey, everybody,
Speaker 1: Robert Evans here and welcome to It could happen here.
Speaker 1: You know. When we started the show, when I did
Speaker 1: the first season of it, you know, the one about
Speaker 1: all the civil wars back in twenty nineteen, this was
Speaker 1: basically a place for me to write long essays explaining
Speaker 1: my vision of the future and the present, and people
Speaker 1: seem to like that a lot. We did a little
Speaker 1: bit of that at the start of this new Eternal
Speaker 1: daily season of the show, but obviously over the last
Speaker 1: year or so, it's morphed into something very different and
Speaker 1: something wonderful and successful, and that's brought a lot of
Speaker 1: new voices, or at least voices people maybe hadn't heard
Speaker 1: from as much out in front of the audience, and
Speaker 1: I've been really happy about that. But what I also
Speaker 1: haven't been doing is writing any more essays about the
Speaker 1: world and how fucked up shit is, because you know,
Speaker 1: I've been managing a bunch of stuff and there's been
Speaker 1: a lot of work to do. But I like doing
Speaker 1: that stuff, and I think you people like it, So
Speaker 1: I'm going to try to do more of that. And
Speaker 1: I wanted to kind of start by talking a little
Speaker 1: bit about Silicon Valley, and I'm going to say something
Speaker 1: at the start of this essay that a lot of
Speaker 1: people are probably instinctively going to want to disagree with,
Speaker 1: which is that Silicon Valley and the tech industry have
Speaker 1: been gigantic failures by every metric that matters. They have
Speaker 1: made life comprehensively worse for humanity, and there is no
Speaker 1: real fact based counter argument to that statement. This is
Speaker 1: a hard pill for people to swallow. I'm sure, a
Speaker 1: lot of folks are frustrated in me for saying it
Speaker 1: right now and are thinking of counter arguments. Most people
Speaker 1: today are critical of the tech industry, obviously, particularly major
Speaker 1: social media companies, but they still tend to acknowledge the
Speaker 1: tremendous wealth created by Silicon Valley, as if there's some
Speaker 1: sort of inherent value to that behind a number on
Speaker 1: a spreadsheet. Collectively, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, and Google, the
Speaker 1: so called Big Five had a seven point five trillion
Speaker 1: dollar market cap in twenty twenty. Every person listening to
Speaker 1: this keeps a device in their pocket made by or
Speaker 1: using the software of one or more of these companies,
Speaker 1: And so when people want to make the counter argument
Speaker 1: to what I just said, they'll tend to point out
Speaker 1: some version of this. Yeah, companies like Facebook have done
Speaker 1: bad things, but the Internet still a tool for good.
Speaker 1: It connects people, YadA, YadA YadA. Smartphones empower us. You know,
Speaker 1: there's all these positive things about the internet, to which
Speaker 1: I will say, present me with your fucking evidence that
Speaker 1: that has mattered for people really in terms that actually
Speaker 1: inaggregate improve their lives. I will show you my arguments
Speaker 1: to the contrary. In the period of time from Harry
Speaker 1: Truman's election to the end of the Nixon administration, American
Speaker 1: productivity on a per capita basis increased at a faster
Speaker 1: rate than it did at any other point in history.
Speaker 1: But then something happened. From nineteen seventy three to twenty thirteen,
Speaker 1: income growth was eighty percent slower than it had been
Speaker 1: in the previous three decades. If productivity had continued to
Speaker 1: grow at the same rate from nineteen seventy three to
Speaker 1: twenty thirteen as it did from nineteen forty six to
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy three, the economy in twenty thirteen would have
Speaker 1: been sixty percent larger than it actually was. Now. I'm
Speaker 1: gonna guess a decent number of the people listening to
Speaker 1: this grew up watching The Jetsons. I know I did,
Speaker 1: and for the most part it was a silly, pretty
Speaker 1: harmless animated show. But at the center of it was
Speaker 1: a dream about the future that seems unfathomable in light
Speaker 1: of current events. George Jetson, who is in the show
Speaker 1: a pretty normal working class guy, worked three hours a
Speaker 1: day for three days a week. One of the running
Speaker 1: jokes in the show is that he considered himself overworked
Speaker 1: despite this pretty idyllic schedule. Now, this was never particularly
Speaker 1: a focus of the show. It was just kind of
Speaker 1: something that was mentioned from time to time. And that's
Speaker 1: because the idea that a workweek might just be nine
Speaker 1: hours in the future wasn't a joke. This was the
Speaker 1: direction futurists in the nineteen sixties, looking at that surge
Speaker 1: in productivity I just mentioned, and all of the middle
Speaker 1: class wealth that had been created from the forties through
Speaker 1: the early sixties, this is the direction they saw as
Speaker 1: heading in Around a decade ago, in a period that
Speaker 1: was still significantly more optimistic than our current age. The Atlantics,
Speaker 1: Alexis Madrigal went on a reading spree of some early
Speaker 1: twentieth century futurist novels. His conclusion was this quote. Technological
Speaker 1: optimists sold the world on automation by telling people it
Speaker 1: would create unimaginable amounts of leisure for them. The big
Speaker 1: question for the workers of the twenty first century would
Speaker 1: be how to spend their copious amounts of free time. Now,
Speaker 1: the future we've actually gotten has given us the opposite
Speaker 1: of this stream to try and cover up the rank
Speaker 1: and rampant ways modern technology has failed humanity. Think tanks
Speaker 1: funded by venture capitalists and tech gurus produce an endless
Speaker 1: stream of identical futurist thinker types who write columns about
Speaker 1: how the world is actually better today than it's ever been.
Speaker 1: A good example of this would be this June twenty
Speaker 1: twenty Forbes column by Rob Asgar titled the World's getting better.
Speaker 1: Here's why your brain can't believe it. It opens with
Speaker 1: this paragraph, Life has improved for most people around the
Speaker 1: world over the past generation temporary pandemics aside. The rub
Speaker 1: is that you can't get anyone to believe the good news,
Speaker 1: and the result is a toxic political environment and the
Speaker 1: potential collapse of timocratic norms if too few people feel
Speaker 1: that a stressed system is worth saving. Now, I might
Speaker 1: point out, for example, that if people don't actually feel
Speaker 1: like the system's good, perhaps it's not really working well.
Speaker 1: There's a number of counter arguments you can make to this. Now.
Speaker 1: Two years later, this again was written in June of
Speaker 1: twenty twenty, we've got a massive war in Europe. People
Speaker 1: are worried about nuclear warfare. As a result of that, Again,
Speaker 1: we've got a degradation of democracy worldwide that's continued to
Speaker 1: pace from where it was in twenty twenty. We've got
Speaker 1: soaring inequality, we've got inflation the likes of which a
Speaker 1: lot of people alive have never seen, myself included prior
Speaker 1: to this point, and we still have a pandemic. So
Speaker 1: it's clear that Rob is at least not as smart
Speaker 1: as he thinks he is, which is what I would
Speaker 1: say about everyone who makes versions of the same claim
Speaker 1: that he was making. Now, this doesn't mean I'm saying
Speaker 1: that life is worse now than it was at some
Speaker 1: imagined prelapsarian version of the past. I actually think that's
Speaker 1: kind of a useless way to think about the past
Speaker 1: and the future. There's different things people would have preferred.
Speaker 1: There's things that are objectively better, there's things that are
Speaker 1: objectively and debatably worse. You know that it's hard to
Speaker 1: make those kind of claims about history, especially when they
Speaker 1: often rely on saying, well, x amount more people have
Speaker 1: been pulled out of poverty, and the question to that is, well,
Speaker 1: I don't know. Before colonization of Africa, would you say
Speaker 1: all of those people in what became the colonized parts
Speaker 1: of Africa were in poverty or were they simply not
Speaker 1: part of a system that measures poverty and anyway whatever.
Speaker 1: We can go on and on about that. My point
Speaker 1: is that the metrics these people use to claim the
Speaker 1: success of our current system to talk about how wonderful
Speaker 1: things are today are constantly shifting, and they're widely arbitrary.
Speaker 1: The same year Rob wrote his stupid column, a NRC
Speaker 1: study showed that Americans self reported being happy at the
Speaker 1: lowest levels in fifty years. You can quote juke statistics
Speaker 1: about wealthare access to luxury goods all you want. But
Speaker 1: the modern world, in the post two thousand and eight
Speaker 1: financial crash economy, all of which was built in the
Speaker 1: shade of the tech industry, is making people miserable now.
Speaker 1: Happiness is obviously not a perfect measure of progress either.
Speaker 1: Self reporting always dicey, but things like the consumer price
Speaker 1: index and per capita income, which are often used by
Speaker 1: folks on the optimist side, are also juked and jiggered
Speaker 1: to hell and back. So to provide a bit more
Speaker 1: of an international scale, I'm going to quote from the
Speaker 1: Berkeley University's Greater Good magazine quote release annually on the
Speaker 1: International Day of Happiness. The World Happiness Report ranks countries
Speaker 1: based on their life satisfaction. In the Gallop World Poll,
Speaker 1: residents rate how satisfied they are with their lives in
Speaker 1: a scale of zero to ten, from the worst possible
Speaker 1: life to the best possible life. This year's report also
Speaker 1: analyzes how global happiness has changed over time, based on
Speaker 1: data stretching back to two thousand and five. One trend
Speaker 1: is very clear. Negative feelings, worries, sadness, and anger have
Speaker 1: been rising around the world, up by twenty seven percent
Speaker 1: from twenty ten to twenty eighteen. The authors also found
Speaker 1: troubling trends and happiness in equality, which is the psychological
Speaker 1: parallel to income inequality, how much individuals in society differ
Speaker 1: in how satisfied they are with life. Since two thousand
Speaker 1: and seven, happiness inequality has been rising within countries, meaning
Speaker 1: that the gap between the unhappy and the happy has
Speaker 1: been getting wider. This trend is particularly strong in Latin America,
Speaker 1: Asia and Sub Saharan Africa. And this is kind of
Speaker 1: getting it. I think, what is an incredibly important point,
Speaker 1: for one thing, if you want to look at how
Speaker 1: people have self reported their unhappiness rising, This massive recent
Speaker 1: surge and unhappiness occurs almost at exactly the period of
Speaker 1: time that the smartphone takes off and becomes ubiquitous. And
Speaker 1: the smartphone is such a bafflingly useful device, I would
Speaker 1: never want to give mine up as a thing that
Speaker 1: I had access to. And the Internet is an incredibly
Speaker 1: powerful tool. I wouldn't want to give the Internet up either.
Speaker 1: But the usefulness and the undoubtable brilliance behind these products
Speaker 1: makes it seem inconceivable to argue that they haven't made
Speaker 1: us better at accomplishing the things that matter to us.
Speaker 1: But the evidence on this is pretty clear. I want
Speaker 1: to quote now from a write up in The Atlantic.
Speaker 1: No matter how aggressively you torture the numbers, the computer
Speaker 1: age has coincided with a decline in the rate of
Speaker 1: economic growth. When Chad Siverson, an economist at the University
Speaker 1: of Chicago's Business School, looked at the question of missing growth,
Speaker 1: he found that the productivity slowdown has reduced GDP by
Speaker 1: two point seven trillion dollars since two thousand four. Americans
Speaker 1: may love their smartphones, but all those free apps aren't
Speaker 1: worth trillions of dollars. The physical world of the city,
Speaker 1: the glow of electric powered lights, the rumble of automobiles,
Speaker 1: the roar of airplanes overhead on subways below is a
Speaker 1: product of late nineteenth century and early twentieth century invention.
Speaker 1: The physical environment feels depressingly finished. The bulk of innovation
Speaker 1: has been shunted into the invisible realm of bytes and code.
Speaker 1: All of that code, technology advocates argue, has increased human
Speaker 1: ingenuity by allowing individuals to tinker, talk, and trade with
Speaker 1: unprecedented ease. This certainly feels true. Who could dispute the
Speaker 1: fact that it's easier than ever to record music, market
Speaker 1: a video game, or publish an essay. But by most measures,
Speaker 1: individual innovation is in decline. In twenty fifteen, Americans were
Speaker 1: far less likely to start a company than they were
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties. According to the economist Tyler Coha,
Speaker 1: the spread of broadband technology has corresponded with a drop
Speaker 1: off and entrepreneurial activity in almost every city and in
Speaker 1: almost every industry. Now you might think from all this
Speaker 1: that I'm mount ahead into some sort of technodoomer, anti
Speaker 1: siev primitivist rant. Here I'm not. Perhaps I should, but
Speaker 1: I'm not. I am a person who loves technology. I
Speaker 1: got my start as a journalist as a tech journalist.
Speaker 1: I've joyously traveled the world for years visiting conventions looking
Speaker 1: at new gadgets, and a lot of this was in
Speaker 1: that pretty wondrous period if you're a gadget nerd from
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight to twenty eleven, where there were
Speaker 1: there's these amazing, new, weird sci fi gadgets dropping every
Speaker 1: single week, stuff that you'd grown up watching in like
Speaker 1: Star Trek the next generation suddenly getting mailed to your
Speaker 1: door for you to test out. I tested hundreds of
Speaker 1: tablets and smart gadgets in that timeframe, and there's some
Speaker 1: really great products that came out from that period. Bluetooth
Speaker 1: speakers are wonderful. Lot of people, including me, use them
Speaker 1: happily on a daily basis. But when it comes to
Speaker 1: legitimately life changing applications of technology that's come to us
Speaker 1: in the last fifteen years or so, I can really
Speaker 1: only think of three things. Number one is the ability
Speaker 1: to navigate by GPS basically everywhere. Number two is the
Speaker 1: ability to be in constant contact with people around the world.
Speaker 1: And number three is the ability to store a shitload
Speaker 1: of media on a portable device. So I'm not anti technology,
Speaker 1: nor am I saying that big tech doesn't make things
Speaker 1: that are cool or useful. Nor am I saying we
Speaker 1: should get rid of this stuff. The point I'm making
Speaker 1: is that viewed at thirty thousand feet, the tech industry
Speaker 1: has produced very little of quantifiable value to the human race,
Speaker 1: and it has caused unfathomable harm at the same time. Now,
Speaker 1: in my opinion, this has nothing, or at least fairly
Speaker 1: little to do with how the technology inherently works, and
Speaker 1: instead has everything to do with the ideology behind the
Speaker 1: people who developed and who continue to marshal that technology.
Speaker 1: In nineteen ninety five, two of the smartest guys in
Speaker 1: the twentieth century by my estimation, Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron,
Speaker 1: wrote an essay about the ideology that animated the men
Speaker 1: who had come to dominate the twenty first century tech industry.
Speaker 1: They titled their essay the Californian Ideology, and I think
Speaker 1: it still counts as one of the three or four
Speaker 1: most incisive accurate essays of that century. The gist of
Speaker 1: the idea was that as the first wave of the
Speaker 1: digital boom started to hit in the mid nineteen nineties,
Speaker 1: the thinkers behind it were fueled by a mix of
Speaker 1: left wing by a mix of left wing egalitarian, often
Speaker 1: anti statist beliefs that got wetted to right wing free
Speaker 1: market fundamentalist libertarian ideology and created this deeply toxic way
Speaker 1: of thinking about the future. You can see this in
Speaker 1: the story of guys like Steve Wozniak, the inventor of
Speaker 1: the personal computer, who was also a former phone freaker.
Speaker 1: He committed federal crimes as a kid, hacking the phone
Speaker 1: system primarily because fuck the man. But then when he's
Speaker 1: a young man, the Waws hooks up with a guy
Speaker 1: named Steve Job, and Jobs is a brilliant but heartless
Speaker 1: con man who cares about nothing but market dominance. Jobs
Speaker 1: recognizes the naive brilliance of Steve Wosniak, and he turns
Speaker 1: it into an engine for wealth creation. At one point,
Speaker 1: he steals money that Wosniak was owed for a project
Speaker 1: that they took on together, money Wosniak probably would have
Speaker 1: just given him if he'd asked, and he used it
Speaker 1: secretly to fund their business, which became Apple. In their essay,
Speaker 1: Cameron and Barbara, who are much better writers than I,
Speaker 1: described the Californian ideology this way. The Californian ideology is
Speaker 1: a mix of cybernetics, free market economics, and counterculture libertarianism,
Speaker 1: and is promulgated by magazines such as Wired and Mondo
Speaker 1: two thousand and preached in the books of Stuart Brand,
Speaker 1: Kevin Kelly, and others. The new faith has been embraced
Speaker 1: by computer nerds, slacker students, thirty sethter capitalists, hip academics,
Speaker 1: futurist bureaucrats, and even by the President of the USA himself. Now,
Speaker 1: the tech industry as we know it got its start
Speaker 1: courtesy of government money. Everyone knows that the first version
Speaker 1: of the Internet was developed as part of a Defense
Speaker 1: Department project, But the entire computer industry, all of the
Speaker 1: coders and engineers who would form the first generation of
Speaker 1: Sillincon Valley profit engines, all these guys got their start
Speaker 1: working for or as defense contractors. When the US pulled
Speaker 1: out of Vietnam, thousands of these people were left out
Speaker 1: of jobs and they were forced to move into the
Speaker 1: private sector. Everything worthwhile that's come out of big tech
Speaker 1: has involved a titanic amount of public funding one way
Speaker 1: or the other. I'm going to quote from that essay again.
Speaker 1: Almost every major technological advance of the last two hundred
Speaker 1: years has taken place with the aid of large amounts
Speaker 1: of public money and under a good deal of government influence.
Speaker 1: The technologies of the computer in the net were invented
Speaker 1: with the aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the
Speaker 1: first difference Engine project received a British government grant of
Speaker 1: five hundred and seventeen four hundred and seventy pounds a
Speaker 1: small fortune in eighteen thirty four. From Colossus to ed VAC,
Speaker 1: from flight simulators to virtual reality, the development of computing
Speaker 1: has depended at key moments on public research handouts or
Speaker 1: fat contracts with public agencies. The IBM Corporation the first
Speaker 1: programmable digital computer only after it was requested to do
Speaker 1: so by the US Defense Department during the Korean War.
Speaker 1: The result of a lack of state intervention meant that
Speaker 1: Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the first electronic
Speaker 1: computer in the late thirties, when the Wehrmacht refused to
Speaker 1: fund Conrad Zus, who had pioneered the use of binary code,
Speaker 1: stored programs, and electronic logic gates. One of the weirdest
Speaker 1: things about the Californian ideology is that the West Coast
Speaker 1: itself was a product of massive state intervention. Government dollars
Speaker 1: were used to build the irrigation systems, highways, schools, universities,
Speaker 1: and other infrastructural projects which make the good life possible.
Speaker 1: On top of these public subsidies, the West Coast high
Speaker 1: tech industrial complex has been feasting off the fattest pork
Speaker 1: barrel in history. For decades, the US government has poured
Speaker 1: billions of tax dollars into buying planes, missiles, electronics, and
Speaker 1: nuclear bombs from Californian companies. Americans have always had state planning,
Speaker 1: but they prefer to call it the defense budget. Now
Speaker 1: this state of affairs is more or less unchanged today.
Speaker 1: Elon Musk is probably the most celebrated modern tech visionary.
Speaker 1: Miss Sundry companies have taken nearly five billion dollars in
Speaker 1: public funding, subsidies, and government support since twenty fifteen. All
Speaker 1: of these libertarian visionaries who push in their political lives
Speaker 1: for a world of Los afaire economics and corporate sovereignty,
Speaker 1: only produce value with the help of tax payer dollars. Period.
Speaker 1: The irrational exuberance of public financing and the narcissism to
Speaker 1: ignore its role in innovation has given us a generation
Speaker 1: of tech industry overlords who seem bound and determined to
Speaker 1: destroy their own creations. Steve Jobs represented the most successful,
Speaker 1: and probably the most intelligent manifestation of the Californian ideology.
Speaker 1: Every tech industry ghoul currently boiling away fortunes for the
Speaker 1: sake of their ego. I'm thinking of Zuckerberg and Musk
Speaker 1: most prominently right now is trying to be him. Steve's
Speaker 1: skill was being able to perfectly inhabit the form of
Speaker 1: a visionary, and he was so good at doing this
Speaker 1: that he convinced this generation they could follow in his footsteps.
Speaker 1: But Steve Jobs was only ever playing at being a creator,
Speaker 1: at being an inventor. His skill was not in making things.
Speaker 1: He had other people to do the making. Steve was
Speaker 1: an exceptional confidence man, and like all good confidence men,
Speaker 1: he was able to make money because he understood on
Speaker 1: a deep level what other human beings wanted. This skill
Speaker 1: allowed him to lock Apple into spending hundreds of millions
Speaker 1: of dollars on R and D for what would become
Speaker 1: the first proper smartphone, and for a while he was
Speaker 1: just having them toss that money into an apparent chasm
Speaker 1: repeatedly turning back iterations of the product that weren't quite
Speaker 1: right on the strength of his belief that when they
Speaker 1: got it right, it would be worth it. In the
Speaker 1: years sense, we've seen many wanna be Steve's try to
Speaker 1: follow in his footsteps, igniting tens of billions of dollars
Speaker 1: of venture capital for absolutely nothing. One of the best
Speaker 1: examples would be Uber. They lost eight point five billion
Speaker 1: dollars in twenty nineteen six point eight billion dollars in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty. Once upon a time, the understanding the jobs
Speaker 1: and vision of what Uber could be was that all
Speaker 1: of this ignited VC cash would be worthwhile because eventually
Speaker 1: the company would succeed in replacing human drivers with autonomous cars,
Speaker 1: cutting out the primary cost in the entire professional driving industry,
Speaker 1: and making the potential for a shitload of profit. But
Speaker 1: after investing more than a billion dollars in self driving cars,
Speaker 1: Uber sold their entire autonomous vehicle division off at a loss.
Speaker 1: All of that expense had resulted in self driving cars
Speaker 1: that averaged one half mile traveled per accident. Despite this,
Speaker 1: after a two point six billion dollar loss in August
Speaker 1: of twenty twenty two, Uber stocks swared now, the realities
Speaker 1: of what generates profit and loss in the tech industry
Speaker 1: have been completely divorced from productive reality or value created
Speaker 1: for quite some time. The delamination of real value in
Speaker 1: big tech happens subtly. It's not howard to see ey Apple,
Speaker 1: who created a device every human being wanted to have
Speaker 1: in their pocket, became worth a shitload more money, right,
Speaker 1: pretty obvious. The value case for Google's core business search
Speaker 1: is also pretty obvious. And as much as I hate Facebook,
Speaker 1: it became initially successful because it provided people with something
Speaker 1: of real value, a way to stay in touch with
Speaker 1: human beings they had met over the course of their lives.
Speaker 1: Younger folks may find this odd because they've grown up
Speaker 1: with the Internet, but as a kid, I can remember
Speaker 1: very vividly my parents talking about the friends they'd had
Speaker 1: in high school and in college, and how a lifetime
Speaker 1: of moving regularly had severed many of the connections they'd
Speaker 1: valued with these people. When I joined Facebook and my
Speaker 1: freshman year of college, I found real value and the
Speaker 1: ability to maintain and sometimes even build stronger connections with
Speaker 1: people I would otherwise have lost touch with Entirely. There
Speaker 1: is the core of something good or something at least
Speaker 1: valued inherently by people in Facebook, and that's true with most,
Speaker 1: if not all, of the Big five companies. When people
Speaker 1: reflexively leaped to defend the ten industry is an engine
Speaker 1: of innovation. They can point to these successes, But the
Speaker 1: point that I'm making isn't that no good ideas come
Speaker 1: out of Silicon Valley, or that there isn't anything valuable
Speaker 1: that is involved in what these companies do. It's that
Speaker 1: the endless quest for profit and the narcissism of this
Speaker 1: Californian ideology lead inevitably to the destruction of whatever value
Speaker 1: the industry creates. This is why none of these innovations
Speaker 1: have actually led to surges in productivity, why none of
Speaker 1: them have made us any happier, which I think might
Speaker 1: be more important. Any potential these creations had was smothered
Speaker 1: by the ideology that drives Silicon Valley money. Facebook took
Speaker 1: the connections that they'd made with people and used them
Speaker 1: to feed those same people rage bait. They destroyed the
Speaker 1: open Internet, shuttered countless local news sites, put tons of
Speaker 1: people out of business, while algorithmically pushing millions of folks
Speaker 1: around the world towards whatever kept them angriest and most
Speaker 1: online Google spent billions on an endless stream of spinoff
Speaker 1: products like Google Plus and Google Glass, which were nearly
Speaker 1: all catastrophic failures, at least on a financial sense, and
Speaker 1: all the while they gradually turned the search results they'd
Speaker 1: prided themselves on into a sponsored ad feed. Google is
Speaker 1: less useful now than it was a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: You'll notice this immediately if you just get on there
Speaker 1: and start asking it questions. Elon Musk has taken the
Speaker 1: visionary technology that underpins the Tesla, all created by other people,
Speaker 1: and used the clout from that to shatter any chance
Speaker 1: of California developing a high speed rail system. By the way,
Speaker 1: in June of twenty twenty two, Tesla stock value plunged
Speaker 1: seventy five billion dollars, which is substantially more money than
Speaker 1: the company has ever actually made. Elucidating the full scale
Speaker 1: of the failure of Silicon Valley an American techno optimism
Speaker 1: would take more time than I'm able to spend right now,
Speaker 1: So instead, I want to talk about the idea that's
Speaker 1: behind so much of the recent big failures that we've
Speaker 1: seen from big tech stuff like meta pissing away ten
Speaker 1: billion dollars half the budget of NASA in a year
Speaker 1: to create a worse version of vr chat. The idea
Speaker 1: is called blitz scaling, and it basically means attempting to
Speaker 1: achieve massive scale at breakneck speed. You take big risks
Speaker 1: and you spend huge amounts of money very quickly to
Speaker 1: try and force apps or other products onto the market
Speaker 1: that are then adopted rapidly by huge numbers of people.
Speaker 1: This brings in a shitload of VC money and is
Speaker 1: a way that you can make a fortune. In the
Speaker 1: years since Jobs brought the first iPhone out on stage,
Speaker 1: this has become the dominant model of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship.
Speaker 1: Everyone is looking for the next iPhone, right, something that
Speaker 1: can take over an industry, something that can take over
Speaker 1: the world that rapidly, that can change human life almost overnight.
Speaker 1: In funding Calls, Mark Zuckerberg says this. In Funding Calls,
Speaker 1: Mark Zuckerberg says this very directly, comparing his company's metaverse
Speaker 1: dreams to the new smartphone. The thing that Mark misses
Speaker 1: because his ideology renders it invisible, is that Steve Jobs
Speaker 1: didn't make people want the iPhone. He was able to
Speaker 1: figure out what they wanted already, what they had talked
Speaker 1: to about running for decades, starting with tricorders and communicators
Speaker 1: on Star Trek, and he lashed his dev team until
Speaker 1: they built the damn thing. Now, the metaverse has some
Speaker 1: analogs in fiction, including the thing that it gets its
Speaker 1: name from, but number one, most depictions of the metaverse
Speaker 1: in fiction are not aspirational things people want their dystopian
Speaker 1: There's no evidence that people actually want this thing that
Speaker 1: he's igniting a fortune to build, or that they'd spend
Speaker 1: meaningful periods of time in it if it existed. There's
Speaker 1: not a lot of polling on this data, but one
Speaker 1: in seven but one seventeen thousand person survey I found
Speaker 1: showed less than twenty percent of respondents expressing an interest
Speaker 1: in a metaverse like the Onezuck is trying to build.
Speaker 1: The last time Facebook provided any kind of information about
Speaker 1: how many people are on Horizon Worlds, which is kind
Speaker 1: of the core of their metaverse efforts, it was somewhere
Speaker 1: around three hundred thousand people in the most recent quarter.
Speaker 1: They declined to provide an update to those numbers, which
Speaker 1: suggests the number has not increased, and if you just
Speaker 1: want to look at what happens when people create a
Speaker 1: digital product that actually has a strong base of interest.
Speaker 1: Look at how quickly a world of warcraft went from,
Speaker 1: you know, a thing that very few people outside of
Speaker 1: nerds would have known much about, to a thing that
Speaker 1: was entirely mainstream, millions of users, regular references to it
Speaker 1: on television. You're just not seeing that with any of
Speaker 1: this metaverse shit, because there's nothing in it that people
Speaker 1: actually want. The sheer hollowness of big tech is starting
Speaker 1: to become financially obvious too. Facebook stock has lost fifty
Speaker 1: seven percent of its value in the last year. Amazon
Speaker 1: is down twenty six percent, Google by twenty nine percent,
Speaker 1: and even Apple has fallen by fourteen percent. More to
Speaker 1: the point, I think any honest person has to look
Speaker 1: at the last fifteen years or so in which these
Speaker 1: companies have ruled our economic and social lives and ask
Speaker 1: are we better off now? Over the course of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, productivity and income rose at unprecedented rates. There
Speaker 1: was a lot of brutality in this process, right. We talk,
Speaker 1: you know, on Behind the Basterds regularly about all of
Speaker 1: the horrible labor things that happened in the nineteenth century.
Speaker 1: It also marked the beginning of the fossil fuel age,
Speaker 1: which may well kill us all. But while all this
Speaker 1: was going on, another thing that happened is wages for
Speaker 1: the working class doubled in the first half of the
Speaker 1: nineteenth century, and the second half. Life expectancy rose faster
Speaker 1: than it ever had before as well, and that continued
Speaker 1: through the first part of the twentieth century. Now, near
Speaker 1: the end of the first quarter of the twenty first century,
Speaker 1: we're not seeing that kind of movement. The United States
Speaker 1: is now ending its second consecutive year of declining life
Speaker 1: expectancy for the first time in any of our lifetimes,
Speaker 1: and real average wage, adjusted for inflation, has remained flat
Speaker 1: for almost half a century. Progress has flatlined, and nothing
Speaker 1: about how brilliant the modern tech industry is or how
Speaker 1: cool some of these gadgets and products are can change
Speaker 1: those fundamental facts. It's a failure. It could happen here
Speaker 1: as a production of Zone Media. For more podcasts from
Speaker 1: Cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or
Speaker 1: check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 1: wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for
Speaker 1: it could happen here. Updated monthly at Coolzonmedia dot com
Speaker 1: Slash Sources, Thanks for listening.