Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, Robert Evans here and welcome to It could
Speaker 1: happen here. You know, when we started the show, when
Speaker 1: I did the first season of it, you know, the
Speaker 1: one about all the Civil War stuff back in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 1: this was basically a place for me to write long
Speaker 1: essays explaining my vision of the future and the present. Uh,
Speaker 1: And people seem to like that a lot. We did
Speaker 1: a little bit of that at the start of this
Speaker 1: new Eternal daily season of the show. Um, but obviously
Speaker 1: over the last year or so, it's it's morphed into
Speaker 1: something very different and something wonderful and successful, and it's
Speaker 1: brought a lot of new voices, or at least voices
Speaker 1: people maybe hadn't heard from as much out in front
Speaker 1: of the audience, and I've been really happy about that.
Speaker 1: But what I also haven't been doing is writing any
Speaker 1: more essays about the world and how fucked up shit is,
Speaker 1: because you know, I've been managing a bunch of stuff
Speaker 1: and there's been a lot of work to do. But
Speaker 1: I like doing that stuff, and I think you people
Speaker 1: like it, So I'm gonna try to do more of that.
Speaker 1: And I wanted to kind of start by talking a
Speaker 1: little bit about Silicon Valley, and I'm going to say
Speaker 1: something at the start of this essay that a lot
Speaker 1: of 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 they're 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 I have
Speaker 1: trillion dollar market cap in every person listening to this
Speaker 1: keeps a device in their pocket made by or using
Speaker 1: the software of one or more of these companies, And
Speaker 1: so when people want to make the counter argument to
Speaker 1: what I just said, they'll tend to point out some
Speaker 1: version of this. Uh 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 two
Speaker 1: thousand and thirteen, income growth was eight percent slower than
Speaker 1: it had been in the previous three decades. If productivity
Speaker 1: had continued to grow with the same rate from nineteen
Speaker 1: seventy three to two thousand thirteen as it did from
Speaker 1: nineteen forty six to nineteen seventy three, the economy in
Speaker 1: two thousand thirteen would have been sixty percent larger than
Speaker 1: it actually was. Now, I'm gonna guess a decent number
Speaker 1: of the people listening to this grew up watching the Jetsons.
Speaker 1: I know I didn't. For the most part, it was
Speaker 1: a silly, pretty harmless animated show, but at the center
Speaker 1: of it was a dream about the future that seems
Speaker 1: unfathomable in light of current events. George Jetson, who was
Speaker 1: in the show a pretty normal working class guy, worked
Speaker 1: three hours a day for three days a week. One
Speaker 1: of the running jokes in the show is that he
Speaker 1: considered himself overworked despite this pretty idyllic schedule. Now, this
Speaker 1: was never particularly a focus of the show. It was
Speaker 1: just kind of something that was mentioned from time to time.
Speaker 1: And that's because the idea that a work week might
Speaker 1: just be nine hours in the future wasn't a joke.
Speaker 1: This was the direction of futurists in the nineteen sixties,
Speaker 1: looking at that surgeon productivity I just mentioned, and all
Speaker 1: of the middle class wealth that had been created from
Speaker 1: the forties through the early exties. This is the direction
Speaker 1: they saw us heading in around a decade ago, in
Speaker 1: a period that was still significantly more optimistic than our
Speaker 1: current age. The Atlantics Alexis Madrigal, when on a reading
Speaker 1: spree of some early twentieth century futurist novels. His conclusion
Speaker 1: was this quote. Technological optimists sold the world on automation
Speaker 1: by telling people it would create unimaginable amounts of leisure
Speaker 1: for them. The big question for the workers of the
Speaker 1: twenty first century would be how to spend their copious
Speaker 1: amounts of free time. Now, the future we've actually gotten
Speaker 1: has given us the opposite of this dream to try
Speaker 1: and cover up the rank and rampant ways modern technology
Speaker 1: has failed humanity. Think tanks funded by venture capitalists and
Speaker 1: tech gurus produce an endless stream of identical futurist thinker
Speaker 1: types who write columns about how the world is actually
Speaker 1: better today than it's ever been. A good example of
Speaker 1: this would be this June column by Rob Askar titled
Speaker 1: the World's getting better, Here's why your brain can't believe it.
Speaker 1: It opens with this paragraph, Life has improved for most
Speaker 1: people around the world over the past generation, temporary pandemics aside.
Speaker 1: The rub is that you can't get anyone to believe
Speaker 1: the good news, and the result is a toxic political
Speaker 1: environment and the potential collapse of democratic norms if too
Speaker 1: few people feel that a stressed system is worth saving.
Speaker 1: Now I might point out, for example, that if people
Speaker 1: don't actually feel like the system is good, perhaps it's
Speaker 1: not really working well. There's a number of counter arguments
Speaker 1: you can make to this. Now, two years later, this
Speaker 1: again was written in June, we've got a massive war
Speaker 1: in Europe. People are worried about nuclear warfare as a
Speaker 1: result of that. Again, we've got a degradation of democracy
Speaker 1: worldwide that's continued to pace from where it was in
Speaker 1: We've got soaring inequality, we've got inflation the likes of
Speaker 1: which a lot of people alive have never seen, myself
Speaker 1: included prior to this point. And we still have a pandemic.
Speaker 1: So it's clear that Rob is at least not as
Speaker 1: smart as he thinks he is, which is what I
Speaker 1: would say about everyone who makes versions of the same
Speaker 1: claim that he was making. Now, this doesn't mean I'm
Speaker 1: saying that life is worse now than it was at
Speaker 1: some imagined pre lapse arian version of the past. I
Speaker 1: actually think that's kind of a useless way to think
Speaker 1: about the past. In the future, there's different things people
Speaker 1: would have preferred. There's things that are objectively better, there's
Speaker 1: things that are objectively indebatably worse. You know, that's hard
Speaker 1: to make those kind of claims about history, especially when
Speaker 1: they often rely on saying, well, X amount of more
Speaker 1: people have been pulled out of poverty, and the question
Speaker 1: to that as well, I don't know, before colonization of Africa,
Speaker 1: would you say all of those people in what became
Speaker 1: the colonized parts of Africa were in poverty or were
Speaker 1: they simply not part of a system that measures poverty
Speaker 1: and anyway, whatever. We can go on and on about that.
Speaker 1: My point is that the metrics these people used to
Speaker 1: claim the success of our current system to talk about
Speaker 1: how wonderful things are today are constantly shifting, and they're
Speaker 1: widely arbitrary. The same year Rob wrote his stupid column,
Speaker 1: an in O r C studies showed that Americans self
Speaker 1: reported being happy at the lowest levels in fifty years.
Speaker 1: You can quote jupe statistics about wealth or acts as
Speaker 1: to luxury goods all you want, but the modern world
Speaker 1: and the post two thousand eight financial crash economy, all
Speaker 1: of which was built in the shade of the tech industry,
Speaker 1: is making people miserable now. Happiness is obviously not a
Speaker 1: perfect measure of progress either. Self reporting is always dicey,
Speaker 1: but things like the consumer price index in per capita income,
Speaker 1: which are often used by folks on the optimist side,
Speaker 1: are also juked and jiggered to hell and back. So
Speaker 1: to provide a bit more of an international scale, I'm
Speaker 1: going to quote from the Berkeley University's Greater Good magazine quote.
Speaker 1: Released annually on the International Day of Happiness, the World
Speaker 1: Happiness Report ranks countries based on their life satisfaction and
Speaker 1: the Gallop World Poll. Residents rate how satisfied they are
Speaker 1: with their lives in the scale of zero to ten,
Speaker 1: from the worst possible life to the best possible life.
Speaker 1: This year's report also analyzes how global happiness has changed
Speaker 1: over time, based on data stretching back to two thousand five.
Speaker 1: One trend is very clear. Negative feelings, worries, sadness, and
Speaker 1: anger have been rising around the world, up by from
Speaker 1: two thousand ten to two thousand eighteen. The others also
Speaker 1: found troubling trends, and happiness in equality, which is the
Speaker 1: psychological parallel to income inequality, how much individuals in society
Speaker 1: differ and how satisfied they are with life. Since two
Speaker 1: thousand 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 incredibly powerful tool.
Speaker 1: I wouldn't want to give the Internet up either. But
Speaker 1: the usefulness and the 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 Civerson, 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 points 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 and subways below is a
Speaker 1: product of late nineteenth century In 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 bites 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 spute the
Speaker 1: fact that it's easier than ever to record music, market
Speaker 1: a video game, or published an essay. But by most measures,
Speaker 1: individual innovation is in decline. In two thousand fifteen, Americans
Speaker 1: were far less likely to start a company than they
Speaker 1: were in the nineteen eighties. According to the economist Tyler Cohen,
Speaker 1: the spread of broadband technology has corresponded with a drop
Speaker 1: off an 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 left ahead into some sort of techno dum
Speaker 1: er anti primitives rant here. I'm not. Perhaps I should,
Speaker 1: but I'm not. I am a person who loves technology.
Speaker 1: I 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 eight to two thousand eleven, where there were
Speaker 1: just these amazing, new, weird sci fi gadgets dropping every
Speaker 1: single week, stuff that you'd grown up watching, and 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 time frame, and there's
Speaker 1: some really great products that came out from that period.
Speaker 1: Bluetooth speakers are wonderful. A lot of people, including me,
Speaker 1: use them happily on a daily basis, But when it
Speaker 1: comes to legitimately life changing applications of technology that's come
Speaker 1: to us in the last fifteen years or so. I
Speaker 1: can really only think of three things. Number one is
Speaker 1: the ability to navigate by GPS basically everywhere. Number two
Speaker 1: is the ability to be in constant contact with people
Speaker 1: around the world. And number three is the ability to
Speaker 1: store a shipload of media on a portable device. So
Speaker 1: I'm not anti technology. Nor am I saying that big
Speaker 1: tech doesn't make things that are cool or useful. Nor
Speaker 1: am I saying we should get rid of this stuff.
Speaker 1: The point I'm making is that viewed at thirty thou feet,
Speaker 1: the tech industry has produced very little of quantifiable value
Speaker 1: to the human race, and it has caused unfathomable harm
Speaker 1: at the same time. Now, in my opinion, this has nothing,
Speaker 1: or at least fairly little to do with how the
Speaker 1: technology inherently works, and instead has everything to do with
Speaker 1: the ideology behind the people who developed and who continue
Speaker 1: to marshal that technology. In nineteen ninety five, two of
Speaker 1: the smartest guys in the twentieth century by my estimation,
Speaker 1: Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron, wrote an essay about the
Speaker 1: ideology that animated the men who had come to dominate
Speaker 1: the twenty first century tech industry. They titled their essay
Speaker 1: the Californian Ideology, and I think it still counts as
Speaker 1: one of the three or four most incisive accurate essays
Speaker 1: of that century. The gist of the idea was that
Speaker 1: as the first wave of the digital boom started to
Speaker 1: hit in the mid nineteen nineties, the thinkers behind it
Speaker 1: were fueled by a mix of left wing by a
Speaker 1: mix of left wing egalitarian, often anti status beliefs that
Speaker 1: got wedded to right wing free market fundamentalist libertarian ideology
Speaker 1: and created this deeply toxic way of thinking about the future.
Speaker 1: You can see this in the story of guys like
Speaker 1: Steve Wozniak, the inventor of the personal computer, who was
Speaker 1: also a former phone freaker. He committed federal crimes as
Speaker 1: a kid, hacking the phone system primarily because fuck the man.
Speaker 1: But then when he's a young man, the waws hooks
Speaker 1: up with a guy named Steve Jobs, and Jobs is
Speaker 1: a brilliant but heartless con man who cares about nothing
Speaker 1: but market dominance. Jobs recognizes the naive brilliance of Steve Wozniak,
Speaker 1: and he turns it into an engine for wealth creation.
Speaker 1: At one point, he steals money that Wosniak was owed
Speaker 1: for a project that they took on together, money Wosniac
Speaker 1: probably would have just given him if he'd asked, and
Speaker 1: he used it secretly to fund their business, which became Apple.
Speaker 1: In their essay, Cameron and Barbara, who are much better
Speaker 1: writers than I, described the Californian ideology this way. The
Speaker 1: Californian ideology is a mix of cybernetics, free market economics,
Speaker 1: and counterculture libertarianism, and is promuligated by magazines such as
Speaker 1: Wired and Mondo two thousand and preached in the books
Speaker 1: of Stuart Brand, Kevin Kelly, and others. The New Faith
Speaker 1: has been embraced by computer nerds, slacker students, thirty something
Speaker 1: cap the lists, hip academics, futurist bureaucrats, and even by
Speaker 1: the President of the USA himself. Now, the tech industry
Speaker 1: as we know it got its start courtesy of government money.
Speaker 1: Everyone knows that the first version of the Internet was
Speaker 1: developed as part of a Defense Department project, but the
Speaker 1: entire computer industry, all of the coders and engineers who
Speaker 1: would form the first generation of selincom Valley profit engines.
Speaker 1: All these guys got their start working for or as
Speaker 1: defense contractors. When the US pulled out of Vietnam, thousands
Speaker 1: of these people were left out of jobs and they
Speaker 1: were forced to move into the private sector. Everything worthwhile
Speaker 1: that's come out of big tech has involved a titanic
Speaker 1: amount of public funding, one way or the other. And
Speaker 1: I'm gonna quote from that essay again. Almost every major
Speaker 1: technological advance of the last two hundred years has taken
Speaker 1: place with the aid of large amounts of public money
Speaker 1: and under a good deal of government influence. The technologies
Speaker 1: of the computer in the net were invented with the
Speaker 1: aid of massive state subsidies. For example, the first difference
Speaker 1: Engine project received a British government grant of five hundred
Speaker 1: and seventeen thousand, four hundred and seven d 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 built the
Speaker 1: first programmable digital computer only after it was requested to
Speaker 1: do so by the U. S Defense Department during the
Speaker 1: Korean War. The result of a lack of state intervention
Speaker 1: meant that Nazi Germany lost the opportunity to build the
Speaker 1: first electronic computer in the late thirties when the Wehrmacht
Speaker 1: refused to fund Conrad Zooz, who had pioneered the use
Speaker 1: of binary code, stored programs, and electronic logic gates. One
Speaker 1: of the weirdest things about the Californian ideology is that
Speaker 1: the West Coast itself was a product of massive state intervention.
Speaker 1: Government dollars were used to build the irrigation systems, highway 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 in to buying planes, missiles, electronics,
Speaker 1: and nuclear bombs from Californian companies. Americans have always had
Speaker 1: state planning, but they prefer to call it the defense budget.
Speaker 1: Now 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 two thousand fifteen.
Speaker 1: All of these libertarian visionaries who push in their political
Speaker 1: lives for a world of lossyfair economics and corporate sovereignty,
Speaker 1: only produce value with the help of taxpayer 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 right,
Speaker 1: on the strength of his leaf that when they got
Speaker 1: it right, it would be worth it. In the year since,
Speaker 1: we've seen many wanna be Steves try to follow in
Speaker 1: his footsteps, igniting tens of billions of dollars of venture
Speaker 1: capital for absolutely nothing. One of the best examples would
Speaker 1: be Uber. They lost eight point five billion dollars in
Speaker 1: two thousand nineteen, six point eight billion dollars. Once upon
Speaker 1: a time, the understanding, the jobs and vision of what
Speaker 1: Uber could be was that all of this ignited VC
Speaker 1: cash would be worthwhile because eventually the company would succeed
Speaker 1: in replacing human drivers with autonomous cars, cutting out the
Speaker 1: primary cost in the entire professional driving industry, and making
Speaker 1: the potential for a shipload of profit, but after investing
Speaker 1: more than a billion dollars in self driving cars, Uber
Speaker 1: 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 travel per accident. Despite this,
Speaker 1: after a two point six billion dollar loss in August
Speaker 1: of two Uber stocks sword Now the realities of what
Speaker 1: generates profit and loss in the tech industry have been
Speaker 1: completely divorced from productive reality or value created for quite
Speaker 1: some time. The delamination of real value in big tech
Speaker 1: happens subtly. It's not hard to see why Apple, who
Speaker 1: created a device every human being wanted to have in
Speaker 1: their pocket, became worth a shipload more money, right pretty obvious.
Speaker 1: The value case for Google's core business, search is also
Speaker 1: pretty obvious. And as much as I hate Facebook, it
Speaker 1: became initially successful because it provided people with something of
Speaker 1: real value, a way to stay in touch with human
Speaker 1: 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 connection 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 leap to defend the tech industry as 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 and 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, shut 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 online.
Speaker 1: Google spent billions on an endless stream of spinoff products
Speaker 1: like Google Plus and Google Glass, which were nearly all
Speaker 1: catastrophic failures, at least on a financial sense, and all
Speaker 1: the while they gradually turned the search results they prided
Speaker 1: themselves on into a sponsored ad feed. Google is less
Speaker 1: useful now than it was a couple of years ago.
Speaker 1: You noticed 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 two, Tesla stock value plunged seventy five
Speaker 1: billion dollars, which is substantially more money than the company
Speaker 1: has ever actually made. Elucidating the full scale of the
Speaker 1: failure of Silicon Valley and America and techno optimism would
Speaker 1: 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 enforce apps or other products onto the market that
Speaker 1: are then adopted rapidly by huge numbers of people. This
Speaker 1: brings in a shipload of VC money and as a
Speaker 1: way that you can make a fortune. In the years
Speaker 1: since Jobs brought the first iPhone out on stage, this
Speaker 1: has become the dominant model of Silicon Valley entrepreneurship. Everyone
Speaker 1: is looking for the next iPhone, right, something that can
Speaker 1: take over an industry, something you can take over the
Speaker 1: 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: about wanting for decades, starting with trike orders 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 um, but number one, most depictions of the
Speaker 1: metaverse in fiction are not aspirational things people want their
Speaker 1: dystopian uh. There's no evidence that people actually want this
Speaker 1: thing that he's igniting a fortune to build, or that
Speaker 1: they'd spend meaningful periods of time in it if it existed.
Speaker 1: There's not a lot of polling on this data, but
Speaker 1: one in seven but one se person survey I found
Speaker 1: showed less than respondents respect expressing an interest in meta
Speaker 1: in a metaverse like the one Zuck 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 thousand people in the most recent quarter. They
Speaker 1: declined to provide an update to those numbers, which suggests
Speaker 1: the number has not increased um 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 World of Warcraft went from, you know,
Speaker 1: a thing that very few people outside of nerds would
Speaker 1: have known much about, to a thing that was entirely mainstream,
Speaker 1: millions of users, regular references to it on television. You're
Speaker 1: just not seeing that with any of this metaverse ship
Speaker 1: because there's nothing in it that people actually want. The
Speaker 1: sheer hollowness of big tech is starting to become financially
Speaker 1: obvious to Facebook, Stock has lost fifty seven percent of
Speaker 1: its value in the last year. Amazon is down Google
Speaker 1: by and even Apple has fallen by fourteen percent. More
Speaker 1: to the point, I think any honest person has to
Speaker 1: look at the last fifteen years or so in which
Speaker 1: these companies have ruled our economic and social lives and asked,
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 talked,
Speaker 1: you know, on Behind the Bastards 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 one 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 cool Zone Media. For more podcasts
Speaker 1: from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media
Speaker 1: dot com or check us out on the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Speaker 1: You can find sources for It could Happen Here, updated
Speaker 1: monthly at cool zone Media dot com slash sources. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening.