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Chapter 1: What is the Rot-Com bubble and why is it significant?
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Hey folks, it's me, Ed. So I'm off this week, get my wisdom teeth out, finally time, but I'm going to rerun this episode, the Rotcom bubble. And I want to be clear, this is two years old. It's going to, I am sure at some point I'm like, this is going to end in three quarters, which I was, I was wrong about that one.
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Chapter 2: How has the tech industry's growth trajectory changed recently?
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For decades, the tech industry and its various venture capital funders, they've been remarkably good at coming up with both innovative new products and ways to turn them into huge new markets for hypergrowth, $100 billion, trillion markets that they could then sell into investing companies within actual industries.
You had search engines, digital maps, smartphones and apps, social media, cloud computing, software as a service, electric cars, streaming audio and video, and also another thing, In the period between 2005 and 2024, we've tripled the amount of people on the internet. It's now over 5 billion people who use it. And that's also another problem I'll get to in a little bit.
There were obvious, meaningful markets to move into, ways to connect people, ways to get people content they wanted, algorithms to present it to them, ways to sell people things that solved problems that they had, or either for the first time or solving them faster, like the transition from physical to digital media, and problems that were both important to solve and actually solvable.
Tech has perpetually succeeded at building things, new things, that neatly create these new markets, and they've been incentivized by both the public and private markets, in growing these companies as fast and as big as possible to dominate these new markets, with the assumption that there would always be more of them, more massive multi-billion and multi-trillion dollar markets to conquer.
And I must be clear, you should never assume anything. Between 2022 and 2023, only 100 million additional people got online, which is the slowest rate of growth in the last 18 years. And that's not because the need to bring connectivity to the masses is actually solved, especially in the global south. It hasn't been.
And as of the most recent figures from the UN's International Telecoms Union shows, 33% of the world's population, or about 2.6 billion people, have never actually used the internet. but I have more worrying stuff. I've received some data from SimilarWeb that shows that the majority of the internet's top 100 web properties have seen significant declines in traffic since 2021.
In the years since the world slowly emerged from lockdown, Google.com has seen a decline of 5.3% in web visits, as has YouTube, which lost 3.8% of its traffic, Facebook, which lost a remarkable 27.7%. Twitter, which lost 3.5%. Amazon, which lost 11.6%. Twitch.tv, 17.5% loss there. They're owned by Amazon. Sadly, Wikipedia, which lost 24.8% of its traffic.
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Chapter 3: What are the problems associated with generative AI technology?
What has Mark Zuckerberg done with it? Where is it going? I don't know. I'm not accusing anyone of anything, but the whole thing just feels like a con. And Zuckerberg's glossy metaverse video, the first one he published when they rebranded Facebook to meta, it was significant in quite a few ways. First of all, the most disgusting bullshit I've ever seen a tech company put out, just complete lies.
But it was also a demonstration of the company's future ambitions and directions. And it showed exactly what they hoped they could build. And had Zuckerberg actually done so, I would have said it would have been a success. But said success would have been predicated on a pace of innovation that we haven't had in over a decade or longer.
I don't actually know how we get to anything close to what Mark Zuckerberg was selling. But $40 billion later, the metaverse is just... Nowhere near close to existing. And yet he keeps burning cash in the hopes that he can get just one more hit of hypergrowth, man. That's all Mark Zuckerberg needs. Just one more hit, brother. Just give me a little more growth. I'll be okay.
I swear I won't need any in the future. Putting that aside... I really think this is why Zuckerberg is so full force on generative AI. He's shoved it into every meta platform now, regardless of whether it does anything useful or whether it's doing anything weird like commenting on a parenting group that it has a gifted child and telling parents where to take their kids.
It's just so weird and it's the same reason that Sundar Pichai and Liz Reid are forcing generative AI into Google search, even as it misinforms customers. And it's recommending people put glue on their pizza and eat rocks. And it's claiming that Barack Obama is a Muslim. And it's regurgitating stories from The Onion as indisputable fact. And it's just... It's very frustrating.
You can hear it in my voice. But it all comes down to a simple problem, which is the tech industry is getting withdrawal symptoms. They're realizing there might not be any massive new markets. There might not be another way to create another billion-dollar arm of a trillion-dollar enterprise.
And on some level, I believe that the industry-wide alignment around this unprofitable, unsustainable AI tool is just proof that they're getting desperate. and that some of them might be irredeemably washed. Why else would Sam Altman spend most of the time talking about what AI might do?
Why else would Sam Altman talk so often about building artificial general intelligence, a thing that, as I have mentioned, is totally and utterly impossible to build with any of the generative AI tech his company makes, and likely requires kinds of computing that do not exist yet? It's really frustrating, and the Rotcom bubble bursting is going to be nasty for big tech.
It's going to wash out at least one of these companies, and it might take years to happen. But the growth trend is reversing. Every single one of these companies, with a few exceptions, I realize, is seeing traffic declines, and they're not improving. Perhaps they will find new ways, but where are they going to find them? What are the things they're going to do?
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