It’s been an incredibly long few weeks, and as a result my previously-planned Hater’s Guide just isn’t possible within what little time I have left in this week, which is why I’m starting an ongoing series — Notes From The Bubble — where I’m going to dig into the various stories that have stood out to me in the last few weeks and what they mean for the greater tech ecosystem. It’ll be my weapon of choice going forward for the (few) weeks where a greater narrative is taking longer to pull together than usual.
I also think it’s time for something a little more light-hearted after a few hundred thousand words of deeply-researched financial nightmare fuel. As serious as the tech industry’s descent into cargo cultism has become, it’s really important to laugh at how disordered and goofy everybody has become as they realize that we’re flat out of hypergrowth ideas. Every time you see something stupid, desperate, ridiculous or disconnected from reality, know it’s a symptom of the greater fear that AI isn’t the next big thing, and that everything is an attempt to put off accepting that truth or, alternatively, create another hype cycle so we can avoid talking about it.
I know this all sounds a little reductive, but look at the current state of the tech industry. Meta is creating a Polymarket competitor. Snap is launching its third generation of AR glasses that nobody wants, I assume to compete with Meta’s AI glasses that are exclusively owned by influencers and people that should be banned from public restrooms. Microsoft has gone from loving OpenAI to loving Anthropic to loving open source LLMs and decrying the idea that any one company could control the entire AI ecosystem, somehow missing that Microsoft is the largest AI infrastructure provider in the world and is the reason that this industry exists. Google invested $75 million in movie studio A24 as part of some sort of nebulous AI partnership that will likely result in very little actually happening.
Oh, and you can now watch Instagram on your TV.
This is the modern tech industry: a series of cobbled-together ideas pushed out by also-rans with massive monopolies and talent suffocated by executives that haven’t had a human experience in decades. Can you imagine Satya Nadella or Mark Zuckerberg buying something from a hardware store? Do you think they know how to use a vending machine? When did any of these people last pay a bill, or worry about anything other than shareholder value and stock-based compensation? How often do you think Sundar Pichai actually uses Google, Google Docs, or any other products blighted with a Gemini pop-up?
Today’s newsletter will be a longer-form column, a series of thoughts on the current state of the tech industry.
Welcome…to Notes From The Bubble.