First as tragedy, then as farce

A sucker is born every minute.

“If you go back to the middle of the last decade, the big tech platforms were massive, and were entrenching their monopoly power in various segments of the tech economy and the national and global economy generally. The exponential growth of earlier years was giving way to merely arithmetic growth if not stagnation. In a key sign of change, the tech world, which had ignored Washington, D.C. as hidebound, sclerotic and irrelevant to their world, started pouring real sums into the lobbying and influence games like the rest of corporate America. There was a huge, huge hunger for the next thing which would bring back the financial explosion of a decade or more earlier. AI was by no means the first entrance.

 

“Crypto was a big one and to an extent remains one. But the big one to remember was the “metaverse.” There was a massive craze for the Metaverse which took over Silicon Valley. NFTs, absurd digital things, which people could bid up to insane valuations because other idiots certainly would jump in and buy too, became a thing. Seemingly out of the blue, Facebook announced that it was now a metaverse company and renamed itself Meta in October 2021. In June 2022, McKinsey issued a report that predicted that by 2030 the Metaverse could grow to $5 trillion in value. It’s hard not to notice how close that is to the $6 trillion Bain & Co says AI now has to grow by 2031 in order to keep up with the massive level of capital investment Silicon Valley is pouring into it.”

The Red Queen problem: you have to run faster and faster just to stay in place.

The greater fool theory of investing. The problem is that, when done at scale, they bring the rest of us down with them.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/remember-the-metaverse-techs-hunger-for-the-next-big-thing-long-predated-ai?fbclid=IwY2xjawUszlFleHRuA2FlbQIxMQBwZG9mAXNydGMGYXBwX2lkEDIyMjAzOTE3ODgyMDA4OTIAAR7GaZ22R6FyAIeCaslOHjZZlcGCjIQYfU4xvLwKMCx7k5bo_I80Q7QEkIu57w_aem_xO754Txvuw7JvG2c5pjpcA

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