So as you may have just seen, some insiders at big companies (Zuckerberg, etc.) sold off stock. That tells me the sign that things are slowing down in tech. Well, one of many signs:
- Everyone’s all in on AI, which means that there is going to be some shakeout when it doesn’t all work out.
- Plenty of sites that are a little unstable, like ol’ Kotaku’s pivot (ha!) to guides.
- Whatever embarassments crypto still holds for us.
- Venture Capital looking for quick profits (See Ed Zitron’s latest).
This tells me that at some point we’ve got a shakeout in tech. As in something bad – and something earlier than I expected. This isn’t a surprise – for the last six months I’ve seen people make predictions that boil down to some combination of:
- A big name takes a hit.
- A lot of not-as-big-names fail because of a mix of bad ideas, low ad rates, and so on.
- AI doesn’t pan out like people hope.
- General enshittification.
- VC money moves away fast.
I’ve been trying to puzzle out what’s going to happen myself. But there’s something else I want to address – how people react. See, I think there’s going to be little sympathy, and plenty of schadenfreude when the inevitable “big fall” happens.
People regard tech different than they did ten years ago or twenty years ago. Sure there’s some interesting stuff, but it’s often pricey, questionable, or not much more beyond interesting. Beloved sites are enshittified. Nothing seems new, often because it’s not.
Gone are the days of breathless waiting that felt like there was something worth waiting for. Ads are everywhere, websites are overclogged, products might be fourth-rate knockoffs with AI generated images. New gizmos ape SF concepts while planned obsolescence takes the fun out of the new. Annoying bad features are a joke among social media users.
A friend of mine of well over two decades has noted they feel things were better back when we first met.
So when the “big fall” happens, in whatever forms (I expect a kind of cascade collapse), I think people won’t care and many will enjoy watching things burn. When they do care it’ll be more how they’re personally impacted for obvious reasons – but there’s so much less “loving tech together” these days.
That’s also going to make everything from economic recovery to new products to potential government regulations harder to predict. Watching people fall out of love with tech (and tech has done plenty to shoot itself in the foot) isn’t quite like anything I’ve seen in my life except one thing.
Watching how the reputation of smoking collapsed in my lifetime. No, it’s not exact – tech has benefits smoking’s benefits were mostly social, but still the “feel” is there.
Perhaps that’s something for me to explore later. Just writing the above was exhausting, because so much has changed over the nearly three decades I’ve been in tech. Looking back over half my lifetime feels like several.
Steven Savage