CZM Rewind: The Rot-Com Bubble

Tech's hyper-growth era is ending, with online 100 million new people getting online between 2022 and 2023, and almost every major web platform seeing a decline in growth since 2021. In this episode, Ed Zitron walks you through how tech's decline is driving the tech industry to try and sell you useless products like the metaverse, cryptocurrency and generative AI. Original Air Date: 6.5.24 Save $10 off a year of my premium newsletter: https://edzitronswheresyouredatghostio.outpost.pub/public/promo-subscription/gzqwkv54e1 - I’d be so grateful! YOU CAN NOW BUY BETTER OFFLINE MERCH! Go to https://cottonbureau.com/people/better-offline and use code FREE99 for free shipping on orders of $99 or more. Buy our new “FUCK DATA CENTERS” shirts today! --- LINKS: https://www.tinyurl.com/betterofflinelinks Newsletter: https://www.wheresyoured.at/ Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/BetterOffline/ Discord: chat.wheresyoured.at https://discord.com/invite/QUUQUP9szv Ed's Socials: https://twitter.com/edzitron https://www.instagram.com/edzitron https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com https://www.threads.net/@edzitron Email Me: [email protected] mailto:[email protected] See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:37Ed Zitron?

  Call Zone Media. Hey folks, it's me, Ed. So I'm off this week, getting my wisdom teeth out, finally time. But I'm going to rerun this episode, the Rockcom Bubble. And I want to be clear, this is two years old. It's gonna, I am sure at some point I'm like, this is gonna end in three quarters, which I was, I was wrong about that one. Nevertheless, this is an important piece because I think everything about the AI bubble comes back to the Rockcom Bubble, which is the idea that the big companies, they run out of hypergrowth ideas. They don't have a new smartphone. They don't have a new cloud computing. And I think this episode is super educational. And yeah, I'm taking a week off, so enjoy this. Remember, it's from like September 2024. But nevertheless, it's very, very important that you listen to this

• 2:20Ed Zitron?

  as I think that this is going to be kind of formatted for the future. Anyway, enjoy.

• 2:33Ed Zitron?

  Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zitron.

• 2:47Ed Zitron?

  In the next two episodes, I want to present you with a theory about why the tech industry has felt so weird for the last few years and why there are so many products that have popped up that don't seem to really do anything or be things that people have actually asked for. And it comes down to a few simple questions. Chief of them, what if the next big thing in tech is actually years or decades away? What if the era of hypergrowth in tech is over? Now, as I've mentioned before, I believe the rot economy is to blame for a lot of this. It's a growth at all costs mindset that sits at the core of pretty much everything I've written or spoken about. It's this force that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better and make products to conquer markets and show growth to the public markets rather

• 3:31Ed Zitron?

  than fixing a problem that you or I might have or a business might have or provide a necessary service that was nevertheless popular and profitable. And the rot economy, it doesn't feel like any other economic period I've seen. It's not like, say, I don't know, the post 2008 financial crisis or that stagnation that lingered afterwards. And what's different was there isn't really a single obvious event that started the decline of the services we're using or the companies that make them. And there's not really like a Lehman Brothers crater we can point at and say, there you go. That's the thing. The closest I can come is kind of FTX, which was the big crypto crash, the big massive Ponzi scheme that no one really saw coming, other than many people who were looking behind the

• 4:13Ed Zitron?

  scenes. But other than that, that was kind of what crashed crypto. And maybe it was the end of the zero interest free era where interest rates went up and it was harder to get money. But there was no one thing you could point out. But I do want to try. And I have one epoch, I think, for when the rot economy kind of took over. And I'd want to point to the latter point of the 2010s. Think about it, like really think about it for a second. Sometime after 2019, the tech industry, it kind of lost its sizzle. There were new gadgets, there were new apps, new services, but tech started to feel iterative rather than innovative. Yet they were making more money than ever. And by 2021, even the pretense of any gradual improvement was really dropped.

• 4:58Ed Zitron?

  It felt like, I don't know, they were trying to sell us things that didn't really exist. We were told that NFTs would replace physical tangible collectibles and that cryptocurrency would replace regular money, while also emancipating customers from an unstoppable market force like inflation or big tech. Because of course cryptocurrency came with it, the idea, and I mean idea, of decentralized software. And this was all meant to get rid of rent-seeking middlemen that were taking parts of every purchase, despite the very same middlemen investing in cryptocurrency. Yet, the actual services that came out of these movements didn't really seem to do anything or improve our lives in any meaningful way.

• 5:40Ed Zitron?

  And we were told at one point that our futures were in the metaverse and we'd lived in this massive interconnected quote "new internet", yet when we actually got there, it was just this really wonky VR, virtual reality space that Mark Zuckerberg has somehow burned $36 billion on. It's all so weird. And today, we're told that we have this glorious AI-powered future that's just imminent. Yet what we've actually got is this unprofitable, unsustainable generative AI that has this horrible, unsustainable problem of hallucination, where it spits out incorrect information authoritatively, which worryingly Google CEO Sundar Pichai has said in an interview with The Verge,

• 6:22Ed Zitron?

  is an inherent feature of a technology that he's now plugged into Google Search, which means it's generating these horrible answers to queries based on the links of a search engine that Sundar Pichai has helped decay. It's all just very frustrating. And it's also quite useless, kind of illogical too.

• 6:41Ed Zitron?

  And at the forefront of this AI boom is Sam Altman and his $80 billion juggernaut OpenAI, a company that claims it's going to build artificial general intelligence, one that experiences human-like cognition, which is just not possible with generative AI. The tech he is selling today is not going to give us AGI. I just want to be abundantly clear about that. Anytime you read Sam Altman talking about AGI, he is talking about tech that OpenAI does not have and is not building. They may claim they're building it behind the scenes, but they're only working on generative AI. And the frustration you hear in my voice, you might have felt yourself, you might not have, but it's this prevailing sense of, "You keep telling me the future is here, but when I look at what the future is, it isn't even close."

• 7:27Ed Zitron?

  And the products you're selling me aren't actually useful. Let me give you another example. Windows laptops will soon integrate an AI-powered search feature called Recall that allows you to search everything you've ever done on your computer in the last three months. And it does so by recording everything, everything, from the meetings you've been into to the things you've written. I should be clear, I don't think anybody actually asked for a feature like this. And it's also inherently invasive. It directly encroaches on your privacy and your security, and it takes screenshots of your machine every few seconds and stores them, along with AI-generated inferences, in a locally-held database.

• 8:08Ed Zitron?

  This isn't good, and the fact that they're not sending it anywhere doesn't really make it better. It is, in essence, a pre-installed screen recorder, the kind of thing that hacker might install on a victim's computer. And if an attacker gains access to it, it's obvious how catastrophic the ramifications are. Or, let's be honest, domestic abusers, people at work. There are people who can get on your computer, force access by forcing you or just getting your password, and they can now see everything you've done. Despite this being an inherently AI-powered feature, it just, it can't distinguish between your regular computer usage and, say, sensitive information, passwords, health information,

• 8:49Ed Zitron?

  trade secrets, the very obvious stuff you would not want your computer recording. It treats, I don't know, like an email from your doctor with the same level of concern and copying as it would, like, YouTube or a chat conversation. It's just really bad. And already, White Hat Security Researchers, they've created proof-of-concept malware applications that can pull sensitive data obtained or generated by Microsoft Recall from your computer and with pretty minimal effort. And now, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, the nation's privacy watchdog, by the way, they can actually do quite steep fines, it's not great, they're now probing whether the tech actually presents an unacceptable risk to consumers, which, as anyone who thinks

• 9:31Ed Zitron?

  about it for more than 12 seconds, or even five, can confirm it does. It, it's just very frustrating. And who asked for this? Who actually asked for this? Now, every major tech company, they're integrating AI into their products and services, yet underneath the hood, the AI they're integrating doesn't actually seem to do anything new or generate a profit or solve anyone's actual needs. Even the companies themselves seem incapable of explaining why AI is such a big deal, to the point that Microsoft's Super Bowl commercial for its AI-powered copilot assistant featured multiple things that it cannot do, like generate the code for an open world game. When you, by the way, you type in the prompt, which on the commercial is 3D, generate the

• 10:16Ed Zitron?

  code for an open world 3D game, and you type that in, and it will give you a list of things you should do to build a, an open world game. It's so strange. And it's so strange how so many of these companies just can't really explain why this is the next best thing. They just need you to believe them. And maybe that might actually be the problem.

• 10:46Speaker 05

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• 11:14Speaker 03

  Empower is all about helping you invest well, so you can go out and live a little. And their Free Empower Personal Dashboard shows you your full financial life in one place. You'll be able to see your net worth, monitor budgets, analyze your portfolio, set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  What if you could make that stop? With LPL Financial, we remove the things holding you back and provide the services to help push you forward. If you're a financial advisor, what if you could have more freedom, but also more support? Ready to invest? What if you could have an advisor that really understood you? When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, at LPL Financial, we believe the only question should be, what if you could? Paid advertisement. Anna Kendrick is not a client of LPL Financial, LLC, and receives compensation to promote LPL. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. LPL Financial, LLC, member FINRA, SIPC.

• 12:21Speaker 03

  Every small business owner has that one story, the one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories. Stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  You'll hear from entrepreneurs who faced make or break moments and came out stronger. We dig into how they did it, what they learned, what they'd never do again, and what kept them pushing forward. These are the stories that remind us that being unshakable isn't about never falling. It's about how you rise, rebuild, and keep going. Whether you're starting up, scaling up, or trying to find your footing again, these stories remind us that resilience lives everywhere, in small businesses shaping communities all across America. Listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 13:33Ed Zitron?

  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. Hundred billion trillion dollar 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 like 2005 and 2024, we've tripled the amount of people on the internet. It's now over five 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,

• 14:17Ed Zitron?

  algorithms to present it to them, ways to sell people things that solve 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.

• 14:55Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 15:41Ed Zitron?

  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, and here's the thing that really worried me, porn sites like Xvideos, 27.4% loss, and Pornhub, 17.1% loss. When the porn's down, that's when you start worrying. Though you might be tempted to dismiss this all as a result of life returning to normal

• 16:26Ed Zitron?

  and that traditional office-based environments aren't particularly conducive to a crafty midday wank, you shouldn't. The trend actually began earlier, with SimilarWeb data showing the decline starting in 2019. My analysis focuses on 2021 to 2024 because that's the one I have the most detailed month-by-month and year-by-year breakdowns for. And by the way, I'm going to put in the episode notes links to things so that you can all see this. I want you to know, this data is very worrying, but don't trust me, trust the data from SimilarWeb. When you look at the trajectory of the web's most valuable properties on a year-over-year basis, things look quite bleak.

• 17:05Ed Zitron?

  With Google, which lost about 0.9%, YouTube lost about 4.4%, Facebook, 7.7% loss, Twitter, 6.2% loss, Twitch, 11.9% loss, and Amazon, 2.7% loss, all still seeing significant declines. Only a few sites, like Reddit, which saw a 31.3% growth, TikTok, 11.6% growth, and Instagram, 9.9% growth but trending down every year since 2019, and also LinkedIn, up 17.9%, they're the only ones that are really seeing good year-over-year growth. And while it's important to note that these are visits rather than active users, and in fairness, this data only covers visits made through a browser rather than an app, this

• 17:46Ed Zitron?

  is still a truly astounding trend that suggests for the most part that the web's largest platforms are seeing kind of a digital recession. While there might be revenue coming to these companies, and they might still be acquiring no users, there's really no good way to spin the fact that traffic to platforms like Amazon and Google has plateaued, then declined. Something's shifting downwards, and it's been doing so since 2019. Perhaps this explains why platforms like Google and Facebook have kept making changes to make each user journey create more engagement and make it more profitable to sustain growth, because fewer people than ever are actually visiting the platforms.

• 18:26Ed Zitron?

  I believe we're at the end of something I called the RotCom boom, the tech industry's hypergrowth cycle, where there were so many new lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new innovative, useful ideas, that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth just by throwing money at a problem. It also explains why so many tech products, YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on, feel like they're either trapped in amber or like they've got tangibly worse. Because when you think about it, when there's no incentive to improve the things you've already built, why would you? You should just be working on the next big thing, or new ways to juice the thing you have right now, to keep people coming back, eh, maybe, but to keep people on the platform,

• 19:11Ed Zitron?

  sometimes by monopolizing an industry so they have nowhere else to go.

• 19:16Ed Zitron?

  And that's the thing, all of these companies, Facebook, Google, Amazon, I mean all of them, they've all built themselves on this very simple idea that they'd always be a next big thing. And I'm not even saying that there won't be, but they've assumed, and the problem that they're facing right now is that there would always be one around the corner. This belief that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement is central to the core of the rot in the tech industry. And as these rapacious demands run into reality, I'm sorry to say that the rot con bubble is going to deflate. And as we speak, the tech industry, they're grappling with somewhat of a midlife crisis, and they're

• 19:57Ed Zitron?

  desperately searching for that next hypergrowth market, and they're eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt this technology that nobody actually asked for. They must keep the rot economy alive, because if they don't, they're gonna, they're gonna have to face the fact that they've built pretty unsustainable businesses. Even though they're profitable, even though they keep growing, the only thing that grows forever is cancer.

• 20:29Speaker 03

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• 21:13Speaker 03

  set retirement goals, and more. Whether you're saving for something big, want to treat yourself, friends, or family, or meet long-term goals, Empower helps you see where you stand. You've worked hard for your money, and Empower can help you make the most of it. Download the Empower Personal Dashboard or visit empower.com. Not an Empower client paid or sponsored.

• 21:33Speaker 06

  What if you could make that stop? With LPL Financial, we remove the things holding you back and provide the services to help push you forward. If you're a financial advisor, what if you could have more freedom, but also more support? Ready to invest? What if you could have an advisor that really understood you? When it comes to your finances, your business, your future, at LPL Financial, we believe the only question should be, what if you could?

• 21:56Speaker 03

  Paid advertisement. Anna Kendrick is not a client of LPL Financial LLC and receives compensation to promote LPL. Investing involves risk, including potential loss of principal. LPL Financial, LLC member FINRA, SIPC.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  Every small business owner has that one story, the one moment that could have broken them, but remarkably, it didn't. Hi, I'm Kathleen Griffith, co-host of The Unshakeables, along with Stevie Barron, CEO of Chase for Business. We have more incredible stories of overcoming the impossible still to come in season three. You'll hear from entrepreneurs who faced make or break moments and came out stronger. We dig into how they did it, what they learned, what they'd never do again, and what kept them pushing forward. These are the stories that remind us that being unshakable isn't about never falling, it's about how you rise, rebuild, and keep going. Whether you're starting up, scaling up, or trying to find your footing again, these

• 22:52Speaker 03

  stories remind us that resilience lives everywhere, in small businesses shaping communities all across America. Listen to The Unshakeables wherever you get your podcasts and learn more at chase.com/podcast. JPMorgan Chase Bank, N.A., member FDIC. Copyright 2026 JPMorgan Chase and Company.

• 23:19Ed Zitron?

  The rot economy and tech's growth lust, it isn't new, though. Venture capital has been incentivizing and monetizing rot for over a decade, and Marc Andreessen advocated in 2011 that we should look to expand the number of innovative new software companies created, rather than constantly questioning their valuations. Yet, just a year earlier in March 2010, his partner, Ben Horowitz, he advocated for fat start. And I'll link to that in the notes, saying that you can't save your way to winning the market. And that startup purgatory is when you don't go bankrupt, but you fail to build the number one product in the space and have zero chance of becoming a high-growth company. Which, by the way, Horowitz described this as worse than startup hell, because you are, and I quote, stuck with the small company,

• 24:04Ed Zitron?

  even if its cash flow positive. At the time, this might have made sense to them, because this mindset made them quite rich. Even though there's something inherently abnormal about describing being a stable, profitable company as being in a state that's worse than hell. Anyway. I want you to take a step back in time with me, though, and think about how much has changed in the last ten years, fifteen years? Think about it for a second.

• 24:35Ed Zitron?

  In 2010, it felt like we were just making our first steps into the digital world. It was still pretty new. 2010, there was no Instacart, there was no Zoom, no Snapchat, no Lyft, no Tinder, no Slack, no Snowflake, no DoorDash, no TikTok, no Discord, no Coinbase, no Robinhood, and there wasn't any Venmo or Zelle either. Tesla, Facebook, LinkedIn, Airbnb, Uber, Square, Alasian, Okta, MongoDB, Workday, Palo Alto Networks, Asana, UiPath, Spotify, they hadn't even gone public yet. Instagram was still independent, it wasn't part of Facebook yet, and consumer drones, they hadn't reached ubiquity. Voice assistants hadn't even been launched, full G LTE networks, they were brand new.

• 25:15Ed Zitron?

  And Amazon Web Services, one of the most profitable things in the world, as I'll get to, was on course to make $600 million in revenue in 2010. Which is, by the way, 2.5% of the $24 billion that AWS on its own made in the first quarter of 2024. Google and Apple's stock prices were worth less than a tenth of what they are today, and Nvidia, a stock now worth over $1,000, traded at under $3 a share. Between 2005 and 2018, we saw this incredible surge of innovation and tech valuations, and this kind of seemingly unstoppable period of growth and big sexy ideas that created big sexier new markets.

• 25:55Ed Zitron?

  While applications existed in 2008, Apple's App Store and the perpetual nature of connection that we get from smartphones, it consumerized the concept of distinct service-based apps, as well as the overall concept of software ecosystems, which has become a multi-trillion-dollar philosophical and economic force. And it's changed just about everything about how we communicate and even do business. It's remarkable, and also was there new market just sitting there waiting for the hardware and software to catch up with it, and for someone to come up with the idea, of course? Connecting people digitally through social media, voice, video, and so on, it's been central to the hypergrowth cycle, with innovations like connectivity and cloud infrastructure

• 26:39Ed Zitron?

  allowing multiple companies to carve out these 100 billion and trillion-dollar ecosystems. On some level, big tech companies could put money through research and development, investment, or acquisitions wherever they needed to as a means of making the future a reality. And thanks to the fact that interest rates were rock bottom and there was a lot of private money going into startups, they were never really short of cash to do so. At some point, hype began to outpace innovation, and while there were new ideas, the actual fundamental technology required to actually innovate may not actually exist, making a lot of these ideas theoretical and so far behind the cart that you may as well shoot the horse dead.

• 27:22Ed Zitron?

  When Mark Zuckerberg renamed Facebook to Meta, he told Casey Newton, who by the way should feel nothing but shame for accepting this in good faith, that he believed the metaverse was an embodied internet that was a persistent synchronous environment that resembles social media but also be an environment where you're embodied in it. That's a real quote, by the way. This is, of course, total nonsense, a total word salad that will make you throw up, conjured up by somebody without any real ideas that knows that they won't receive any pushback on them anyway. Not even from those whose job it is to scrutinize the tech industry and ask the difficult questions so that people don't buy stupid shit.

• 28:03Ed Zitron?

  Anyway, what Zuckerberg had actually built, by which for the most part I mean acquired, was a half-assed virtual world accessed through niche virtual reality technology that nobody asked for, that already kind of existed, that made people sick, and that Meta couldn't actually build. And what Mark Zuckerberg wanted to do was build the successor to the mobile internet in the hopes that "the Metaverse" would be another hypergrowth industry where people would buy land, which they didn't, or hang out en masse, which they didn't, or have meetings, which they did not, all while sharing data and watching ads served by Meta and other companies that Meta could sell ads to. In this cynical, horrible version of the future, the internet, neutral, standards-based

• 28:45Ed Zitron?

  and controlled by no single company, would be transformed into a platform, a feudal system where Meta would set the rules and exact a cut from each engagement, interaction, and transaction. It was quite plainly a power grab, the likes of which the internet hasn't seen since the bleak days of Internet Explorer 6 and ActiveX, and if you don't know what those are, Microsoft has some evil things in the past. The tech, however, was never there. Mark Zuckerberg sold everybody on the concept of a Ready Player One Metaverse, and putting aside for a second that Ready Player One is a poorly-written dystopia, this vision hinges heavily on the idea of technology that completely immerses the user and their senses and makes them feel like they're actually in a world.

• 29:28Ed Zitron?

  Which is just insane. It's not possible, it's not even close to possible. We're talking about full sensory takeover and the ability to traverse the digital world somehow without moving. This would be a revolution both in cloud computing, because just the raw data would be insane, but also...

• 29:48Ed Zitron?

  Immersive technology, just what was everyone doing accepting this idea? And let's be honest, the reality was just so much worse. You had these nausea inducing headsets that led you into this horrible, clunky cartoon world that wasn't fun or practical or useful. And tens of billions of dollars of R and D costs developing headsets that lose money on every sale. It's just insane. By the way, Mark Zuckerberg has spent tens of billions of dollars, and I realize sometimes people don't like it when I get yelly, and I apologize, but where has the $30 billion gone? 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.

• 30:30Ed Zitron?

  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.

• 31:16Ed Zitron?

  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 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

• 32:01Ed Zitron?

  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 realising 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.

• 32:40Ed Zitron?

  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 Rockcom bubble bursting is, it's going to be nasty for BitTech. 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.

• 33:22Ed Zitron?

  Every single one of these companies, with a few exceptions, I realise, 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? What happens when none of this stuff actually is the future? What happens when Google Search tells someone to actually do something that kills them? How to clean up a chemical fire incorrectly, for example? There are very real ways that these things are going to hurt people, but putting that aside, even if they don't, they're not going to make them the kind of money and get them the kind of customers that they need to perpetually show perpetual growth.

• 34:06Ed Zitron?

  As I said last episode, or two episodes ago, Facebook is dying and Facebook's dying because I actually believe Mark Zuckerberg is quite innovative about one thing, which is he can smell blood in the water. Except now he can smell his. I think Mark Zuckerberg realised that this was happening many years before everybody else, and that's why he pushed the metaverse in 2021. That's why he was talking about Web 3 in 2021. That was a very, very easy year to get money, and it was a year when people were aggressively buying things, so it was a great time to sell new ideas. Also, I think he read Ready Player One and he actually liked it, which is so strange. But either way, I do think Zuckerberg's an innovator because he's realised that the

• 34:49Ed Zitron?

  hypergrowth era is over, and he's really trying to create the next best thing. Now, notice I didn't say something good or something useful. That's just not in Zuckerberg's DNA, and it's not in Sundar Pichai or Sam Altman or Satya Nadella's either. Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, these companies are not innovative anymore because they're no longer engineered to be. When the living was free and easy, when there were tonnes of these markets to attack and grow and eat and shit out the other way and make money from, they just needed a management consultant mindset. It was growth at all costs. It was growth all the time because all they had to do was throw more money at the problem, and they'd always keep growing. And to their credit, they have been.

• 35:32Ed Zitron?

  But mark my words, they're not going to grow forever, and they don't have a next trick. They don't have the next 1 billion user product. They don't have the next innovation, and I don't think they're going to have it for a long time. And this is why all of this stuff feels kind of weird. It's why all of this stuff doesn't seem to be solving a need that you or I have, or that even a business has. And it's why so often it feels like they're pleading with us to believe that this is the future. Companies that build useful things that people need don't need to talk about what they're build in the future. You can see it in the things they're selling you today.

• 36:13Ed Zitron?

  You could see in the early days of cloud computing how ubiquitous storage like Dropbox or Box might have existed. I was using FTP. Thank, thank God for Dropbox, honestly. But seriously, you could see why these things were the future. And in the next episode, I'm going to walk you through how the tech industry's promises no longer actually seem to match their ability to build things, and how this desperation I've been discussing shows that we're close to the Rockcom bubble bursting. Thanks for listening.

• 36:51Ed Zitron?

  Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matt Osowski. You can check out more of his music and audio projects at mattosowski.com. M A T T O S O W S K I dot com. You can email me at [email protected] or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat dot where's your ed dot at to visit the discord and go to r slash better offline to check out our reddit. Thank you so much for listening.

• 37:24Speaker 03

  Better Offline is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 37:55Speaker 03

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• 38:27Ed Zitron?

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• 39:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.