TechTakes

oooh. AWS t4g.small instances (ARM, 2GB RAM) are free until 31 Dec 2025. See caveats.

I got bounced back to Casey Newton's recent master class in critihype and found something new that stuck in my craw.

Occasionally, they get an entire sector wrong — see the excess of enthusiasm for cleantech in the 2000s, or the crypto blow-up of the past few years.

In aggregate, though, and on average, they’re usually right.

First off, please note that this describes two of the most recent tech bubbles and doesn't provide any recent counterexamples of a seemingly-ridicilous new gimmick that actually stuck around past the initial bubble. Effectively this says: yes, they're 0 for 2 in the last 20 years, but this time they can't all be wrong!

But more than that I think there's an underlying error in acting like "the tech sector" is a healthy and competitive market in the first place. They may not directly coordinate or operate in absolute lockstep, but the main drivers of crypto, generative AI, metaverse, SaaS, and so much of the current enshittifying and dead-ending tech industry comes back to a relatively small circle of people who all live in the same moneyed Silicon Valley cultural and informational bubble. We can even identify the ideological underpinnings of these decisions in the TESCREAL bundle, effective altruism and accelerationism, and "dark enlightenment" tech-fascism. This is not a ruthlessly competitive market that ferrets out weakness. It's more like a shared cult of personality that selects for whatever makes the guys in top feel good about themselves. The question isn't "how can all these different groups be wrong without someone undercutting them", it's "how can these few dozen guys who share an ideology and information bubble keep making the exact same mistakes as one another" and the answer should be to question why anyone expects anything else!

the looting of the commons continues apace

I'm not too surprised by this happening (and I see the specter of the same thing approaching with salt (bought by vmware bought by broadcom...)), but god am I tired of how fucking effective the method is

True Anon podcast (began with dissecting the Jeffrey Epstein case) goes deep on Luigi, his shooting, and his grey tribe ideological background. https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-425-blue-118079355

ZITRON DROPPED