People have short memories. A few years ago hypes like big data and machine learning, blockchain and autonomous cars were pushed relentlessly . The consultants would confidently predict 300 gazillion profits by 2030, everybody would lose their job etc. Then the pandemic happened, momentarily some candid voices admitted that all this digi-crap does not help an iota with our quality of life (or life, period) but the di…
> The tech economy is like the fabled sharks: needs to keep inventing hypes or it will implode No, the tech economy wouldn't implode. It would just signal it had become an old, stable industry (eg automobiles). The so called tech economy isn't going away under any scenario, it underpins modern civilization across the globe, and that's only going to be more true in 20/30/50 years than it is already today. The tech eco…
Well, we need to calibrate a baseline otherwise its just a waste of my precious minute. Digital tech as such, especially the hardware side is not a fluke. It evolves inexorably in capability, follows physical laws (e.g. the endless shrinking of transistor sizes has stopped) and is the tooling supporting a range of potentially long-term sustainable economic activities.
This reality does not exactly fix the relative size of the tech economy to the rest of the economy, much less so in terms of market valuation (which is the driver for most the actors involved).
There are various important factors that people simply assume are "normal" in the tech landscape but they are not. They are the result of arbitrary political decisions. 1) The degree of allowed concentration (monopolization) that essentially guarantees rent extraction and prohibits commoditization. 2) Lax attitudes towards data privacy that effectively simply siphon wealth from others. These two regulatory malfuctions could be reversed without much impact on the actual tech but a major impact on valuations.
In fact the engineered hypes serve as much the need to keep inquiring minds at bay (by arguing now is not the time to stifle the exponential innovation) as they do to inflate stock options.
Finally you have the fact that a certain fraction of "tech" is essentially disemboweling and substituting (rather than growing) other industries. For each triumphant Amazon type entity (that you seem to celebrate so much), you have the millions of boarded-up city bookstores and shops. This is a more complicated economic calculus. You could argue that all those vendors, publishers, taxi drivers, hoteliers etc should have been more proactive in adopting technology rather than have their lunch eaten.
I would like to reverse the compliment and argue that it should take a person of any awareness less than a minute to grasp the rotten foundations on which quite a bit of the "tech economy" has built its edifice.