Everything in Tech Seems to Be Collapsing at Once
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
In my lifetime alone I've seen the "collapse" of the non-x86 personal computer industry, the dot-com bubble, the "collapse" of UNIX firms, the Great Recession, wave after wave of defense/electronics/space industry consolidations and contractions, and several other events that have caused certain people to believe that the sky is falling.
Over and over and over, the sky has fallen. We must be buried under hundreds of layers of sky by now.
Now Twitter, a borderline-irrelevant microblogging platform that could easily be replaced by any number of competitors in a week if it disappeared into a puff of smoke, is causing people to lose their god damned minds.
I saw an article that included a quote from a current or former Twitter employee saying that "the world needs twitter now more than ever" and I think I may have started to throw up in my mouth a little bit.
Every other one of the companies listed in the article is either shitting the bed in terms of performance and needs to tighten the belt, or massively over-hired in the last two years. It is highly unlikely that any one of the recently laid-off employees who want a job will be unable to find one before their severance runs out.
I believe that I may have officially become out of touch.
Social media has, I believe, been a net negative for the world. The echo chamber it creates is too strong, pushing people into more and more extreme worldviews. There is no more honest dialog, no more meeting of the minds. There is "us" and "them", and "them" is often seen as less than human.
If Elon does destroy Twitter, it might be the single greatest contribution to humanity he ever makes.
And, again, this is only a problem in the first place because they voluntarily gave their agency to a corporation that doesn't have their interests at heart.
We will see a lot of gobbling up of small companies as the cash rich companies can shop for bargains over the next year or more.
It seems sudden but I feel like there's been a slow downward spiral. Maybe we HN readers are just early adopters and found out a before the wider economy could react.
The author is suggesting the first "movement" was the "browser era, the social-media era, and the smartphone-app-economy era".
It seems they think the next era will vaguely have something to do with AI.
What do HN'ers think the next "movement" will be (if any)?
Major layoffs from companies that have advertising revenue as their main source of revenue is kind of a signal that ad spend might drop a lot.
Some of the above companies have become huge monoliths and this is the market adjusting itself. The companies growth has slowed and smaller, leaner, more agile companies are out maneuvering them.
It sucks to see people losing their jobs and getting laid off, but the recession and closing market space has triggered off more wartime CEO actions instead of peacetime CEO. Instead of expanding, these leaders realized their expansion is or has come to an end and instead they are cutting all the excess they can to stay afloat.
And while I do not like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg, I think they are reading the market correctly on what is coming and what they can do to put their businesses in the right place for the future.