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Comment by woah | Hacker News Reader

The real engine behind “internet” is the bad tech economy.

Vendors need something to sell, companies need to show results to investors, team leads need to justify staffing, devs need to stand out to avoid layoffs.

Insert any buzzy topic into this mix it will get eviscerated by the starving packs of tech jackals… regardless of what actual users want.

I’m excited about the potential behind the technology. But we’re in a state where many emporers have no clothes, and nobody quite wants to say it.

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Well "Internet" went through its own boom and bust crash during the dotcom era. With lots of dumb money chasing dumb investments.

My hypothesis would be that cycle is going to be very heavily accelerated due to the current economy. Many companies aren't operating from a position of strength, but more of desperation. Some tiny few will do well. Many announcing their "AI thing" suddenly becoming AI companies overnight will probably crash and burn.

I could be wrong though.

The biggest losers on the dotcom crash were actually the failed networking companies "selling shovels" who had many 10s billions invested and then went to zero. Only AOL/TW was really comparable to Worldcom, Globalcrossing, with the $100B failures of Nortel and JDS/Uniphase.. Pets, Boo, Flooz etc made a big ad splashes, but were actually pretty small (single digit $B).

Your thoughts are valid. AI.com is the Pets.com of this generation

We are in a 2nd bigger 'tech' bubble. I hear lots of funny thing said about the era and now' "today is nothing like the dot com bubble, pets.com ... PETS DOT COM!". and I am like, pets.com had a max valuation of 400 million for like a hot minute. Today we have over 1,000 never made a profit tech unicorns. One thousand companies with a market cap of 1 billion+ that has never (and probably never will) made a profit.

"you just got to find a company with a strong balance sheet, one that makes money, one that sells the shovels". Had you invested your money in CISCO back then, you'd still be in the red over 23 years later.

Geees well when you put it like that you make it sound pretty bad

There have always been naked emperors, but what has changed is the amount of pretend time + energy in the form of currency that society has been willing to produce, and pretendess is the one thing that feeds more pretend ess. The pipeline of pretendness is ignorance, both willing and institutionalized. In prior times, the rubber band would have snapped by now. The fantasy has become so hyper that it seems nobody has a clue whether there is even a "rubber band" at this point.

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