CZM Rewind: The Rot-Com Bubble

Summary

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Better Offline — CZM Rewind: The Rot-Com Bubble

Host: Ed Zitron (Cool Zone Media & iHeartPodcasts)
Date of Original Episode: September 2024 (Rebroadcast June 10, 2026)

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Episode Overview

This episode of Better Offline, hosted by tech industry veteran Ed Zitron, revisits and reevaluates his influential theory about the "Rotcom Bubble": the era of growth-at-any-cost in tech. Zitron analyzes why technology feels stagnant, why so many recent tech products seem pointless or unwanted, and how the current AI boom is closely tied to the mistakes and delusions of the last decade. The episode connects the dots from the death of meaningful innovation, to traffic declines on major internet platforms, to the tech industry's desperate hunt for the next hypergrowth market.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Core Thesis: Tech's Hypergrowth Has Ended

• Zitron confronts foundational questions:
  • What if the next big thing in tech is decades away?
  • Has the era of hypergrowth ended, and what are the consequences?
• The “Rotcom Bubble” describes a period where the tech industry prioritized scale and hype over utility and true innovation.

Quote:

“It’s this force that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better... to conquer markets and show growth to the public markets rather than fixing a problem you or I might have.”
(Ed Zitron, 03:47)

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2. No Eureka Failure Point—Only a Slow Decline

• Unlike previous tech busts (e.g., dot-com, 2008 financial crisis), there's no single “Lehman moment.”
• Crashes like FTX (crypto) were major, but the overall stagnation is drawn out and diffuse.
• Marker: Tech excitement peaked around the late 2010s; by 2021, the industry was “out of sizzle.”

Quote:

“There isn’t really a single obvious event that started the decline…”
(Ed Zitron, 05:09)

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3. The Rot Economy: Growth-at-All-Costs Culture

• Venture capital and public markets trained tech leaders to chase new markets regardless of utility.
• Core belief: Perpetual exponential growth is expected—even after running out of real problems to solve.
• Data shows internet user growth is slowing—only 100 million new users between 2022–2023, the slowest rate in 18 years.

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4. Hype Over Innovation: Recent Fads and Failures

• NFTs, Cryptocurrency, Metaverse — all sold as revolutionary, but produced little of value for real people.
• AI — Sold as the new savior, but current generative AI is error-prone (“hallucinations” baked in), unprofitable, and generally fails to deliver on the overhyped promises.

Memorable Moment:

“You keep telling me the future is here, but when I look at what the future is, it isn’t even close.”
(Ed Zitron, 09:05)

• Microsoft Recall — AI-powered PC feature that records everything done on your computer. Zitron skewers it as dangerous, invasive, and entirely unwanted.

“Should be clear, I don’t think anybody actually asked for a feature like this. And it’s also inherently invasive… It is, in essence, a pre-installed screen recorder, the kind of thing hackers might install.”
(Ed Zitron, 10:22)

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5. Platform Traffic is Plummeting

• Zitron cites SimilarWeb data: Since 2021, most top 100 web properties have seen traffic declines:
  • Google: -5.3%
  • YouTube: -3.8%
  • Facebook: -27.7%
  • Wikipedia: -24.8%
  • Even porn sites: significant declines.
• Only a handful of platforms (Reddit, TikTok, LinkedIn, Instagram) show significant growth, but the trend is broadly negative since 2019.

“When the porn’s down, that’s when you start worrying.”
(Ed Zitron, 14:35)

• This “digital recession” explains why incumbents like Google and Facebook keep changing their products to squeeze more out of each remaining user.

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6. Tech’s "Midlife Crisis": Desperate for the Next Big Thing

• As real user growth and new markets dry up, tech CEOs force AI and other “innovations” into products—even when solutions are obviously inferior or unwanted.
• Rotcom mentality leads to declining utility and user experience as companies focus on extracting more from a shrinking pie.
• “Companies that build useful things that people need don’t need to talk about what they build in the future; you can see it in the things they’re selling you today.”

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7. The Metaverse Fiasco and Leadership Delusions

• Zitron lays out the metaverse as emblematic of out-of-touch leadership and unsustainable investment:
  • Meta (formerly Facebook) has burned tens of billions on a virtual world vision tied to Ready Player One-style fantasies—without technology or market demand to support it.
  • Describes Meta’s strategy as a cash-fueled “power grab,” attempting to make the internet a feudal system monetized by Meta.

Quote:

“[Mark Zuckerberg] sold everybody on the concept of a Ready Player One metaverse… conjured up by somebody without any real ideas… he keeps burning cash in the hopes he can get just one more hit of hyper growth. 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.”
(Ed Zitron, 30:34)

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8. Generative AI: The Latest Desperate Gambit

• Tech giants are “adding AI” regardless of utility—AI that hallucinates, misinforms, and can’t actually deliver breakthrough functionality.
  • Example: Google’s AI telling users to put glue on pizza or eat rocks, spreading falsehoods from unreliable sources.
• Zytron identifies Sam Altman’s (OpenAI) constant drumbeat for AGI (artificial general intelligence) as misleading, since current technology simply cannot achieve that.

Quote:

“Anytime you read Sam Altman talking about AGI, he is talking about tech that OpenAI does not have and is not building.”
(Ed Zitron, 08:38)

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9. The Bursting Bubble: What’s Next?

• Zitron forecasts the bubble will burst, forcing at least one major tech player out and fundamentally reshaping the landscape.
  • Failure is inevitable when all growth levers have been pulled and new demand dries up.
  • Companies are addicted to growth, but “the only thing that grows forever is cancer.”
    (Ed Zitron, 19:53)
• The future may see a hard reckoning as real innovation dries up—unless new, genuine needs are found and solved.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On "growth at all costs":
  “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.” (Ed Zitron, 18:14)

• On the move toward meaningless products:
  “All of these companies… have built themselves on this very simple idea that there’d always be a next big thing… they’ve assumed that there would always be one around the corner.” (Ed Zitron, 18:54)

• On tech leadership's desperation:
  “These companies are not innovative anymore because they’re no longer engineered to be… when there were tons of these markets to attack... all they had to do was throw more money at the problem and they'd always keep growing.” (Ed Zitron, 36:28)

• On AI and the future:
  “You should never assume anything… they're not going to grow forever. And they don't have a next trick.” (Ed Zitron, 36:55)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:07 — Episode overview, core questions about tech malaise
• 03:20–07:00 — Outlining the “Rotcom Bubble” and lack of obvious crash event
• 09:05 — Tech's false promises: NFTs, crypto, the Metaverse, and now AI
• 10:20–11:15 — Dangers and absurdity of Microsoft Recall and surveillance features
• 13:42–18:54 — Traffic declines across the internet’s biggest properties; data analysis
• 23:32–28:20 — Rot economy’s roots in VC, cultural incentives, and contrasts with 2010s innovation
• 30:10–35:02 — Metaverse critique, Zuckerberg’s missteps, generative AI as desperate pivot
• 36:00–37:45 — The bubble’s looming burst, why no major company is likely to deliver “the next billion users”
• 37:45–38:38 — Closing remarks and preview of the next episode: how tech’s ability to make big promises far outpaces its actual ability to deliver

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Tone, Language, & Style

• Zitron’s delivery is acerbic, skeptical, and darkly humorous—often outright calling out the “bullshit” and “con” at the heart of current tech hype cycles.
• Frequent direct addresses to listeners (“think about it, for a second”), keeping a conversational yet fiercely critical tone.

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Takeaways for Listeners

• The “weirdness” and disconnect people feel about tech today is rooted in years of hypergrowth thinking.
• The major players are out of tricks, still addicted to growth, and pushing new technologies in search of the next boom—without regard to utility or danger.
• A reckoning is inevitable, and real innovation is rare; skepticism and historical perspective are crucial in evaluating new tech claims.

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This episode is essential listening for anyone who senses something’s gone deeply awry in Silicon Valley—and wants an unvarnished perspective on how and why we landed here.

Transcript

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[Ed Zitron]

Callzone Media hey folks, it's me, Ed. So I'm off this week getting my wisdom teeth out. Finally time. But I'm gonna rerun this episode the Rock. Com Bubble. And I want to be clear. This is two years old. It's gonna. I'm sure at some point I'm like, this is gonna end in three quarters, which I was wrong about that one. Never less. This is an important piece because I think everything about the AI bubble comes back to the Rock com 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 as I think that this is going to be kind of formative to the future. Anyway, enjoy Foreign. Hello and welcome to Better Offline. I'm your host Ed Zitron. In the next two episodes I want to present you with a theory about why the tech industry is 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 hyper growth in tech is over now? As I've mentioned before, I believe the raw economy is to blame for a lot of this. It's a growth at all cost mindset that sits at the core of pretty much everything I've written or spoken about. It's this force that, that drives businesses to grow bigger rather than better and make products to conquer markets and show growth to the public markets rather 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 raw economy 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 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 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 raw economy kind of took over. And I 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 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. 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 for 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. 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, unassailable problem of hallucination, where it spits out incorrect information authoritatively, which, worryingly, Google CEO Sundar Pasha has said in an interview with the Verge, 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. 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 artifact 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. 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. 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 is. It can't distinguish between your regular computer usage and say, sensitive information, passwords, health information, 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 about it for more than 12 seconds or even five can confirm it does. 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 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 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 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.

[Kal Penn]

Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn, host of Irsay, The Audible and iHeart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Wil Wheaton, who played Gordie Lachance in stand by me 40 years ago and now narrates Stephen King's the Body, the novella that inspired it all. We talk about what it's like to return to a story that shaped his life, channeling his memories of River Phoenix and the recording booth, and why the friendships you have at 12 might be the most important ones you'll ever have.

[Ed Zitron]

I know Gordie Lachance. I am Gordie Lachance. Like, I mean, even when I was a little kid, I was Gordie Lachance when I didn't know it.

[Kal Penn]

Listen to Irsay the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Ed 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 hyper growth. Hundred billion trillion dollar markets that they could then sell into, invest in 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 5 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 algorithms to present it to them, ways to sell people things that solved 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 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. 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. 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% lost there they are owned by Amazon, sadly wikipedia, which lost 24.8% of its traffic. And and here's the thing that really worried me. Porn sites like X videos 27.4% loss and Pornhub 17.1% loss. When the porn's down, that's that's when you start worrying. Though you might be tempted to dismiss this all as a result of life returning to normal, and that traditional office based environments aren't particularly conducive to a crafty midday wank, you shouldn't the trend actually began earlier with similar web 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. 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 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 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. 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. 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? Nah, maybe. But to keep people on the platform, sometimes by monopolizing an industry so they have nowhere else to go. 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 there'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, the. I'm sorry to say that the Rotcom bubble is going to deflate. And as we speak, the tech industry, they're grappling with somewhat of a midlife crisis, and they're desperately searching for that next hyper growth 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 going to. They're going to 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.

[Kal Penn]

Hey, everyone, it's Kal Penn, host of Irsay, the Audible and I Heart Audiobook Club. This week on the podcast, I'm sitting down with Divergent author Veronica Roth to talk about her sprawling new novel, Seek the Traitor's Son. It's a sci fi fantasy epic about two protagonists on opposite sides of a war and a prophecy neither of them wanted.

[Veronica Roth]

My first book was Divergent, and when that came out, like, because it was so popular, I think it attracted like, mostly positivity, but the negativity I sucked in like a sponge. And I think it was like, critiques of things I liked when I was like, you know, I was 23 and I wrote this book and it had all my, like, dorky little cheesy or maybe unrealistic loves in it.

[Kal Penn]

And.

[Veronica Roth]

And I started to feel a lot of shame about those things. And so for the rest of my career, I steered away from those little things that, like, make you feel pleasure when you read. But I also was, like, saying no to these parts of myself that I then was like, screw it. Yeah, so that's this book.

[Kal Penn]

Listen to Irsay, the Audible and iHeart audiobook club on the iHeartradio app or wherever you get your podcasts.

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[Ed Zitron]

The ROT economy and tech's growth lust isn't new, though. Venture capital has been incentivizing and monetizing ROT for over a decade, and Marc Andreessen advocated in 2011 that we 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 startups 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 even if it's 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 10 years. 15 years. Think about it. For a second. 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, Atlassian, OCTA, 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. 4G LTE networks, they were brand new. 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 and this kind of seemingly unstoppable period of growth and big sexy ideas that created big sexier new markets. 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 multitrillion dollar philosophical network economic force. And it's changed just about everything about how we communicate and even do business. It's remarkable. And also was a 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, allowing multiple companies to carve out these hundred 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. 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 would resemble 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 difficult questions so that people don't buy stupid shit 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 hyper growth 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 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, it 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 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 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, clutch, funky 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. But the whole thing just feels like a con. 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. And yet he keeps burning cash in the hopes that he can get just one more hit of hyper growth. 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 Reed are forcing generative AI into Google Search. And even as it misinforms customers and it's recommending people put glue on their pizza and eat rocks, and it's claiming 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 realizing 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. 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 Rotcom bubble bursting is. It's going to be nasty for big tech. 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. Every single one of these companies, with a few exceptions, I realize, 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. As I said last episode, well, 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 realized 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 Web3 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 realized that the 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 Altmun 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 tons 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. 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 build in the future. You can see it in the things they're selling you today. You could see in the early days of clouds 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 rock bubble bursting. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to Better Offline. The editor and composer of the Better Offline theme song is Matosowski. You can check out more of his music and audio [e-mail] m a t t o s o w s k-I.com you can email me at ezeteroffline.com or visit betteroffline.com to find more podcast links and of course, my newsletter. I also really recommend you go to chat where's your ed to visit the Discord and go to R betteroffline to check out our Reddit. Thank you so much for listening. 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.

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