The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI

Summary

Podcast Summary
Podcast: Cory Doctorow’s craphound.com
Episode: The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI
Date: May 17, 2026
Host: Cory Doctorow
Focus: Excerpt from Doctorow’s new book “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI,” examining how artificial intelligence changes work, power, and technology criticism

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Overview

In this episode, Cory Doctorow presents a substantial excerpt from his upcoming book, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.” The episode explores how AI is reshaping labor, workplace dynamics, and public perceptions about technology’s inevitability. Doctorow focuses on the distinction between technologies that empower workers (“centaurs”) and those that conscript humans as assistants to machines (“reverse centaurs”), applying these concepts to contemporary debates around AI. He also warns listeners about misleading narratives that fuel tech bubbles and “criti-hype,” and offers a call for more thoughtful, power-aware technological criticism.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The “Reverse Centaur” Metaphor and the Fate of Automation

   • Doctorow explains how automation can serve as either a tool that empowers (“centaur”) or enslaves (“reverse centaur”) its user, depending on who chooses to use it and under what conditions.

   • Centaur: A person augmented and enhanced by a machine, using technological tools on their own terms.

   • Reverse Centaur: A person compelled to serve the requirements of a machine; automation becomes oppressive rather than emancipatory.

     • Example: Amazon warehouse workers conscripted to operate as adjuncts to warehouse automation systems and scored on machine metrics.
     • Contrasted with empowerment, like using transcription software voluntarily to speed up creative work.

   • Quote:

     “A Reverse Centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine.” (21:40)

2. AI Hallucinations and Accountability

   • Opening story of Marco Buscaglia, a writer who used a chatbot to create a summer reading list, which included invented books—illustrating both the limits of foundered AI generation and how individuals get blamed for systemic problems.

   • The power structure is skewed to scapegoat workers for machine-generated failures, rather than questioning the organization’s practices or incentives.

   • Quote:

     “Buscaglia was set up to fail. His job wasn’t merely to oversee a chatbot, it was to absorb the blame for that chatbot’s mistakes.” (09:29)

3. Personal Experience with AI as an Empowering Tool

   • Doctorow compares Buscaglia’s experience with his own—using the open-source Whisper speech-to-text tool to transcribe hours of podcasts efficiently. This is a positive “centaur” use, chosen purposefully and with agency.
   • The importance of open-source tech: “The fact that Whisper is open source means that it can be maintained forever by anyone in the world who has the skills and desire to do so, no matter what happens to Whisper’s manufacturer...” (12:20)

4. The Centaur vs. Reverse Centaur Distinction

   • The core difference rests not in the technology itself, but “whether the worker gets to choose where, when, and how to use that automation.”

   • Technology’s value and threat are determined by social relationships, not technical characteristics.

   • Quote:

     “The important part isn’t the technical characteristics of the device; it’s the power relationships of the people who use the device.” (25:05)

5. Inevitableism and the Tech Boss Narrative

   • AI boosters and tech bosses use rhetoric of technological “inevitability” (aka “inevitableism”) to excuse exploitative choices.

   • Science fiction, by contrast, is an “anti-inevitableist literature” whose value is showing that the future is up for grabs—not preordained by the tech industry’s current choices.

   • Notable jab at Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, parodying their faux-helpless responses to calls for user empowerment.

   • Quote:

     “This is a cheap bully’s trick, insisting that their abusive behavior is out of their hands, that they are merely acting in accord with some kind of iron law or great force of history.” (29:51)

6. Criti-Hype and the Feedback Loop of Tech Hype

   • Doctorow introduces the concept of “criti-hype,” after scholar Lee Vinsel—the way well-meaning critics sometimes inadvertently promote tech hype by amplifying wild claims about technology’s power.

   • Example: The overblown panic about “subliminal advertising” in the 1950s and surveillance advertising in more recent years.

   • The need for criticism that attacks the real sources of power (ad tech profits and misleading investor narratives), rather than echoing fantastical capabilities.

   • Quote:

     “Critihype: criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype... Far from puncturing the ad tech bubble, this criti-hype inflated it even further, making billions for the people currently driving AI psychosis among the world’s deepest pocketed, most easily gulled investors and policymakers.” (45:02)

7. Labor, Technology’s Social Arrangements, and Union Power

   • Socio-technical history of the cash register: Technology’s impact on workers depends on how gains are distributed and whether workers have collective bargaining power.

   • Point: Advancing technology isn’t inherently good or bad; the outcomes depend on labor organization and political choices.

   • Suggestion: We should resist narratives that “you have to take the good with the bad”—instead insisting on a world where workers get only the good.

   • Quote:

     “You don’t have to take the good with the bad. You can get the good without the bad... If you want to get the good without the bad, you need to switch from fighting technologies to fighting bosses.” (56:51)

8. How Growth Hype and Funny Math Shape Tech Bubbles

   • Doctorow reveals the accounting tricks (e.g., Microsoft’s AI tokenization with OpenAI) that inflate both investment numbers and revenue figures to fuel the AI bubble.

   • Corporate narratives of unbounded “growth” are used to drive stock price, create endogenous capital, and perpetuate the cycle.

   • Goodhart’s Law: When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure—seen in how companies distort user interactions and product metrics to satisfy KPIs, not user needs.

   • Application to Google, Uber, Lyft, and the culture of growth at all costs.

   • Quote:

     “Every AI company is using all kinds of cheap tricks to juke the stats to make AI seem like a bigger phenomenon than it actually is.” (01:00:17)

9. The Real Stakes: Who Is Technology For?

   • Repeated theme: What matters is not what technology does, but who it does it for—and against whom.

   • Advocacy for agency, democracy, and collective decision-making about technological use.

   • William Gibson’s maxim invoked: “The street finds its own use for things.”

   • Quote:

     “The most important thing about the gadget isn’t what it does, it’s who it does it for and who it does it to.” (55:10)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “The difference between a useful tool and technological torment is the difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur.” (17:52)
• “Science fiction is an anti-inevitableist literature... we can choose something else.” (34:19)
• “To win the AI fight, we need to enlist allies. If you’re a worker whose job is in some AI pitchman’s crosshairs, then every time you repeat claims about AI’s current or future ability to do your job, you help that hustler convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI.” (49:43)
• “The solution to the paradox is to stop thinking about what the gadget does and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for.” (25:38)

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Important Timestamps by Theme

• [04:08] — Introduction to the Buscaglia incident and the dangers of AI-generated content in journalism
• [13:25] — Doctorow’s positive AI experience with Whisper and open source software
• [18:50] — Extended metaphor: Centaur vs. Reverse Centaur, automation and labor conditions
• [25:05] — The core issue: not technical features, but power relationships
• [29:50] — Tech bosses and “inevitableism” rhetoric; science fiction as a counterpoint
• [44:59] — Critihype and how criticism can feed tech bubbles
• [50:30] — Customer service, labor outsourcing, and how chatbots change the balance of sympathy and blame
• [55:10] — Cash registers, labor organization, and the myth of technological inevitability
• [59:15] — The “funny math” of the AI investment bubble
• [01:01:20] — Growth economics, stock valuation, and KPI perversions in big tech companies

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Summary Tone

Doctorow’s tone is sharp, witty, and critical—peppered with sardonic asides, cultural references, and a commitment to demystifying both AI rhetoric and financialized tech culture. The message is fundamentally hopeful: the future is not fixed, and the public can demand and create fairer, more humane uses of AI.

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Conclusion

This episode lays bare the power dynamics underlying AI adoption, the consequences of technological hype, and the necessity of critical, agency-centered discourse in shaping our technological future. Doctorow advocates for a labor- and democracy-first approach to automation, reminding listeners that tech’s benefits (and harms) are the results of collective choices—not the dictates of inevitability.

Transcript

[A]

Well, good morning. It's very early here in London and I am recording you a very quick

[B]

introduction to this week's podcast. Very special podcast. Oh, I should say this is Cory Doctorow and you're listening to the Cory Doctorow Podcast. I have a new book out. It's called the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI A pungent critical look at AI and how to be a better critic of it. That comes out in a few weeks. And as per usual, I am now kickstarting pre sales of the audiobook and the ebook and the print book, as well as memberships to eff, the Electronic Frontier foundation, the world's most important and most effective digital rights group where I've worked for 25 years. And that's [e-mail] Kickstarter and there is an hour of audiobook that you are about to hear. And before I hand you off to that, I I just wanted to let you know about my upcoming appearances. If you're listening to this right after it comes out and you're in Berlin, you've got a few chances to catch me. I'm doing both a keynote and a panel at the Republika conference May 18th 20th. I'm also doing speeches on both May 18th and May 19th in Kreuzberg for other land books. Those are both sold out, but there is a waiting list. The following week, May 22nd through 25th, I will be at hey on Wye for the how the Light Gets In Festival. I'm doing, I think like three panels and a keynote. There's a lot. Oh, and a breakfast. I'm doing a keynote in London on June 2 at south by Southwest London.

[A]

If you're in Kansas City, I'll be

[B]

at the Woodneath library centre on June 10. That's also sold out, but there is a wait list. And then we get into the tour for the Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life after AI. There are still some events that are not announced, but I'm going to give you dates and places so you can mark your calendar in case you want to come out and you're in the

[A]

right city for it.

[B]

It starts in with Brian Merchant at skylight books on June 19th and then I'll be in Menlo park on June 21st at Kepler's. There is an unannounced but definite event in Toronto on June 23rd and I'll be at the Strand in New York on June 24th with Jonathan Coulton. Another unannounced event in Philadelphia on June 25th and there's an event that's not yet on the calendar, but I can give you details in Chicago on June 26th, we'll be at Exile in Bookville and I'll be with the Amazing Rick Pearlstein. I'll be at the Edinburgh International book Festival on August 17 with Jimmy Wales and also doing a solo talk there. So those are the things that are in the diary. There's actually lots more talks to come, but I want to get on with the audiobook excerpt here.

[A]

And just to say, if you're a

[B]

Londoner and you came out Yesterday for the 75th anniversary of the Nakba Never Again March yesterday that I was there with you and I thank you for the solidarity. I had to walk through the fascist march in Trafalgar Square to get there and boy, it was very depressing to see all those neo fascists massed in the streets of London. And it really buoyed my spirits to see so many hundreds of thousands of us marching in Palestinian solidarity and for a better world. So thank you very much and if you have a chance to show your solidarity wherever you live, I hope you will take it.

[A]

Anyway.

[B]

Now on with the excerpt. And once again, if you like this audiobook and you want the audio, the E book, the print book, the ebooks and audiobooks of inshitification, the chance to to support eff, to buy inshidification pins and stickers from EFF to raise money, all of those things you can go to pluralistic.net Kickstarter and that'll redirect you to the latest Kickstarter campaign. And I thank you very much. Have a great week.

[A]

For the Electronic Frontier foundation and everyone else who ever fought for better technology, your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they should that they didn't stop to consider whether they could. Matthew W. Bradley Introduction In May 2025, the Internet briefly chose a new unfortunate main character, Marco Buscaglia, a Chicago based freelance writer behind a syndicated summer reading list. Though the list was credited to him, he wasn't its principal author. Rather, the list was written by a chatbot. We know this is true for two reasons. First, because 10 of the 15 books on the list were non existent. They were AI hallucinations, a term that AI boosters use because it sounds sexier than errors. Second, because Buscalia confessed to using a chatbot in an interview with the veteran tech reporter Jason Kebler, who co founded the journalist owned news site 404 Media. In Kebler's article, Buscaglia admits that he used a chatbot to source the list and blames the inclusion of non existent books on the list on his own oversight. I do use AI for background at times, but always check out the material first. This time I did not and I can't believe I missed it because it's so obvious. Buscaglia comes across as utterly mortified, telling Kepler no excuses on me 100% and I'm completely embarrassed. It's a complete mistake on my part. This is just idiotic of me. Really embarrassed for a few days the Internet had a lot of fun with poor Buscaglia, from the baffled authors whose non existent books were recommended on his list to the legion of people who are sick to the back teeth of having AI jammed into their eyeballs by overcapitalized tech companies. But Kepler's analysis went beyond Buscalia's contrition. In follow up stories and on the 404 Media podcast, Kepler dove deep into the context of Buscalia's unfortunate moment in the Internet's baleful glare. Start with the list itself. The summer Reading list was one of many lists and guides in a 64 page best of summer supplement that was distributed to multiple daily newspapers by King Features Syndicate, a division of Hearst Communications, a massive and established publishing conglomerate. Buscaglia wrote or wrote the majority of those lists. This is a remarkable feat. Kebler had experience writing lists like these, having begun his career as an intern at Washington Monthly magazine, where a list like this would be assigned to a team of three interns overseen by an experienced newsroom journalist and backstopped by a large and skilled fact checking department. I've done this kind of work myself. I got my start as a journalist with assignments from Wired magazine that had me devoting an entire month to evaluating dozens of multi tools, speaking to experts and manufacturer's representatives in order to pick my top three and write a brief paragraph about each. These were fun assignments, but they were also serious and involved endless back and forth with the fact checkers and even down to providing proof of how many different blades and attachments each tool had. To be frank, there's no way that Buscaglia could have written all those lists and summer guides, including a guide to hammocks that features a quote from a non existent professor of leisure studies who is credited with writing a scholarly journal article on hammock culture. That paper also doesn't exist in 2025. Any editor who assigns a freelancer to write the bulk of a 64 page summer guide is either tacitly or explicitly commissioning that writer to confine Their efforts to prompting a chatbot to barf up a bunch of plausible verbiage and hammer it into shape. Buscaglia was asked to do the work of dozens of writers, researchers, editors, and fact checkers on a short timescale that guaranteed that the resulting product would be riddled with AI generated errors. We don't know how much Buscalia was paid for this job, but it's a sure bet that it doesn't add up to the total salary of all the skilled professionals whose jobs he was asked to do. In other words, Buscaglia was set up to fail. His job wasn't merely to oversee a chatbot, it was to absorb the blame for that chatbot's mistakes. Like Buscalia, I am a freelance writer. What's more, I'm a freelance writer who has recently used AI. In the course of my work, I was trying to locate a quote from an expert I'd heard say something very smart on a podcast. The only problem was that I couldn't remember the name of the expert or which podcast I'd heard him on. So I downloaded an open weight AI speech transcription model called Whisper and installed it on my laptop. Then I downloaded 30 or 40 hours worth of podcasts that I'd recently listened to and fed them all to Whisper, asking it to produce a transcript of all of them. While Whisper chugged away in the background of my laptop, I kept working on the article, answering emails, and alt tabbing to social media in case someone had uploaded a video of a guy putting a lemon up his nose. Normal writer stuff, in other words. A couple hours later, I opened the folder where Whisper dumps his transcripts and searched them for some phrases I remembered from the quote I was looking for and located the file in minutes. It was Hagen Blix, co author of why We Fear AI, discussing the plight of AI therapists on the excellent this Machine Kills podcast. Then I used the timecode Whisper provided to open the podcast file and clean up the transcribe quote, which I pasted into my article. I was right. It was a great quote. This was a great experience. It was a great AI experience. Thanks to AI, my computer has now acquired a permanent new feature. It can turn arbitrary amounts of recorded speech into pretty reliable transcripts in a manner so efficient that my laptop's fan doesn't even turn on. The fact that Whisper is open source means that it can be maintained forever by anyone in the world who has the skills and desire to do so, no matter what happens to Whisper's manufacturer, a grossly overhyped and terrible firm called OpenAI. Two freelance writers using AI. One was made miserable and embarrassed by his AI usage. The other had a delightful experience, saved a bunch of time, and produced a better piece of writing. How to explain the paradox? One possibility is that the difference lies in how we used AI. I used AI to transcribe some audio, whereas Buscaglia used it to generate some writing. Though I don't brainstorm with AI or other forms of automated or random text generation, I don't have a moral objection to these practices. There are plenty of writers who find text generation to be a productive tool for producing excellent work. The Dadaist's cutups involve slicing phrases out of a manuscript and scrambling them around looking for serendipitous juxtapositions. Writers delight in Brian eno and Peter Schmidt's Oblique Strategies deck, which contains 55 cards printed with mysterious orders. Be the first person to not do something that no one else has ever not done before. The Surrealists love their exquisite Corpse, in which a group of writers take it in turn to append text to the previous writer text, but each writer can only see the last sentence of the work when they begin. Today I know lots of writers who use chatbots to produce fine work. They may use the chatbot as a sounding board for evaluating ideas or variations on ideas, or to challenge them with writing prompts or to suggest improvements. As I said, I don't use AI that way, but I know people who do, and I like the things they write. The difference between Buscaglia's AI experience and my own, the difference between a useful tool and technological torment is the difference between a centaur and a reverse centaur. In Automation Theory, the academic study of automation, a centaur is a person who is assisted by a machine. Think of a clever human's head, arms, and hands atop a horse's strong body. Riding a bicycle or driving a car makes you a centaur. So does using the mute button on your TV remote when an ad comes on. Wearing a hearing aid makes you a centaur, and so does using a calculator to multiply large numbers. Being a centaur can be glorious. My whole writing career has been a series of centaur moves from the used IBM Selectric my parents bought for me to play with when I was 6 or 7, to the Apple II plus we got when I was 9, which kicked off an unbroken string of better and better writing tools with spell checkers, version control, collaboration features, autosave, and more. Best of all, I get to choose exactly which of these features I use. I work for myself, after all, so if I don't want to use the grammar checker, hell no. That's my business. No one expects me to write more pages when I get a new tool. A couple of years ago, a former student of mine asked me to try out his LLM tool that would help me write dialogue and flesh out characters. I played with it for 10 minutes and they never went back to it. No one told me I was being uncooperative or spoiling. A grand plan to increase efficiency and realize cost savings by refusing to use AI. Sometimes when I'm really stuck, I write with a pen and a notebook. No one cares except me. A Reverse Centaur is a human who is conscripted into acting as an assistant to a machine. There's a classic I Love Lucy episode where Lucy and Ethel are working on the assembly line at a chocolate factory, taking bon bons off the belt and wrapping them in paper. As the belt goes faster and faster, Lucy and Ethel have to work at superhuman speed. They're Reverse Centaurs. The machine can move the chocolates from one place to another, but it needs a human to pack them into the box, and the humans who act as its assistant are made to work at a pace that exceeds all human capac until calamity ensues. I Love Lucy played that bit for laughs. Amazon warehouse workers get the horror movie version. They are observed by AI equipped cameras that time their movements and monitor their time off task, penalizing them if they fail to make quota. Amazon warehouse workers experience the highest level of on the job injuries in the US warehouse sector, and many of them have to resort to urinating in bottles because a visit to the toilet blow their quotas. An Amazon warehouse is full of machines, but there are jobs the machines can't do, and that's where the Amazon warehouse workers come in. They assist the machines. They are Reverse Centaurs and they have been conscripted to serve as peripherals for the warehouse's automation systems. They aren't merely used by those machines, they are used up. It's not hard to imagine how a warehouse worker might choose to use AI in their daily work. For example, a computer vision system in a pair of smart glasses highlights an item they're looking for in a bin. There have been many instances in which I've stared directly at something without seeing it, in which I would have loved this. Automation isn't necessarily the enemy of warehouse work. There's nothing wrong with a forklift. The difference between automation that helps a warehouse worker and automation that torments that worker is whether the worker gets to choose where, when, and how to use that automation. It's the difference between a Centaur and a reverse Centaur. I love the automation system in my car that warns me when I'm drifting out of my lane. And I recently discovered the hard way that if the person ahead of me brakes suddenly, my car will let out a sphincter puckering series of beeps and activate its own br. I was pretty happy about that, even if it did come as a hell of a surprise. Compare that with the drivers in those Amazon vans rolling around your neighborhood. They have to sign into at least nine separate apps and they are continuously scored on their driving performance as assessed by various AI tools. Drivers lose points for braking or swerving, even if that's the only way to avoid a sudden road hazard, or for deviating from the prescribed routes set by the AI. Even if there are obstructions or hazards, drivers have impossible to meet quotas and the per parcel compensation rate drops if they fail to meet it. Drivers are forbidden from peeing in bottles, but also given no time to urinate. The driver is just a peripheral for the van, present only because the van can't drive itself or get your parcel onto your porch. They are a Reverse Centaur. This Centaur Reverse Centaur distinction is the heart of the paradox at the heart of the debate about the usefulness of AI tools. When you find yourself surrounded by people swearing that a given tool is worse than useless and others swearing that it has made their lives easier and better, you can bet that the former group is made up of reverse Centaurs who've had AI imposed upon them. The latter group is all Centaurs who've gotten to make up their own minds about where, when, and how to use AI tools. The solution to the paradox is to stop thinking about what the gadget does and pay attention to who the gadget does it to and who the gadget does it for. The important part isn't the technical characteristics of the device, it's the power relationships of the people who use the device. It's been a long time since I last held a factory job. I'm a science fiction writer by trade, which means that I get asked about AI about a million times per day. Some people think science fiction writers are seers or prophets. Regrettably, some extremely delusional science fiction writers share this view. They imagine that science fiction is a literature that predicts the future. This is nonsense, of course. The future isn't predictable, which is a damn Good thing, because if the future were predictable, it would be foreordained, which would mean that the actions taken by people don't matter. But science fiction writers do have an intimate relationship with the future. By creating futuristic parables, made up stories about futures that may never come to pass, we SF writers remind everyone that the future is up for grabs, full of possibility. That's in stark contrast to tech bosses who claim total authority over our possibilities, both present and future. There's Mark Zuckerberg. Yes, well, obviously you'd like to talk to your friends without me spying on you all from asshole to appetite. But let's be realistic here. That's like asking for water that isn't wet. Or Apple CEO Tim Cook. Yes, certainly it would be nice if we could provide you with a reliable mobile device without locking you into our app store, where we rake in a 30% commission on everything you spend and where we get to decide which apps you can use and which ones you can't. Like the privacy apps we banned in China or the ice tracking app we banned in America. But come on, it's just not realistic to want a computer that A works and B takes orders from you, not me. This is a cheap bully's trick, insisting that their abusive behavior is out of their hands, that they are merely acting in accord with some kind of iron law or great force of history. Margaret Thatcher was the world champion of this. She insisted that her cruel program of austerity and privation was inevitable, repeating the phrase there is no alternative so often that wags started to refer to her as Tina. T there I is n no a alternative. Tina Thatcher's contemporary successors are to be found in the C suites of the tech industry. Call this philosophy inevitableism, the insistence that there is only one conceivable way to do things, and any problems you're experiencing aren't anyone's fault. They're just inescapable reality. The fact that the world is filled with sneaky Bluetooth sniffers that track your location as you walk through shopping centers or even just down the street isn't something you can blame a person or a company for. It's just a fact. Science fiction is an anti inevitableist literature. Science fiction is only incidentally about thinking up new gadgets and explaining what they do. Far more important than what the gadget does is who it does it to and who it does it for. As the legendary science fiction editor Gardner Dozois once Most SF can predict the car. Some SF can predict the drive in theater. But SF that can predict the changes in teenage sexual behavior as a result of the drive in is vanishingly rare. To this I would add truly visionary science fiction might think about how a world where you need a government issued ID like a driver's license in order to engage in sexual experimentation might plausibly lead to a database nation of ubiquitous surveillance. The mere existence of a literature in which many different writers have imagined many different futures, each of which can feel possible and even desirable, is a rebuke to inevitableism. The fact that social relations between people and their technology can be different means that the current arrangement is a choice. And crucially, it means that we can choose something else. AI hucksters want you to believe that all the things they call AI an incoherent grab bag of many technologies, some of them not especially related to the rest, are coming. And that means that when they arrive, there is only one conceivable way that we could use them. This is just high tech Thatcherism, the inevitableist move of a bully who insists that they're only doing what implacable reality demands of them. This is a book about what AI can and cannot do, but even more important, it's about the possible social arrangements of AI, from not using some AI technology at all to using it in ways that let some of us choose to be centaurs while saving our friends and neighbors, and from being conscripted into reverse centaurity. The current wave of AI is full of software performing impressive feats in both parsing and generating language and images and sounds. There are lots of interesting, fun, and productive ways to use this technology. There is nothing about the technology of AI that determines how it must be used. We can choose to use it sometimes or never, or all the time, depending on our needs and proclivities. We don't have to let billionaires tell us how it must be used. Margaret Thatcher's There Is no Alternative has a fine rejoinder in the science fiction writer William Gibson's famous maxim, the street finds its own use for things. Science fiction writers make lousy profits, but we can be pretty good technology critics before how we got here. The AI hype machine runs on badly considered criticism, and it's not unique in this regard. Lee Vincel, a science, Technology and society scholar at Virginia Tech, describes this process in a widely cited essay entitled you're Doing It Notes on Criticism and Technology Hype, which defined a critical misstep that Vincel dubbed critihype, which he defines as criticism that both feeds and feeds on hype. When a tech company tells a fanciful story about the terrible things its products can do. They do so in anticipation of some advantage from convincing the public of their fearsome capabilities. For example, the advertising industry has long touted its ability to bypass our rational faculties in order to sell us things aided by some kind of mind control technique. In the 1950s, ad companies provoked a moral panic by claiming that subliminal advertising could implant ideas directly into consumers minds. They claim that subtle images and words hidden in the shadows of illustrations, eye blink, single frame insertions in films, and backward audio or audio that was too high or too low to be perceived by the human ear would act directly upon our desires, causing us to rush out and buy whatever they were selling. It's easy to see why the advertising industry would want to tell this story because it helps them sell ads. Just like your boss is primed to believe a story about how someday he'll be able to fire you and replace you with a docile chatbot, so too are merchandisers primed to believe that there is a tool that will cause you to march into their store, wallet in hand, and buy whatever they're offering at whatever price they're charging. Many of the people who promoted the story of subliminal advertising doubtless believed it. Others may have been cynics who gave the clients what they wanted to hear. Today, many of the practitioners of surveillance advertising techniques also doubtless believe their own stories. And Rasputin may have believed that he could hypnotize people with his mystical stare. That doesn't make it true. The evidence for mind control via targeted advertising is awfully thin. See my 2020 book how to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism for more. And big tech critics who breathlessly repeat these claims are unwitting accomplices to the sales departments of ad tech companies. Why should you pay a 40% premium to advertise on Facebook? Just ask my critics. I've invented a mind control ray. Contrast this with an anti criti hype approach. Adtech claims it has a mind control ray and it's using that outlandish claim to bilk advertisers out of hundreds of billions of dollars while amassing galactic scale surveillance dossiers on every living person, which it both leaks and hands out to any cop or authoritarian state that asks for it. What they're calling mind control is at best just fine grained targeting. They're not convincing people they're thirsty and then selling them a drink. They're listening in on billions of online conversations to find the people complaining about how parched they are and then showing them an ad for Coke. This is an approach that strikes directly at the source of ad tech's power, which come from its profits, which come in turn from its ability to convince rubes that there's such a thing as a big data mind control ray. Moreover, this is an approach that correctly places the ad tech industry on one side of a struggle with advertisers who are being sold a defective product and advertisees. That's us being spied upon and exploited on the other side. Obviously, there's a certain irreducible degree of enmity between advertisers and the public. But we all share a common enemy. In the ad tech industry, there's a certain kind of policymaker or governmental enforcer whose priority is keeping businesses from being built by adtech hucksters. There's a different group of powerful people who are charged with protecting the public from surveillance. Framing ad tech as a scam rather than as a miracle of persuasive technology puts these two groups on the same side as well. It's a recipe for victory. The companies that made billions selling and miss selling ad tech are now on the vanguard of the AI bubble. It's the same scammers pulling the same scam. The last time around, a bunch of tech's loudest critics got sucked into Krita hype, breathlessly warning about how our dopamine loops were being hacked by these evil sorcerers. Far from puncturing the ad tech bubble, this Crita Hype inflated it even further, making billions for the people currently driving AI psychosis among the world's deepest pocketed, most easily gulled investors and policymakers. It will be downright embarrassing, not to mention terribly destructive, if we let these guys trick us into helping them sell their snake oil in back to back scams. To win the AI fight, we need to enlist allies. If you're a worker whose job is in some AI pitchman's crosshairs, then every time you repeat claims about AI's current or future ability to do your job, you help that hustler convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI. But it's worse than that, because repeating the AI barker's patter also alienates the people who benefit from your work. Some of those people will be grateful to you for the espresso shots you've pulled for them, or the contracts you've drafted for them, or the education you've provided to their kids. But a sizable fraction of this cohort will shed no tears for your technological obsolescence. Not if it means that they're going to be able to get an unlimited supply of whatever you produce at prices so low they don't even register. Here's an example that makes this distinction super clear. For decades, the largest, most profitable companies in the world have been outsourcing their customer service to overseas call centers. This move coincided with a trend towards steeply declining quality and thus a concomitant increase in how often you need to talk to a customer service rep. To make things even worse, these outsourced customer service reps don't work for the company and have severely curtailed agency and flexibility, meaning they generally can't solve your problem. Long before AI came along, these people were being used by giant corporations as catch all accountability sinks. Their job was to get yelled at by you at minimal expense to the company, which is why they earn terrible money and also why they can't give you a refund, change your plane ticket, or compensate you for the fact that your hotel room was covered in meth and dog hair. No matter how astute you are, it's hard to see these people as class allies in a war against the company that indirectly employs them and directly shafts you. But that becomes a lot easier when these human reps are replaced by chatbots, who are so much more obviously put in place to simply absorb your frustrations and abuse without helping you. In 2022, a Canadian named Jake Moffat contacted Air Canada Customer Service to find out about bereavement fares so that he could travel to his grandmother's funeral. This was shortly after Air Canada had wired up some chatbots to its customer service desk, and one of these bots helpfully advised Moffat that all he needed to do to make use of a bereavement ticket was to buy a regular full fare ticket, attend the funeral, and then submit a letter with proof of his grandmother's death. Whereupon Air Canada would provide him with a refund for the difference between the full fare ticket and and the discounted bereavement fare. Which is exactly what he did, only to be told by a human Air Canada customer service rep that the chatbot had hallucinated its advice about bereavement fares and that company policy required flyers to provide proof of death before buying their tickets, and so no refund would be forthcoming. Moffett pursued this through every level of Air Canada customer service support, laboriously escalating his claim until he had exhausted all appeals. Finally, he filed a case with the British Columbia Civil Resolution Tribunal, and more than two years later, he was refunded $812.02 Canadian. There's never just one ant the likelihood that the only lie an Air Canada chatbot told to one of its customers was this one is vanishingly small. Far more likely is that most of Air Canada's customers who lost money because one of the company's chatbots lied to them were simply unwilling to spend two years playing Air Canada's Kafka Larp just to get their money back. Their loss is Air Canada's gain. Now, I happen to be Canadian. All the best Americans are, you know. And that means that I have spent hundreds of hours on hold with Air Canada only to be connected to overseas call center employees who were systematically curtailed from solving my problems. I am the last person to defend the old system of resolving Air Canada complaints. But those customer service reps, low paid and ineffectual as they are, have repeatedly and sincerely tried to help me. When they made mistakes, it was due to misunderstandings. No one ever told me that the errors these people made were between me and them and had nothing to do with Air Canada. Someone sold Air Canada a chatbot by promising to put these people out of work. That same person knew, or should have known, that the chatbot would hallucinate a stream of incorrect advice that would cost Air Canada flyers like me money. In the war against Air Canada's remorseless and shitification, I am on the same side as those poor call center folks against inevitableism. The social arrangements of technology are a choice, not an inevitability. Consider the various iterations of the cash register. Prior to the cash register, a grocery store clerk did skilled labor that made them hard to replace, while basic arithmetic isn't that hard to master, reliably summing up orders consisting of many items and making changes for eight hours straight without making major mistakes requires a rare combination of talent and temperament. From the grocery store clerk's skill came power. The harder it is to replace a grocery clerk, the more the clerk can demand of their boss, including higher wages and better working conditions. After a grocery store invests in a cash register, the clerk becomes much easier to replace because the pool of people who can reliably punch buttons on an automatic tabulator and make change according to its calculations is much larger than the pool of people who can manage the same trick with pencil and paper. This means that the boss can now lower the clerk's wages, add more duties to their workday, or fire half their clerks and give their work to the remaining half. This isn't inevitable. The boss's freedom to fire a worker or change Their job description or wages does not exist in a vacuum. It is socially determined if the workers are in a union or even if they aren't. But they live in a country where the union movement has successfully lobbied for strong labor protections. The benefits of the cash register might be more equitably divided between labor and capital depending on these social arrangements. A grocery clerk with access to a cash register might be freed from boring labor and given more time to chat with their customers. If the store attracts more customers, the clerk can serve those customers thanks to the labor saving properties of the cash register and demand a share of the higher profits that come from serving more customers without hiring extra staff. The boss who tells you that the only way to use a cash register is to fire your co workers and make you do their jobs too is practicing vulgar Thatcherism. They are trying to bamboozle you with inevitableism. After all, there are many users of the cash register for whom it is an unalloyed good. Like the grocery across the street that's organized as a workers co op where the worker owners enjoy the register for its labor saving properties without having to fight with a boss over their share of the productivity gains of the new technology. Successor technologies to the cash register, like mobile phone attachments that let people process credit card transactions, allow creative workers to sell directly to passersby at art fairs, comic cons and flea markets. They enhance the welfare and improve the material circumstances of workers. The most important thing about the gadget isn't what it does, it's who it does it for and who it does it to. Inevitableists will tell you a version of this story whose moral is see? You take the good with the bad. They're wrong. You don't have to take the good with the bad. You can get the good without the bad. The difference isn't to be found in what a technology does, it's in what your boss uses the technology to inflict upon you. If you want to get the good without the bad, you need to switch from fighting technologies to fighting bosses. Really weird math. Your boss almost certainly loves AI. Bosses will not shut up about AI adopting AI, integrating AI using AI. These subjects seem to weigh more heavily on our bosses minds than objectively more important issues like their quarterly profits. When bosses get so excited about a new tech trend that they forget about profits, it's a good bet that you're living through a tech bubble. Even by the standards of tech bubbles, the AI bubble is a whopper. Hundreds of billions of actual dollars have been spent on AI hardware and data centers since OpenAI shipped ChatGPT3 in 2020. But even more hundreds of billions of imaginary dollars have been spent on AI. For example, Microsoft has a long standing partnership with OpenAI. As part of this partnership, Microsoft gives OpenAI tokens that OpenAI can spend to access the computers in Microsoft's data centers. OpenAI books these tokens as investment revenue at face value. This is some very funny accounting. The tokens Microsoft invests in OpenAI can only be redeemed for Microsoft data center access when Microsoft invests $10 billion worth of tokens in OpenAI. That $10 billion figure assumes that if you or I showed up at Microsoft and bought $1's worth of computing, and then Sam Altman showed up and ordered $10 billion worth of computing, Microsoft would simply multiply the amount of computing it sold to us by $10 billion. Think of it this say an ice cream cone costs $1 and contains one cup of ice cream. If you order 10 billion cups of ice cream, that isn't $10 billion worth of ice cream. Anyone who orders 10 billion cups of ice cream would expect a massive discount relative to the customer who buys just one cup. Though of course it remains highly unclear what you're planning to do with all that ice cream. So OpenAI is booking Microsoft's tokens as an investment that is grossly inflated. But that's just the warm up. The really weird math comes after OpenAI redeems its tokens with Microsoft to power ChatGPT and its other products. Microsoft books that transaction as $10 billion worth of AI related revenue to its cloud computing division. Imagine that the ice cream parlor has some video game machines on the back wall, and to play these you need tokens that you can get from the cashier in exchange for dollars. But the cashier likes you, so they give you $10 worth of video game tokens to play, which you promptly pump into the Galaga machine using Microsoft and OpenAI's funny accounting, the ice cream parlor has invested $10 in you by giving you $10 worth of funny money tokens, and then the ice cream parlor earned $10 in revenue when you pump the tokens into the machine. Microsoft and OpenAI aren't alone in using these accounting gimmicks to create the impression that more investment and revenue are flowing into AI companies. Every AI company is using all kinds of cheap tricks to juke the stats to make AI seem like a bigger phenomenon than it actually is. For example, you will often see established tech companies like Meta and Google trumpeting the amount of engagement their AI products received during the previous quarter. A naive person or a credulous investor might reasonably assume that this means that AI is popular among users. But that is far from the truth. In a paper published in June 2025 in the journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management with the catchy title Adverse Impacts of Revealing the Presence of Artificial Intelligence, AI Technology and Product and Service Descriptions on Purchase Intentions, the Mediating Role of Emotional Trust, and the Moderating Role of Perceived Risk. Two business school professors reported on their work surveying everyday people about their attitudes toward AI. They concluded that 90% of us are less likely to use a product that's advertised as AI based or AI enabled. If people don't like AI, what accounts for those glorious quarterly numbers about increasing AI adoption and gains in AI interactions? As with Centaurs and Reverse Centaurs, the seeming paradox disappears once you apply the lens of incentive and power to the system. To unpack those power relationships and incentives, we need to step out of AI for a moment and expand our focus to look at the tech industry that gave us the AI bubble. Where do AI products come from? Tech companies are among the most instrumented firms in world history. Tech companies pioneered the use of productivity monitoring tools for their tech staff, counting keystrokes per hour or lines of code per day. Savvy tech bosses have long known that these measurements were, at best, imperfect and even counterproductive. You don't want your coders to type as many lines as possible. You want them to type exactly the right number of correct lines. Famously, a young Bill Gates mocked IBM's practice of awarding bonuses to programmers based on the number of lines they generated as the race to build the world's heaviest airplane. But while many tech bosses move past measuring productivity by counting keystrokes, they continue to market those counterproductive productivity tools to their customers. Bill Gates may sneer at the race to build the world's heaviest airplane, but a key selling point for Office 365, Microsoft's flagship enterprise cloud productivity suite, is a set of monitoring tools that provides bosses with a dashboard that ranks their juniors activities how often they type, click and backspace how many times they open, close, or create a new document. Managers can find out how individual employees stack up against one another, see how their departments compare and even compare their company's productivity with productivity at rival firms in their sector. Apparently, no one who uses this feature to see proprietary information about their direct competitors ever worries that this means that those direct competitors can see their data. Meanwhile, tech workers may have largely escaped the kind of granular monitoring that their companies inflict on less technical workers. But their bosses haven't given up on measuring their performance. After all, the reason that tech workers are so easy to monitor is that tech products are so good at monitoring their users. The digital tools you use can gather endless statistics on your usage. The Instagram app, for example, tracks everything from how quickly you scroll to what's on the screen when you stop scrolling or just slow down. Even readings from your phone's accelerometer that tell Meta how you're holding and moving your phone while you interact with their app. All this can be correlated with your location, the specifications of your device and your other activities, the places you visited recently, the places you subsequently visit, the things you buy, and the people you converse with. Note that none of this is inevitable. Meta could absolutely let you look at Instagram without any of this surveillance. In 2022, two teenagers built their own Instagram app called OG App that did just that. OG App reached the top 10 download list on both the Google and Apple app stores within a day. And then Meta, Google and Apple colluded to shut it down. What your technology does is is less important than who it does it for and who it does it to. The fact that your technology tools spy on you means that the tech workers who make those tools can be rewarded or punished based on your usage. Perhaps you're old enough to remember Google, which was Google's 2011 full court press effort to launch a social media service to compete with Facebook. Google's product teams were ordered to find ways to integrate G into their products, for example by shifting YouTube comments to Google message boards to impress a sense of urgency upon their employees. Google management made Googlers bonuses and stock options contingent on how often the users of their products interacted with Google. It's common for techie's bonuses to account for much, even most of their annual pay. In tech management jargon, G interactions were made into the company's overriding key performance indicator, the number that everyone had to hit in order to end the year in the black. KPIs are used in many sectors, but tech is uniquely amenable to them because everything a user does with a product can be monitored and recorded, creating many categories of usage statistics that can be turned into KPIs. KPIs definitely have a focusing effect on the working lives of tech workers, but they are among the most perverse of all incentives. A piece of common wisdom goes you treasure what you measure. Or more pointedly, there's the version known as Goodhart's law. When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. If we're being generous, we can imagine that the Google bosses who turned G interactions into a KPI were thinking if users are interacting with G more, that means that they're enjoying it, even if they don't get that far. They were almost certainly thinking something like the fact that so many users are interacting with G will surely convince some investors that Google could be a significant player in social media in addition to dominating search. There's a big reason corporate leaders at large tech firms are so concerned with what investors think of their future prospects. That's because as long as a large tech firm can claim that it is growing, it will enjoy a substantially higher stock valuation than a comparable firm that is mature. Let's unpack that Publicly traded corporations all have something called a price to earnings ratio, or PE. If a company has a P E of 10, then for every dollar the company brings in, its Corporate valuation is $10. A company with a P E of 10 that makes $1 million per year will be valued at $10 million. PEs are not created equal. Consider two companies in similar lines of business, say a taxi company and an app based Ride Hail company. The taxi business has been around for 50 years, is handsomely profitable, and has never had a bad quarter. Meanwhile, the Ride Hail company is only 2 years old and it loses money every year. But there's another key difference their rate of growth. The Boring Taxi Company made a million bucks this year. Last year it also made a million bucks. As inflation rises, the Boring Taxi Company's annual revenue rises with it. But the earning power of the total revenue of the taxi company doesn't change. Ten years ago you could buy a million loaves of bread with the taxi company's total revenue. This year you can also buy a million loaves of bread with the take. This is called a mature company. There are lots of them and there are good reasons to invest in them, say if you want a safe bet on a small but steady return. They are the boring, safe stock market equivalent of a mom and pop landlord with a duplex that provides the owners with a home downstairs and a rental flat on top that covers their expenses. Expenses year in and year out. It's a safe bet. Unlike the Ride Hail business, which is operating in a risky field that has seen a lot of failures and just a few successes. Uber and Lyft Uber's never been profitable, at least not by the bedrock principles by which investors measure profitability for normal companies. It resorts to the weirdest accounting gimmicks imaginable to make the case that it's actually operating in the black. For example, many of Uber's foreign operations were such disasters that Uber eventually sold them to overseas rivals who are themselves failing and who bought out the local Uber operation with illiquid private stock, stock that isn't traded on a stock market and can't be readily converted to cash. Periodically, Uber will declare that their holdings in some dog shit, failing overseas Ride Hail company have massively increased in value and on that basis declared that it had a profitable year. This is the corporate version of your weird uncle who strains your Thanksgiving dinner conversation by bragging that his holdings of precious beanie babies and NFTs have skyrocketed in value and therefore he is now a millionaire. Lyft, meanwhile, took years to turn even a modest profit, and its actual rate of profit is very low, even with the majority of its expenses being borne by drivers who are misclassified as contractors and who supply the vehicles, fuel and maintenance to keep Lyft's operation running. So our ride hailing business, only 2 years old yet to turn a profit, looks like a worse bet than the taxi company. But there's one way in which the Ride Hail service and the taxi company differ that makes all the difference in the growth. The ride Hail service has increased its ridership and its revenue tenfold for every year it's been in operation. Like the taxi company, it is booking a million dollars in revenue per year. Unlike the taxi company whose profits are $200,000 a year, the ride hail company is losing a million dollars a year. But two years ago the ridehail company made $1,000. Last year it made $100,000. This year it made a million dollars. It is a growth company and the thing is, it's impossible to predict where that growth will end. Take Uber in the company's S1, the document Given to potential investors before a company debuts on the stock market enumerating its strengths, weaknesses and plans for the future. From 2019, Uber told investors that it planned to displace every ride in a motorized land transport in the world. Every bus, taxi, streetcar and subway ride on the planet. If Uber succeeds, then buying a share in the business isn't merely staking a claim on the revenue it's making today. It's a bet that pays out with a share of the incredible world swallowing revenue the company will generate later on as it grows. A share of Google in 1998 was a claim on the non existent revenue of a small but well regarded search engine that lacked any kind of business model. By 2025, it's turned into a share of a company that controls 90% of the world search traffic, bringing in $350 billion the previous year. When investors believe a company is a growth stock, they're prepared to pay much more than they are for a share in a mature company. Back in 2020, Tesla hit a PE of more than 1,000 to 1. Around that time, Ford's PE was less than 10 to 1. Why does this matter? After all, valuation isn't the same thing as revenue. The company doesn't own any shares in itself. Those shares are all disbursed among the original investors, the company's executives, the institutional investors like insurance companies and pension funds, and retail investors like you and me, who might buy a few shares through a Schwab account for our retirement. When the company's share price goes up, the company doesn't get richer, its shareholders do. But here's the thing. When a company has a solid growth stock, other people want that stock. The company can use stock to buy stuff like other companies. Key personnel can be hired at whopping compensation rates, with the majority of that compensation coming in stock. Where does the company get the stock to buy these companies and hire these genius coders by typing zeros into a spreadsheet? A company's own stock is an endogenous substance. It emanates from within the body corporate. There are some limits on how much stock a company can issue without getting into trouble. But the fact remains that the company issues its own stock. It doesn't have to rely on any external force to carry off this trick. Contrast that with a mature company, one that is bidding on the same resources. The mature firm is expected to pay for things with money, which is exogenous to the company. Money comes from your country's central bank and its fiscal agents, such as chartered banks. Money does not come from within a company. If you doubt it, by all means stop listening to this book, head into the office and use the company laser printer to run off a stack of US hundred dollar bills. Draw me a postcard from federal prison and let me know how the experiment went. Say our taxi company wants to compete with the Ride Hail company. The taxi company's got some cash in the bank, of course, so it can make a job offer to some smart app coders and a project manager to oversee the production of a taxi summoning app. If they're feeling really ambitious, they can go to their bank manager and ask for a loan so that they can buy a little app startup. Or they can even approach an outside investor to buy a share of the company with funds that can be used to bid on these key personnel and acquisitions. But the ride hail company also wants to hire key app programmers and buy promising app startups. Unlike the taxi company, they don't have to dip into their non existent savings to make these purchases. They can offer stock instead, which they generate by typing zeros into a spreadsheet. Not only that, but they can approach their own bank manager and take it alone and stake their stock as collateral, securing a preferential interest rate that's better than anything the taxi company can get. The billions Elon Musk uses to buy companies like Twitter and institutions like the US Presidency are all loans collateralized with Tesla's stock, which is why he's so vulnerable to fluctuations in Tesla's share price. They can offer a stake in their company to a new investor who will accept far less stock for a far higher price. In other words, growth companies find it far easier to grow. They can hire key personnel and buy key firms at a price that's far lower than the price paid by their mature rivals. Being a growth company is awfully nice, but it's also awfully precarious. In finance. They speak of Stein's Law, which holds that if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. Companies that grow at a fierce clip make for attractive investments, but they also demand close attention on the part of investors. Because the faster a company grows, the faster it will reach some factor that ends its growth. Which brings us back to Google. The company commands a 90% market share in search. That means that virtually everyone uses Google for search. The 10% who don't use Google are almost certainly people who've made a conscious firm decision to use something else. Remember in 2024, Google was convicted of operating an illegal monopoly because of the tens of billions of dollars the company spent every year buying up default search status on every operating system, device and browser. It's very hard to even find a search box that isn't wired into Google's servers. And even if you do somehow discover a search engine you prefer to Google, you will have to change the defaults in every browser and device you use. And remember to do so every time you get a new phone or new laptop or just install a new browser. 90% of the market. And true systemic ubiquity is the very definition of of a mature business. But what it really means is that Google's growth is unlikely to come from signing up new searchers. I mean, sure, they could try raising another billion human beings to adulthood while convincing them to be Google users. You may be familiar with this project, which Google calls Google Classroom. This might just work, but it's going to take more than a decade and markets are fickle and impatient. Google can try to juice their search revenue without adding more search users. The company lost another monopolization case in 2024 over one tactic they deployed to extract more revenue per searcher. According to records in U.S. and plaintiff States v. Google LLC, Google executives deliberately made their search results worse in the expectation that users would have to repeatedly search Google to get the information they were seeking. Every time you search anew, that's another chance for Google to show you more ads. But this is a gimmick. Google might be able to juice its search revenue by making you search two or three times to get your answer. They may be able to double the number of ads on every page, but they can't make you search 10 times more to get the information, and they can't make you wade through 10 times more ads. Eventually you'll get so fucked off with Google's inshittification that you'll find some other search engine to try. For Google to maintain a credible story about how it will continue to grow, it has to find new lands to conquer. That's why Google was so desperate to make Google happen. If they could convince Wall street that they were a credible competitor to Facebook, then the market would treat Google as though it might conceivably double or triple in size and value its stock accordingly. What's more, that sky high share price will let Google buy the companies and hire the personnel to make that growth possible. Poaching Facebook's best product managers and coders. Buying up buzzy new social media startups just as Facebook bought Instagram and WhatsApp and folding them into Google's social media offerings. Which is to say that if the market believes you can grow, the resulting P E ratio provides the resources you need to turn that belief in life into reality. But this is a double edged, razor sharp sword. The corollary of the idea that a growing company is worth several times more than a similar mature company is. Once a company stops growing, it becomes vastly overvalued because it is now a mature company. If you're holding a lot of stock in a growth company, you can certainly enjoy the ride up. But you need to sleep with one eye open and one fist poised over the sell button the minute the market decides that the company's growth has petered out, there will be a mass sell off, and not just because investors have lost confidence in the company's growth prospects, but because investors believe other investors have lost confidence in the company's growth prospects. It doesn't matter if you think the company might keep growing. If no one else believes that, then the price of the shares you're holding are going to plunge, and as they do, the company will lose one of the key factors that will help it grow, namely that high P E ratio. This is why extremely profitable big tech companies experience flash crashes in their share price whenever there's a hint of bad news. A recent spectacular example came in January 2022 when Meta warned investors that it had experienced less growth among US Users than projected.

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Publish it, write it, sing it, swing to it, yodel it.

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In his spare time, he likes to carve useful objects out of wood, antler and steel.