#RotComBubble
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www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 13, 2024 at 5:04 AM
edzitron.com

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 11, 2024 at 2:58 PM
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We may or may not do so before they realise the jig is up

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 9, 2024 at 6:47 AM
edzitron.com
Yep
www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 13, 2024 at 7:13 AM
edzitron.com
All roads lead back to the Rot Com-Bubble from 2024

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
The Rot-Com Bubble
If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two part deep dive into the Rot-Com Bubble. The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at th...
www.wheresyoured.at
June 5, 2026 at 12:57 AM
edzitron.com
We're at the end of the Rot-Com boom - every single weird, stupid concept (metaverse, crypto, generative AI) is a symptom of an industry that realizes that there isn't another trillion-dollar market to sell into having a dangerous, expensive mid life crisis.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:28 PM
edzitron.com
Every major tech company is "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 any particular need. 
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:28 PM
edzitron.com
Sometime in 2019, things changed in tech - things got iterative rather than innovative, and tech began trying to sell us half-baked concepts that only helped VCs get rich - cryptocurrency, the metaverse, and now generative AI that lacks any real utility.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:27 PM
edzitron.com
Every big tech firm is acting like generative AI is the next big thing because they're desperate. Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and Mark Zuckerberg realize that if everybody realized generative AI isn't the next hyper-growth market, they have nothing else.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:31 PM
edzitron.com
The tech industry has run out of hyper-growth markets at a time when traffic to the majority of the web's top 100 platforms have stopped growing - Google, Amazon, Twitch, Facebook and Twitter have all lost traffic every year since 2021. It's a massacre. 
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:28 PM
edzitron.com
Mark Zuckerberg's "metaverse" push was an act of desperation, trying to create a new hyper-growth market that tech could build into, and the industry ran with an idea of a new internet that big tech owned. Except the concept was flawed and decades early.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:30 PM
edzitron.com
The tech industry took the last 20 years for granted - there were so many obvious ideas that software could solve that it seemed that any big tech company could grow forever. 

But that was predicated on there always being new hyper-growth markets.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:30 PM
edzitron.com
Every single weird idea - the metaverse, crypto and generative AI - is a symptom of the tech industry's mid-life crisis, because once the markets realize that big tech hasn't got another trillion-dollar perpetual growth concept, their stocks will be savaged.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:31 PM
edzitron.com
Newsletter: Tech's hyper-growth era is ending. Almost every major web platform has seen traffic declines since 2021, and the industry is getting desperate as it realizes there aren't any massive new markets left- and generative AI isn't the next big thing.
www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
The Rot-Com Bubble
If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two parter that further expands on the Rot-Com Bubble, coming out Wednesday and Friday. The noxious growth-at-all...
www.wheresyoured.at
June 3, 2024 at 6:27 PM
edzitron.com
Generative AI has survived because it has the *hint* of innovation, though in reality, it's a plagiarism-fueled automation integration, and a completely different piece of tech to what Sam Altman has been hyping. There is no way Gen. Ai becomes AGI.
 wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:32 PM
edzitron.com
Tech's hyper-focus on finding hyper-growth markets caused innovation to stagnate, and the industry has become dominated by product managers, management consultants, and snake oil salesmen that promise the world then deliver mediocrity like the Rabbit R1.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:32 PM
edzitron.com
When the markets realize generative AI isn't a trillion-dollar market, the Rot-Com bubble will burst as Wall Street works out that big tech doesn't always have the next big thing. It'll be punishing, but good thing for a tech industry that's lost its way.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:33 PM
edzitron.com
Me, in June.
www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
I believe we're at the end of the Rot-Com boom — the tech industry's hyper-growth cycle where there were so many lands to conquer, so many new ways to pile money into so many new, innovative ideas that it felt like every tech company could experience perpetual growth simply by throwing money at the problem. It explains why so many tech products — YouTube, Google Search, Facebook, and so on — feel like they’ve got tangibly worse. There’s no incentive to improve the things you’ve already built when you’re perpetually working on the next big thing. This belief — that exponential growth is not just a reasonable expectation, but a requirement — is central to the core rot in the tech industry, and as these rapacious demands run into reality, the Rot-Com bubble has begun to deflate. As we speak, the tech industry is grappling with a mid-life crisis where it desperately searches for the next hyper-growth market, eagerly pushing customers and businesses to adopt technology that nobody asked for in the hopes that they can keep the Rot Economy alive.
December 8, 2024 at 11:55 PM
edzitron.com
The Rabbit R1 sold 100,000 units despite CEO Jesse Lyu outright lying about what it can do - but really, what separates Lyu from Sam Altman and his bare-faced lies about the future of ChatGPT? Sam Altman is just a better-connected grifter.
wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
June 3, 2024 at 6:32 PM
edzitron.com
Rot com bubble! www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
The Rot-Com Bubble
If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two part deep dive into the Rot-Com Bubble. The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at th...
www.wheresyoured.at
December 15, 2025 at 1:17 AM
edzitron.com
Same reason he’s going after generative AI: he is totally out of hyper-growth ideas to carry Meta any further once the digital ad industry begins to contract

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
The tech, however, was never there. Mark Zuckerberg sold everybody on the concept of a Ready Player One-esque metaverse. Putting aside the fact that Ready Player One is a poorly-written dystopia, this vision hinges heavily on the idea of technology that completely immerses the user, allowing them to exist in a digital world that feels real. The reality was far worse — nausea-inducing headsets that led you into a clunky, cartoonish world that was neither fun nor practical, and tens of billions of dollars of R&D costs developing headsets that lose money on every sale. Zuckerberg's glossy metaverse video — published at the same time Facebook rebranded to Meta, and was significant insofar as it was a demonstration of the company’s future ambitions and direction — showed exactly what he hoped he could build, and had he done so I'd argue it might have been a success, But said success would be predicated on a pace of innovation that we've not had in over a decade. Forty billion dollars later, the metaverse is no closer to existing, yet Zuckerberg keeps burning cash in the hopes that he can get just one more hit of hyper-growth. That's all he needs, man. That's why Zuckerberg is so full-force on generative AI, shoving it into every Meta platform regardless of whether it does anything useful or says extremely strange things, like pretending it’s a parent of a gifted child and recommending schools to other (actual) parents. It's the same reason that Sundar Pichai and Liz Reid are forcing generative AI into Google Search even as it actively misinforms their customers, recommending people introduce glue and rocks to their diet, claiming former U.S. President Barack Obama is a muslim, and regurgitating stories from satirical news outlet The Onion as indisputable fact.
December 22, 2024 at 9:51 PM
edzitron.com
Not a bailout situation. Big tech has run out of growth markets, which is why they desperately attached to AI. When that fails, Mag7 makes up 30%~ of the stock market's value. What happens when the market doesn't believe tech can grow forever? Bad stuff.

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
I am sure there are some that will say I'm wrong, that tech's hyper-growth era isn't over, and that generative AI will usher in a glorious new future of powerful assistants. But seriously, what does that look like? What happens next? Where does generative AI go from here? Do they fix the problems? Have they made these things cheaper, or more efficient, or found a way to eliminate hallucinations? How will OpenAI train GPT-5? Has it found five times the amount of training data that was used to train GPT-4 yet? Has Google, or Meta, or Microsoft found a way to make generative AI profitable yet, and if not, how will they do so? And crucially, when does generative AI suddenly prove itself useful? Where is the big moment that changes everything? The answer is simple: it isn't coming. Generative AI is not going to change the world, and while artificial intelligence itself might, it isn't going to do so in the hands of Sam Altman and OpenAI, or Anthropic. When the bubble bursts, I imagine these firms will be absorbed by the massive tech companies that have put billions of dollars into them in exactly the same way that Microsoft absorbed Inflection, quietly hiding their shameful failures and repurposing the massive compute investments to bolster the already-existent cloud infrastructure.
February 24, 2025 at 11:23 PM
eltonskuns.bsky.social
Or as @zitron.bsky.social calls it – The Rot-Com Bubble: www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
The Rot-Com Bubble
If you enjoy this post, why not subscribe to my podcast Better Offline? This week's a two part deep dive into the Rot-Com Bubble. The noxious growth-at-all-costs mindset of the Rot Economy sits at th...
www.wheresyoured.at
June 9, 2024 at 6:22 AM
edzitron.com
So, it’s absolutely sucked the excitement out of tech unless it’s AI, but the reality is that the tech industry has no other hyper-growth markets to dump this money into. They’re out of ideas!

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
Every single one of these questionable, weird products and decisions is an act of desperation, an attempt to keep the growth-at-all-costs fire from going out. There are a finite amount of people in the world, and an even-more-finite amount that will go online at any given time, and in turn even fewer of them that might actually use a particular service. Previously, these companies were able to anticipate and meet customers' needs on both a consumer and enterprise level, in part because they understood their customers and knew their success derived from them. Despite that, I believe that, behind the scenes, many of these companies have been struggling for years to find the next big thing, knowing that while there might be needs to be met (those inconvenient customers mentioned earlier), those needs might not be things that will create perpetual double-digit revenue growth, or convince Wall Street analysts of the growth potential of their stock. Though I can’t say for certain, I’d also argue that the ascent of multiple management consultant types in the tech industry — people like Sheryl Sandberg, Adam Mosseri, Sundar Pichai and Sam Altman — is a testament to how obvious the next big thing has been for some time, and their failure to adapt or create useful products a symptom of a larger problem of innovation taking a back seat to growth.
December 21, 2024 at 10:55 PM
edzitron.com
When I wrote the Rot-Com Bubble in June 2024, I specifically warned people that generative AI was a result of tech's desperation for a new growth market. The markets love tech because they are the best at growth. What happens when that changes?

www.wheresyoured.at/rotcombubble/
ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and other Large Language Models can do some things that are superficially cool. They can generate images, quickly query datasets (albeit with no guarantees of accuracy), and craft poetry, but there is no endearing reason to pick up one of them every day and use them. The use cases they enable are neither exciting nor ubiquitous, nor are they, if we're honest, anything like what tech executives are trying to sell us, and the problem might not be that it's useless, but that as a piece of technology, it just isn't a hyper-growth market or industry-changer, no matter how many hundreds of billions we put into it. Sam Altman isn't asking Microsoft for a $100 billion supercomputer because generative AI is going to get better — he's doing it because what we have today isn't the world-changing boondoggle that the tech industry needs it to be, and his only prospect of fulfilling the lofty promises he’s made is with a tech industry equivalent of the Marshall Plan. Yet, without generative AI, what do these companies have left? What's the next big thing? For the best part of 15 years we've assumed that the tech industry would always have something up its sleeves, but what's become painfully apparent is that the tech industry might have run out of big, sexy things to sell us, and the "disruption" that tech has become so well-known for was predicated on there being markets for them to disrupt, and ideas that they could fund to do so. A paper from Nature from last year posited that the pace of disruptive research is slowing, and I believe the same might be happening in tech, except we've been conflating "innovation" and "finding new markets to add software and hardware to" for twenty years.
February 24, 2025 at 11:25 PM