Zombie Musknukonomics
" Just look behind that bank of servers. Somewhere there is a plug going into a socket in the wall " The problem with Silicon Valley drinking its own Kool Aid is that, beneath the gargantuan market caps, many of its highest-profile players remain unprofitable, while others have achieved profitability through forms of rentierism (such as Amazon Web Services) as well as heavy reliance on government contracts and subsidies that conflict with the industry’s ethos of rugged entrepreneurialism. The ongoing push from various Big Tech figures to deregulate cryptocurrencies and online payment platforms suggests that they regard the most promising frontier of profitability not in world-transforming technologies, but in new forms of financial speculation. In other words, Silicon Valley may see itself as the engine of American growth, but it’s been running on fumes for some time. The tech gold rush of the 2010s was downstream from the Fed’s zero interest rate policy. The current AI b...
