Bet on YouTube

Over the past year, I’ve been a skeptic various social media platforms and technological developments. I do not think artificial intelligence represents a revolution on the order of what came before us in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I do not think Threads, BlueSky, or Elon Musk’s X can begin to approximate the cultural influence of 2010s Twitter. That era will never come back. Now more than ever, as the IT revolution winds down and innovation stalls out—Apple can do little but pump out new iPhones and Mark Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is a historic flop—it’s a time to be wary of hype. Whether it’s cryptocurrency or ChatGPT, second-rate innovations are passed off as the equivalent of electrification or the introduction of the personal computer. As times goes on, tech moguls will only grow more desperate to hawk their wares to a wary public.