Wonderful concept!

John Herrmann describes most of the tech tyranny as executive fantasies.

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Changing Facebook’s name to Meta was a bold attempt not just to rebrand a company but to set an industry agenda, and while it ultimately failed, it sort of worked, for a while.

One question worth dwelling on, however, is why it worked at all — and why people like Zuckerberg were so zealously committed to it, despite the massive costs. Low interest rates couldn’t have hurt. Crypto-adjacency had something to do with it. A sense of impending stagnation among tech giants surely provided some anxious fuel.

Empty offices and newly empowered employees drove some tech executives out of their minds, and the Metaverse promised a solution, or at least functioned as a response. It represented an intoxicating fantasy, just not one that most of us would recognize — or, if we did, one that we might recognize as sort of a nightmare.

Executive fantasies — and executive autonomy in general — get short shrift in most popular theories about How Things Work, I think, especially in the tech industry, where superstar founders and CEOs are given considerable deference and leeway. They live weird lives, develop idiosyncratic views of the world, and have unusual amounts of power.

Consider what crypto looked like from the very top: not just a potentially promising area for investment, a modest but meaningful grassroots phenomenon among users, or an engine for wealth, but also the crude fantasy of total regulatory freedom, a path to a stateless, tech-centric world. AI, too, represents, among other things, a profound tech-exec fantasy: an endless supply of cheap and obedient labor and a chance to take ownership of the means, of, well, everything.

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Many people have been thinking along these lines. Herrmann pulls it all together into an EXTREMELY powerful unified concept.

Some executives have always suffered from similar fantasies. Automotive history is riddled with world-changing grandiose failures. Before QE, the rigid negative feedback of customer desires and heartless bankers brought down those unfounded empires quickly. A legless metacompany floating in the air might attract enough stock-buying suckers to get started, but as soon as it tried to produce a real car or get a real loan, it collapsed.

Under QE and ZIRP, customers aren’t needed and bankers are eager to pour infinite free money into the weirdest and stupidest ideas. A failure means a tax writeoff, which is the sole purpose of venture capitalists. Now that QE has snapped to QT, the Laputa balloons are popping and flibberflobbering to the ground in a delicious way.