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snoozefestaudioWhile Twitter's been stealing all the attention for it's dramatic implosion, It's not the only place where tech workers are losing their jobs.
Almost every app-based company you can think of is laying people off right now, with two of the biggest being Facebook (Meta) and Amazon, but the list also includes Microsoft, Netflix, Lyft, Coinbase, Shopify, Snap, Robinhood... and on, and on.
Indeed, the whole reason Elon Musk is throwing such a tantrum over at Twitter is because it wasn't doing well financially before he was forced to buy it for way too much money, because of a delusional contract he signed in a drunken stupor, or something.
But why was Twitter struggling before that?.. and why are ALL the app-based corporations that ruled the twenty-teens also suddenly struggling?
For goodness sake, I just read today that Amazon is contemplating getting rid of Alexa!
And if you look for answers, they'll say stuff like, Well... they over-hired during the pandemic and now it's time to cut back a bit.
Or about Alexa, they'll say, Alexa is losing 10 billion dollars a year, because there's no way to monetize it!
But if you push a bit further about the whole thing, you'll hear them also say, Erm... and, there's a recession coming!
--<>--
So what that all boils down to is... tech investors are panicking. It's a panic.
So, for example, they may say NOW, that tech companies, over-hired two years ago, but... two years ago, that was considered normal hiring in the midst of a tech boom... fueled by what we thought would be a permanent change in the way we lived!
Remember everybody saying that after Covid the world would never go back to the way it was. We'd all work from home. Kids would school a lot more from home over Zoom. Gas prices would stay low beause nobody would be driving anymore! We'd all share rides in electric cars owned by Uber, bla bla bla!
And just as what WAS normal hiring, is NOW seen as over-hiring... the money Amazon blew every quarter to keep Alexa alive for a decade was never seen as a loss!
Because when investors are behind your company... there's no such THING as losing money!
You're just spending money... that will pan out some day down the road!.. But the stock price is going up TODAY, so... everybody's winning! Nothing's being lost!
But all of those things get redefined, as soon as investors panic and start to drive stock prices down.
--<>--
PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT a stock expert, nor am I claiming to be one. BUT... I have been around the block a few times!
I've seen all of this happen before, and I remember everything the analysts were saying back then... because I listened to the news a lot... and my livelihood hung in the balance, so I wanted to understand what the hell was going on.
The year was 2001... and they would eventually call it, the Dot.Com Bust!
------------{=0=}------------
Before smart phones existed, the first big economic internet boom was between 1996 and 2000.
At the time they called it a boom... but in hindsight they said it had been a bubble, but either way, it all went bust in 2001.
The boom was enabled by the first wave of affordable, all-in-one PC kits... computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard, two speakers, and... most importantly... a modem!
The late 1990s was the first time that an ordinary person could afford such a system... all in one box, off the shelf... take it home... and plug it into their phone jack.
With a free CD from AOL... which were mass mailed to everybody in the goddam country... and a bank account number... you could be online the same night!
And once everybody was online, everybody started making web pages! Everybody had a copy of HTML for Dummies, and some people had a copy of JavaScript for Dummies... and while most people just made silly poetry pages on AngelFire, or Geocities...
SOME people made... EBay, and Google, and PayPal, and Blogger, and MapQuest, and Amazon Online Bookstore, and... the list of new websites and web services was just growing every day, and the possibilities seemed LIMITLESS!
Computers got faster, hard drives got bigger, and of course, the biggest most booming job markets were for programmers & coders, and broadband providers & installers.
Jobs like this were everywhere... anybody could get in on the ground floor with little to no experience... and they started you at $20.00 per hour, with all kinds of perks and benefits! And how could they be so magnanimous?... because INVESTORS!
Anything tech related... any website... any web infrastructure... was just DRENCHED with money, by investors.
The whole idea was, the bigger we grow the internet, the more people can do with it, and the more money we can MAKE!... SOMEDAY!... HAHAHAHA!... YAAAAAS!....
AOL actually ruled the world, for a time! AOL got so big, it merged with publishing giant, Time, and entertainment giant, Warner, and got top billing in the resulting megacorporation... AOL Time Warner!
I always think back to AOL Time Warner, whenever people say Google is getting too big. Because that really was a thing, and at the time, AOL Time Warner looked like this unstoppable megolopoly juggernaut that would rule the planet for a thousand years!
Second to AOL, was Yahoo! Yahoo was the only corporation powerful enough to stand up to AOL.
It sounds like I'm talking about a parallel universe, now!
At any rate, the tech markets began to get a bit shaky in winter 2000/2001, and by spring of 2001, everything was in freefall! Websites and ISPs dropping like flies... the whole tech market bottomed out!
Unemployment was so high that Congress had to extend unemployment benefits for six months.
But that recession was well underway BEFORE 9/11.
--<>--
What sparked the panic that burst the bubble? It's one of those things where if somebody says they know the answer... they don't understand economics.
AOL, for example had income! They charged their subscribers a TON! They started out charging people by the HOUR!.. and they were hooked right into your bank account, so they'd just reach in and TAKE your money!
Not only that, but their base was hyper loyal... probably many of the same people who would years later go on to storm the Capitol! That kind of loyal! But it still failed.
Google, on the other hand, was just a little start up at the time, and... well, now they own half the universe, and their name is a verb in the dictionary!
--<>--
It might make more sense to think of the Dot.Com bust as just the first tremor in a larger, longer earthquake, building up tension beneath the surface. Because not only was it followed by 9/11 and years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but...
As early as 2006, it was clear that a housing bubble was inflating.
People only seem to remember the bank collapse of 2008 now, but it was preceded in 2007 by a collapse in real estate prices, as the housing bubble burst... and only after this did we see a near total bank collapse in late 2008.
So... taken all together, the years of 2001 through 2008 were kinda just one long period of market chaos, with investors inflating and bursting bubbles here, there, and everywhere!
------------{=0=}------------
But it was just at the end of that period... in the fall of 2007... that the first I-Phone hit the market!
We didn't quite realize it yet, but this new invention would transform the internet, from a website based universe, that you accessed from your desk at home... to an app based universe, that was in your pocket wherever you went.
Some of the biggest websites at the time, like YouTube, and Facebook, didn't have much trouble existing in both worlds. Twitter, of course, did a lot better in the age of the smart phone than it had been doing in the earlier age of the SMS flip phone.
Instagram, Tumblr, and Vine, were some of the newcomers who existed way more on the phone than on the computer screen...
And meanwhile, old classics like Blogger, and Livejournal (the site that Dreamwidth is an emulator of) totally fizzled out in the new age of hand held social media.
--<>--
The whole dynamic between tweeting and blogging is kind of fascinating to look back at, now.
When things settled down after the Dot.Com bust, blogging was HUGE! Everybody had a blog. Everybody liked to read a good blog. People talked about the, "blog-o-verse."
When YouTube came along, the concept of the, "vlog," was born, and there was a whole generation of vloggers out there... just blogging with their mouth in front of a camera, instead of with a keyboard in hyptertext.
And Twitter was hyped as, "micro-blogging!"
Who had time for long-winded idiots and their ten-million word blog posts? Truly clever genius people could get across MORE wit and wisdom in 140 characters!
Micro blogging was an art! It really DID take a lot of expertise to just cut through all the bullshit and distill a crackling spark of insight down to a clean 140 characters!
Vine, said, hold my beer, and brought us micro-VLOGs... of maximum, SIX goddamn seconds!
People loved both of them!
But OH MY, was the writing on the wall for Blogger and Livejournal by then!.. don't forget that podcasting was also a thing by then!
Absolutely nobody had any patience for READING a boring, bloated old BLOG!
--<>--
But since then... micro-blogging has died!
And in Twitter's case, it died fighting a war on two fronts... on the one hand, the short-form format was just as effective for extremist propoganda, as for wit and wisdom. Look no further than Donald Trump's vast library of tweets for proof of that!
But on the other hand, people started trying to use Twitter to articulate long, thoughtful treatments of complex subjects... in the form of insanely long chain-tweets!
Twitter doubled the character limit to 280... which did not help either problem, but DID pretty much destroy the entire original concept for the platform.
--<>--
In retrospect, Livejournal, and Tumblr kinda did it the best... because you could blog, but you could also embed videos, audio, photos, links to your references... etcetera!
I Do think LiveJournal did it the best, however, because it let you link to past blogs, or specific parts of past blogs... and it automatically put a time and date stamp on every entry!.. something Tumblr notoriously failed to ever do.
However, Livejournal did not have the @ or # conventions, when it was around... and this emulator of it cannot embed more modern content, such as TikToks.
--<>--
A nice future app would be blog based, but be able to link to sources, embed any kind of media, tag other users, hashtag itself, be re-postable, and somehow be moderated and monetized adequately, without decending into advertising hell, or propoganda hell.
I dunno if that's possible! But we should try!
------------{=0=}------------
Tying this all back up at the end here... I think what we're witnessing today, with these mass layoffs in the app sector, is a modern day Dot.Com bust. Call it, the hashtag bust... or #bust.
I think it's being driven by an investor panic.
And that panic may be due... partly to the simple fact that times are changing, so the social media titans of the twenty-teens are just looking a little too battle worn and problematic...
And also, to the obvious tension that's been building in the housing market again...
And to the obvious tensions in the labor market as a whole, with workers demanding higher wages and better conditions.
All of those things would tend to spook investors, because any one of those sectors could collapse or explode and leave them penniless, if they're on the wrong side!
And the midterms did not help to clarify where any of this is going in the next two years!
--<>--
But by clutching back their money... to play it safe... and allowing those social media giants of the twenty-teens to scramble, and fail...
The door opens up for new apps to step in and replace them.
And after twenty years of this...
Maybe it's been long enough for developers to want to go back to our roots and bring back some of the better ideas that fell by the wayside... and incorporate them into new ideas we haven't yet seen.
°¦}
https://soundcloud.com/snoozefestaudio
Almost every app-based company you can think of is laying people off right now, with two of the biggest being Facebook (Meta) and Amazon, but the list also includes Microsoft, Netflix, Lyft, Coinbase, Shopify, Snap, Robinhood... and on, and on.
Indeed, the whole reason Elon Musk is throwing such a tantrum over at Twitter is because it wasn't doing well financially before he was forced to buy it for way too much money, because of a delusional contract he signed in a drunken stupor, or something.
But why was Twitter struggling before that?.. and why are ALL the app-based corporations that ruled the twenty-teens also suddenly struggling?
For goodness sake, I just read today that Amazon is contemplating getting rid of Alexa!
And if you look for answers, they'll say stuff like, Well... they over-hired during the pandemic and now it's time to cut back a bit.
Or about Alexa, they'll say, Alexa is losing 10 billion dollars a year, because there's no way to monetize it!
But if you push a bit further about the whole thing, you'll hear them also say, Erm... and, there's a recession coming!
So what that all boils down to is... tech investors are panicking. It's a panic.
So, for example, they may say NOW, that tech companies, over-hired two years ago, but... two years ago, that was considered normal hiring in the midst of a tech boom... fueled by what we thought would be a permanent change in the way we lived!
Remember everybody saying that after Covid the world would never go back to the way it was. We'd all work from home. Kids would school a lot more from home over Zoom. Gas prices would stay low beause nobody would be driving anymore! We'd all share rides in electric cars owned by Uber, bla bla bla!
And just as what WAS normal hiring, is NOW seen as over-hiring... the money Amazon blew every quarter to keep Alexa alive for a decade was never seen as a loss!
Because when investors are behind your company... there's no such THING as losing money!
You're just spending money... that will pan out some day down the road!.. But the stock price is going up TODAY, so... everybody's winning! Nothing's being lost!
But all of those things get redefined, as soon as investors panic and start to drive stock prices down.
PLEASE NOTE: I am NOT a stock expert, nor am I claiming to be one. BUT... I have been around the block a few times!
I've seen all of this happen before, and I remember everything the analysts were saying back then... because I listened to the news a lot... and my livelihood hung in the balance, so I wanted to understand what the hell was going on.
The year was 2001... and they would eventually call it, the Dot.Com Bust!
Before smart phones existed, the first big economic internet boom was between 1996 and 2000.
At the time they called it a boom... but in hindsight they said it had been a bubble, but either way, it all went bust in 2001.
The boom was enabled by the first wave of affordable, all-in-one PC kits... computer, monitor, mouse, keyboard, two speakers, and... most importantly... a modem!
The late 1990s was the first time that an ordinary person could afford such a system... all in one box, off the shelf... take it home... and plug it into their phone jack.
With a free CD from AOL... which were mass mailed to everybody in the goddam country... and a bank account number... you could be online the same night!
And once everybody was online, everybody started making web pages! Everybody had a copy of HTML for Dummies, and some people had a copy of JavaScript for Dummies... and while most people just made silly poetry pages on AngelFire, or Geocities...
SOME people made... EBay, and Google, and PayPal, and Blogger, and MapQuest, and Amazon Online Bookstore, and... the list of new websites and web services was just growing every day, and the possibilities seemed LIMITLESS!
Computers got faster, hard drives got bigger, and of course, the biggest most booming job markets were for programmers & coders, and broadband providers & installers.
Jobs like this were everywhere... anybody could get in on the ground floor with little to no experience... and they started you at $20.00 per hour, with all kinds of perks and benefits! And how could they be so magnanimous?... because INVESTORS!
Anything tech related... any website... any web infrastructure... was just DRENCHED with money, by investors.
The whole idea was, the bigger we grow the internet, the more people can do with it, and the more money we can MAKE!... SOMEDAY!... HAHAHAHA!... YAAAAAS!....
AOL actually ruled the world, for a time! AOL got so big, it merged with publishing giant, Time, and entertainment giant, Warner, and got top billing in the resulting megacorporation... AOL Time Warner!
I always think back to AOL Time Warner, whenever people say Google is getting too big. Because that really was a thing, and at the time, AOL Time Warner looked like this unstoppable megolopoly juggernaut that would rule the planet for a thousand years!
Second to AOL, was Yahoo! Yahoo was the only corporation powerful enough to stand up to AOL.
It sounds like I'm talking about a parallel universe, now!
At any rate, the tech markets began to get a bit shaky in winter 2000/2001, and by spring of 2001, everything was in freefall! Websites and ISPs dropping like flies... the whole tech market bottomed out!
Unemployment was so high that Congress had to extend unemployment benefits for six months.
But that recession was well underway BEFORE 9/11.
What sparked the panic that burst the bubble? It's one of those things where if somebody says they know the answer... they don't understand economics.
AOL, for example had income! They charged their subscribers a TON! They started out charging people by the HOUR!.. and they were hooked right into your bank account, so they'd just reach in and TAKE your money!
Not only that, but their base was hyper loyal... probably many of the same people who would years later go on to storm the Capitol! That kind of loyal! But it still failed.
Google, on the other hand, was just a little start up at the time, and... well, now they own half the universe, and their name is a verb in the dictionary!
It might make more sense to think of the Dot.Com bust as just the first tremor in a larger, longer earthquake, building up tension beneath the surface. Because not only was it followed by 9/11 and years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, but...
As early as 2006, it was clear that a housing bubble was inflating.
People only seem to remember the bank collapse of 2008 now, but it was preceded in 2007 by a collapse in real estate prices, as the housing bubble burst... and only after this did we see a near total bank collapse in late 2008.
So... taken all together, the years of 2001 through 2008 were kinda just one long period of market chaos, with investors inflating and bursting bubbles here, there, and everywhere!
But it was just at the end of that period... in the fall of 2007... that the first I-Phone hit the market!
We didn't quite realize it yet, but this new invention would transform the internet, from a website based universe, that you accessed from your desk at home... to an app based universe, that was in your pocket wherever you went.
Some of the biggest websites at the time, like YouTube, and Facebook, didn't have much trouble existing in both worlds. Twitter, of course, did a lot better in the age of the smart phone than it had been doing in the earlier age of the SMS flip phone.
Instagram, Tumblr, and Vine, were some of the newcomers who existed way more on the phone than on the computer screen...
And meanwhile, old classics like Blogger, and Livejournal (the site that Dreamwidth is an emulator of) totally fizzled out in the new age of hand held social media.
The whole dynamic between tweeting and blogging is kind of fascinating to look back at, now.
When things settled down after the Dot.Com bust, blogging was HUGE! Everybody had a blog. Everybody liked to read a good blog. People talked about the, "blog-o-verse."
When YouTube came along, the concept of the, "vlog," was born, and there was a whole generation of vloggers out there... just blogging with their mouth in front of a camera, instead of with a keyboard in hyptertext.
And Twitter was hyped as, "micro-blogging!"
Who had time for long-winded idiots and their ten-million word blog posts? Truly clever genius people could get across MORE wit and wisdom in 140 characters!
Micro blogging was an art! It really DID take a lot of expertise to just cut through all the bullshit and distill a crackling spark of insight down to a clean 140 characters!
Vine, said, hold my beer, and brought us micro-VLOGs... of maximum, SIX goddamn seconds!
People loved both of them!
But OH MY, was the writing on the wall for Blogger and Livejournal by then!.. don't forget that podcasting was also a thing by then!
Absolutely nobody had any patience for READING a boring, bloated old BLOG!
But since then... micro-blogging has died!
And in Twitter's case, it died fighting a war on two fronts... on the one hand, the short-form format was just as effective for extremist propoganda, as for wit and wisdom. Look no further than Donald Trump's vast library of tweets for proof of that!
But on the other hand, people started trying to use Twitter to articulate long, thoughtful treatments of complex subjects... in the form of insanely long chain-tweets!
Twitter doubled the character limit to 280... which did not help either problem, but DID pretty much destroy the entire original concept for the platform.
In retrospect, Livejournal, and Tumblr kinda did it the best... because you could blog, but you could also embed videos, audio, photos, links to your references... etcetera!
I Do think LiveJournal did it the best, however, because it let you link to past blogs, or specific parts of past blogs... and it automatically put a time and date stamp on every entry!.. something Tumblr notoriously failed to ever do.
However, Livejournal did not have the @ or # conventions, when it was around... and this emulator of it cannot embed more modern content, such as TikToks.
A nice future app would be blog based, but be able to link to sources, embed any kind of media, tag other users, hashtag itself, be re-postable, and somehow be moderated and monetized adequately, without decending into advertising hell, or propoganda hell.
I dunno if that's possible! But we should try!
Tying this all back up at the end here... I think what we're witnessing today, with these mass layoffs in the app sector, is a modern day Dot.Com bust. Call it, the hashtag bust... or #bust.
I think it's being driven by an investor panic.
And that panic may be due... partly to the simple fact that times are changing, so the social media titans of the twenty-teens are just looking a little too battle worn and problematic...
And also, to the obvious tension that's been building in the housing market again...
And to the obvious tensions in the labor market as a whole, with workers demanding higher wages and better conditions.
All of those things would tend to spook investors, because any one of those sectors could collapse or explode and leave them penniless, if they're on the wrong side!
And the midterms did not help to clarify where any of this is going in the next two years!
But by clutching back their money... to play it safe... and allowing those social media giants of the twenty-teens to scramble, and fail...
The door opens up for new apps to step in and replace them.
And after twenty years of this...
Maybe it's been long enough for developers to want to go back to our roots and bring back some of the better ideas that fell by the wayside... and incorporate them into new ideas we haven't yet seen.
°¦}
