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Is tech OK? It’s not just the mass layoffs. It’s that, to an alien observer, many of the most hyped ideas emerging from America’s vaunted tech industry over the last few years would seem untethered from reality, if not outright unhinged.
Facebook renamed itself Meta and pitched us the metaverse, insisting we’ll all soon want to immerse ourselves in a giant pixelated 3D cartoon where no one has legs. So-called Web3 startups enlisted celebrities to sell us on NFTs and blockchain technology built to prove we owned doodles of depressed monkeys. Crypto companies proposed we abandon a regulated financial system for a freewheeling digital one overflowing with volatility and fraud.
Some unhinged-ness is good, you might argue. Where would civilization be if we didn’t take some big technological swings? Making vast amounts of information easily searchable for billions of people, and then making it accessible through a screen that fits in your pocket — all that once seemed like a fantastic notion. It’s also true that buzzy concepts have filtered in and out of Silicon Valley for decades, some fizzling, others enduring. But something feels different this time.
The buzzwords seem to be coming faster, the ideas further detached from the real world and the ordinary consumer. The industry that delivered us the iPhone, Google search, social media and Uber seems to have entered into a phase of prolonged magical thinking. Tech, one might say, has found itself in La La Land.
Interesting, then, that tech’s metaphorical drift has paralleled its physical migration into Los Angeles, where Silicon Valley companies have lately entrenched themselves. Recent years have seen the conquest of Netflix and streaming, each of the tech giants rapidly expanding their presence in so-called Silicon Beach, and the cross-pollination of Hollywood and Silicon Valley — the enmeshing of the science fiction industrial complex and the tech sector that turns to its visions for inspiration for its products. It makes sense: Having built the pipes, in the forms of the Internet servers and the social media networks, the next need was for content to pump through them — and who produces content better than L.A.?
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