Steve Jobs was just a 21st century huckster
I'm sitting here in Silicon Valley riding the AI hype cycle like everyone else. On one hand, it feels like something new and different. On the other hand, it kind of feels like we've been here before.
I was born in 1981, so I'm old enough to remember the boom-and-bust of the dotcom bubble. In the late 1990s, tech companies really convinced us that we were going to be doing everything online in no time at all. Obvious things were moving online, like encyclopedias and restaurant reviews, but they really tried to sell us on a bunch of products that nobody needed, and few people even wanted.
It's really easy to look back and mock defunct services like CueCat, which was essentially the 90s version of a QR code.
But, unlike some other tech products that have received mountains of investor cash, the only real problem with CueCat was that it was ahead of its time. People do legitimately need to shop for things. Maybe they don't need to fill their homes with the plastic crap that just ends up in the landfill, but they do need to shop on some level.
The dotcom bubble burst in the early 2000s, but it was followed by wave after wave of questionable tech "innovation."
The weirdest tech bubble was easily cryptocurrency. Cryptocurrency is a technology that allows people to buy things without actually transferring paper money or coins. It's very similar to a credit or debit card, except that the currency isn't backed by a government like the United States, and the accounts aren't stored in banks, but in a common ledger called the block chain. It's a payment technology that is just complex enough to confuse and inspire people who don't understand it. The actual value of cryptocurrency technology seems limited almost entirely to criminals who need to transact outside of government watchdogs, and to confidence tricksters who want to run a pump-and-dump scam with a meme coin.
The AI bubble emerged just as it became clear that cryptocurrency wasn't going to become a widely adopted technology. The long term value of AI is also very unclear. It might be critical to all business in the future, as cryptocurrency claimed to be, on the other hand it might end up being a niche technology that most people don't actually need.
It's already clear that most people don't actually want AI and even business leaders with egos larger than their bank balances don't actually need it.
But the emergence of these recent tech bubbles has caused me to reflect on all the tech we've adopted in my lifetime. I've started to wonder, do I really need any of this? Maybe this question seems obvious to you, but given the obviously scammy nature of the cryptocurrency grift, I'm wondering if scamming has always been integral to the tech game.
Are cell phones a scam? Are smart phones a scam? Are apps a scam? Are websites a scam? Are computers a scam? Is the combustion engine a scam? For each of these technologies, there is an element of a pyramid scheme. The more people who buy into these technologies, the more valuable they become. For instance, cars wouldn't be so valuable if all of us didn't agree that we should be spending our tax dollars on roads. Every new technology claims to solve problems, but it's increasingly unclear that they don't create as many problems as they solve.
And that brings me to the nominal topic of this post, Steve Jobs.
I don't have much to say about Steve Jobs that hasn't already been said. He is often praised as a visionary leader and tech genius. The Netflix science fiction show Pantheon is even loosely based on the idea of him resurrecting himself to create the singularity through his tech genius. But if all this tech is just layers of stuff that we don't really need, what did Steve Jobs really do when he sold us all smart phones?
More and more he just looks like a confidence man standing on stage and selling us magical health elixirs that will cure all the problems that ail us. His main achievement was getting us to pay huge sums of money for something that we didn't need. More and more he just looks like another salesperson huckster in the same vein as PT Barnum or Donald Trump. He was just chasing the holy dollar in the only way he knew how.
He was just a twenty first century huckster in the right place at the right time.
But this post isn't really about Steve Jobs, it's about the tech he sold us, and all the tech hype cycles we have survived. After all, if you can see through the hype cycle for cryptocurrency, and you can see through the hype cycle for AI, shouldn't you question the still-ongoing hype cycle for the smart phone?