We are so back, we are so cooked
The tech discourse oscillates between "we are so back" and "we are so cooked" with the regularity of a metronome. We're living through Amara's law in real-time - that tendency to overestimate technology's impact in the short run while underestimating it in the long run - except now the cycles are measured in Twitter threads rather than decades. The irony is that both the doomers and the accelerationists might be right, just on different timescales. We're simultaneously experiencing the most significant technological shift since the internet and watching VCs fund the same AI ideas over and over again.
The current AI gold rush feels eerily similar to 1999, but instead of putting ".com" after everything, we're slapping "AI-powered" on products that are essentially if-then statements with better marketing. San Francisco billboards promise "revolutionary AI solutions" for problems that a competent Excel macro could solve. YouTube serves me ads for AI apps that will "10x my productivity" by helping me write emails I could have typed faster than explaining what I want to the bot. The surface-level thinking is staggering. We're using frontier models to generate LinkedIn posts about thought leadership while the actual innovators are quietly building infrastructure we won't understand the importance of for another five years. It's entirely possible we'll look back at this period the way we look at Pets.com, wondering how anyone thought delivering dog food at a loss was revolutionary just because you ordered it online.
Is rage-baiting the new GTM motion? Is attention at all costs the new paradigm for founders? The slop is everywhere. Every day brings fresh "ChatGPT DESTROYS [insert profession]" content, and our social media feeds are morphing into a frankenstein of AI slop machine. We've democratized the ability to produce mediocre content at scale, and yet the content inspires so little. Maybe that's the real unlock here: we've finally built the machine that produces exactly the kind of content the algorithm wanted all along - infinite, forgettable, and just engaging enough to keep us scrolling.