Someone (but it is still early days) is starting to suspect that the failure of the "Silicon Valley Bank" is a little more than it seems, and that it is much more serious than Lehman Brothers, and also the entire "credit crunch ” that we experienced in 2008.
Why, as an insider in the IT world, am I so certain? And why am I not turning to farming?
One Thing at a Time: What Was Silicon Valley?
We can start with a photograph:
These are so-called "facades", or if you prefer "backlots", ie buildings which, on a film set, make you believe that the protagonist is in a western frontier village, or anywhere else.
Silicon Valley was one of these villages, where lenders have always been led to believe that the protagonist (those who dropped the money) was inside a productive industrial sector.
Too bad it was all fake. And if you wonder why no investor has noticed, my answer is "shorttermism", ie the fact that the investor is only interested in making money in the short term, whether it's a hoax or not. No investor has ever noticed this for the simple reason that even investing in a western film can make money: if then someone at home really believes that it's all true, too bad for them. In fact, maybe we can even sell them some theme parks.
And even the public, which saves for retirement in the USA, struggles to abandon fiction: Sylvester Stallone was never a soldier or a boxer, Keanu Reeves doesn't understand a damn thing about computer science and has never been a hacker , Valentina Nappi doesn't enjoy being on set, etc. They are actors, and as such they act. Nothing strange, or nothing to resent: after all, if it weren't like this, there would be no fantasy films like LOTR. Or do you believe in hobbits?
How much money did they throw into this fiction? We are in the order of 1 to 10 trillion dollars. I say TRILLIONS, that is trillions.
Why was this fiction needed? It was needed because there was nothing real. Until the early 2000s, the entire mobile and VAS world was entirely European. The giants were called Nokia, Ericsson, Siemens, Alcatel. If you consider that then the "overtaking" took place, you have to ask yourself if it is possible to build an entire industry from scratch, starting from a single company. (and don't tell me about “smartphones”, because they already existed before). And you don't have to tell me about it because you can't make me believe that the same company (and the same person) that killed the Newton product at its peak then fell in love with gadgets and tablets.
As a result, the best minds moved to the Scandinavian countries and not to the USA anymore, et cetera et cetera.
The Grand Illusion has reversed the roles.
But which part of Silicon Valley is a fake?
- NON-Innovation. It's been at least 25 years now that in IT, people my age have been yawning because we don't see any new concepts. Facebook is a university BBS like the one I used in Bologna (Alma BBS, if I remember correctly), only that it has a Web interface. Twitter is just a web interface to IRC, The “Cloud” is just a mainframe with web interface, the “Metaverse” is just another Secondlife, which in turn is a web interface MMORPG, your APIs are just Corba reincarnated, which in turn is VTAM, S3 is just fucking WebDav, which in turn is a web version of FTP, neural networks are only tensors and we were already talking about it when I was at uni, a quantum computer is nothing more than a ternary computer, ( https://it .wikipedia.org/wiki/Calculator_ternary ), Reddit is only USENET with graphical interface, and so on. Have I already told you about the next return of the email?
If you recall, I've been predicting something like Meta for years, just by calculating what I call "the Wheel of Shit Karma," and noting that Secondlife was still waiting for a revival.
After Moore, I can state the “First Theorem of Uriel Fanelli on IT”:
Each technology is on stage for about 4 years, then declines, and comes back after about 20 years, with more encryption, more CPU, or more GUI, in the Eternal Cycle of IT Shit Karma.
And yes, it also applies to video games: they are none other than Wolfstein 3D. For decades. 40 years old, and you still have a Joystick in your hand.
Ah yes: the fideverse. Brand new. BBS networks that will save the world. Good old Fidonet. Then the Americans will make it a Compuserve, I'm sure. Yawn.
- NON-Market. Although many have attributed this phenomenon to the market, in reality it is just a Soviet system sponsored by the central bank and the government, with some proxies to hide itself. And you could have figured it out yourself, noting that in fact, Silicon Valley has produced almost exclusively monopolists, with some oligopoly here and there.
Heinous analyzes or Nobel prize for economics were not needed to note that a market phenomenon should generate competition, not extinguish it.
- NON-Functionality. We're all talking about how well the services are designed, jerking off with UI and UX, but in the end, someone should be asking questions. If Facebook is for socializing, why do you need Linkedin “for professionals” who are also on Facebook? If Instagram is about showing off and getting attention, why do you need Tinder? If Youtube is so great for putting video content online, why was Netflix born?
The truth is that Facebook works badly and is designed worse, Instagram doesn't do what it should, Youtube as an enabler for video content is more than mediocre.
The gentlemen of Silicon Valley are NOT brilliant, they have never been creative or intelligent, (I have already talked enough about Musk) and they have never done anything special. They have always had a rain of money that created a monopolistic, American-centric market, which had the sole purpose of snatching from Europe and China and India the human material that is missing in the USA, and to concentrate everything there.
What happened, the creation of money to finance a completely fake industry, is that now no money is created and everything dies.
I'm sorry for those who fear another "Lehmann Brothers", but this time it will be much more crackling. Because it's not just a bunch of banks that's about to fail, it's about disappearing an entire industrial sector in a very large nation.
Personally, I don't give a damn, for a reason. Because I know that all of this was only possible because a theorem that is decidedly false has impressed itself on people:
“COOL BEFORE OF IMPORTANT”.
Silicon Valley has always done “cool” things. But he never did important things. And if you think Instagram is important in your life, it means that you don't have any real problems.
My job is the design of the infrastructures that bring fiber to your home. Whether it's FTTH, FTTB, FTTC, I do that thing there. That's not cool, I know. For you, the "central office" is just "the control unit". You have no idea what a BNG is, much less an LSR or an OLT. But if you want to call, you go through VoIP, and if you want to call the fire department and the ambulance and everything, ditto.
They are important things. Not cool. But important.
These things will remain.
But the rest is about to sink into its uselessness.
If you look at what a social media application does in China, you find that it does important things. You pay us taxes, you manage our bank account, you open a VAT number, you keep our credit card, registry documents, driving licence, certificates of ownership.
What are you doing with those from Silicon Valley? You put your ass on it.
I don't know what's going to happen, because the bang could be VERY big, and I'm guessing the big idiot hypnotists will get someone to throw their retirement money into it to save it all.
But what I'm really wondering is how much it will take to undo the damage they've done to society.
What damage?
Many. Ageism, for example. To hide the fact that they were inventing the web-interface wheel, they kept out the people who remembered the past, to the point of creating a real hate movement towards anyone who wasn't the young creative who reinvented everything.
But also more extensive social damage: since the arrival of applications such as tinder, the dating scene has marked a collapse, to the point that today most millennials and gen-z are singles who are not looking for anyone.
What were supposed to be apps for socializing have created a wave of hikikimori like never before.
Applications to find a house to rent have made it impossible to find houses to rent with stable contracts.
Social applications, which were supposed to improve socialization, have produced polarized and hate-filled societies.
Everything they touched, they turned to shit.
And now, I don't wonder what's going to happen to the economy.
What I wonder is how long it will take to have a humane and normal society.
As it was before.
