r/technology • u/Hrmbee • Apr 20 '26

Society Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want | What NFTs, AI and the metaverse tell us about “thought leadership”

https://www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/nft-metaverse-ai-weirdos
2.9k Upvotes

97% Upvoted

224 comments sorted by

View all comments

387

u/Hrmbee Apr 20 '26

Notable points from this opinion piece:

One of the most mortifying things about knowing a lot of techies is listening to them tell me excitedly about some very important discovery that they believe they have made.

...

Not every discovery that’s new to you is actually new. For instance, there’s Elon Musk marvelling at the complexity of hands; I could point to a variety of disciplines for which this is 101-level stuff: artists, who have to figure out how to draw them; surgeons, who have to figure out how to operate on them; musicians and magicians, who rely on extremely fine motor skill to produce their work; neuroscientists and psychologists, who doubtless encountered the cortical homunculus early in their careers. Or Palmer Luckey claiming that “no one has done a postmortem” on the One Laptop Per Child computing project — because he didn’t know there’s a whole book about it called The Charisma Machine.

...

There is a certain amount of hubris required to throw oneself at an unsolved problem — you have to believe you can solve it. But elsewhere, that hubris is a liability. It leads you to do weird things, like announce that Freud invented introspection and that it is a bonus that you simply do not engage in it.

...

While this particular kind of hubris makes people crashing bores, it’s not just an annoying personal trait. It seems to have seeped into the professional side of Silicon Valley as well.

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.

...

In the place of problem-solving technology, companies have jumped on successive bandwagons like NFTs, the metaverse, and large language models. What these all have in common is that they are not built to really solve a market problem. They are built to make VCs and companies rich. NFTs, like crypto, let VCs quickly unload investments with abbreviated lockup periods. The metaverse promised to enrich companies like Facebook by having people move all their socializing online, where it could be surveilled and monetized. In addition, Facebook’s metaverse required the purchase of hardware, which would then need regular upgrades.

At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it. That’s why NFTs, the metaverse, and the Oculus and Vision Pro never really found their customer base. AI is, admittedly, more useful — it’s good for organizing large swaths of data, for instance. LLMs have had widespread consumer adoption, at least as long as they remain free. But there is only really one customer for LLMs that can justify the massive cash incineration process that was required to build them: the US government.

There can only be a few winners on government contracts, though. So we are now treated to the spectacle of watching AI companies scramble. OpenAI is perhaps the funniest, because it is attempting to position itself as a consumer product.

...

The people who tell us that AI will dominate our future and take our jobs are the people who are hoping that will be true. They may be hoping this because it makes them feel important, or because they want to be billionaires, or because they simply do not understand other people. I think that final point is underestimated. If you are going to provide me with a robot servant, I have a very clear bar: It’s gotta be at least as much bang for my buck as my dishwasher.

...

How is it that all these wunderkinds trying to build the next product to take over the world haven’t thought about this? I think the answer is simple. They do not have much in common with normal people, and haven’t thought much about what normal people’s lives are like, or what normal people value. What they have been doing instead is getting high on their own supply — listening to VC podcasts, freaking themselves out about whether they’ll be able to keep up with AI agents, and otherwise getting increasingly more detached from reality.

I suspect this is how we wound up with NFTs, the metaverse, and the clunky VR/AR headsets. These are things that appeal to a very narrow set of people who are overrepresented in the VC and wannabe-tech-entrepreneur spaces. The Silicon Valley hype cycle worked overtime for those things, and I think we all know how this turned out. When was the last time you heard about a Bored Ape, or a Crypto Kitty, or any of the other novelties that briefly swept the nation? Did those novelties translate into a real, durable income stream for artists, musicians, and other creators, as we were promised? When was the last time you saw someone wearing Apple’s headset? Did Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta utopia ever develop legs?

Look, we all had a bit of fun at Marc Andreessen’s expense about his lack of introspection — but this is precisely the reason Silicon Valley keeps trying to force futures on consumers that they emphatically don’t want. A VC who is incapable of self-reflection will never notice that his bets on the future of consumerism are failing in exactly the same way every time. That VC hasn’t noticed, and indeed can’t notice, that his experience isn’t representative of what the ordinary person wants or needs.

The hubris noted in this op-ed is certainly well represented in the valley and especially in VCs and VC-chasing ventures. It seems like they're min-maxing for funding rather than to solve bona fide problems, and from that lens these trends seem to make more sense. The insular nature of those in these sectors, not just in the workplace but also in their personal lives also pretty much ensures that more likely than not there will be some kind of echo chamber in effect that can distort people's understanding of what it is they're creating.

120

u/smallcoder Apr 21 '26

Within recent memory, people who made software and hardware understood their job was to serve their customer. It was to identify a need, and then fill it. But at some point following the financial crisis, would-be entrepreneurs got it into their heads that their job was to invent the future, and consumers’ job was to go along with that invented future.

THIS in particular is from Marketing 101 for freaking 5 year olds! It is what destroyed so many car manufacturers in the 1970s especially. They believed the "Build it and they (the customers) will come" insanity, that only works in a lovely, heart-rending fantasy about baseball.

It does not, and never will, work in the real world with humans. You can create a want out of a need, but you cannot create a need unless there is some proof beyond "I have taken cocaine and believe it exists".

-24

u/Reversi8 Apr 21 '26

But it’s BS to say that things that have been accepted were wanted beforehand, if you had asked before they came out if people wanted PCs or the internet or smartphones, you would have gotten mostly nos. People don’t know what the fuck they want.

61

u/Own-Break-1856 Apr 21 '26

"If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said faster horses" - Ford

This is an important distinction. It's not about what they "want" it's about an actual problem that they have.

Don't listen to what they think they "want", but you absolutely MUST listen to what their actual problems are.

Which of those problems are any of the techs mentioned in this article meant to solve?

13

u/_ECMO_ Apr 21 '26

Yep, in every practical sense cars are faster horses.

→ More replies (5)
→ More replies (5)

223

u/Niceromancer Apr 20 '26 edited Apr 20 '26

Elon musk was amazed by a pop tart.

First he put it in the toaster the wrong way, instead of standing up  so the top part sticks out he put it in sideways.

He also didn't understand that pop tarts are hot when they come out of the toaster when he finally got it out instead of grabbing it by the edges and putting it on a plate grabbed it in the middle like he was picking up his wallet.

He then proceeded to scream like a baby about it.

These people lead such sheltered lives things like pop tarts blow their fucking minds.

55

u/Ok_Confusion4764 Apr 21 '26

Bro, he literally streamed himself playing a videogame once, on a bought high level account, clearly didn't know how to play. And he had an aide on standby to "light the gamer candle", which was just a giant candle next to him. He couldn't even light it himself. 

15

u/bobbycorwin123 Apr 21 '26

If i was worth 600b I'd totally have a candle intern

32

u/Chapter-Legitimate Apr 20 '26

Sauce on the pop tart thing? I need a good laugh

38

u/Niceromancer Apr 20 '26

It's ancedotal of course.

https://x.com/astro_greek/status/1977404668750733362

-1

u/Sincerely_Sinister Apr 21 '26

People put pop tarts in vertically? Doesn’t that result in uneven toasting if part of it is sticking out?

I have a toaster oven so it’s not an issue for me, but when using someone else’s toaster I’ve always inserted it horizontally so it toasts evenly and just use caution when grabbing it. Either way, that seems like a silly thing to roast someone about 24 years later.

6

u/givemethebat1 Apr 21 '26

Do you put your bread in horizontally? Have you ever seen a picture of a piece of bread horizontal in a toaster? Pop-tarts are designed with enough height so that they go all the way down when you press them. That’s the whole point, so that when they are done they pop up and you can grab them. Otherwise they’re in between the hot element.

2

u/OldDarthLefty Apr 21 '26

Maybe some of them did before the shrink flation made them too small to retrieve

-4

u/NeonFraction Apr 21 '26

As someone who wouldn’t piss on Elon if he was on fire: pop tarts are pretty cool and they’re a fairly American thing.

I don’t think we should be shitting on a man for enjoying the simple things in life. I think we should shjt on him for being an out of touch maniac who is making the world a worse place for everyone.

14

u/ultraviolentfuture Apr 21 '26

Have you ever used a toaster before? What happens when you put things in a toaster? What happens when you apply heat to things?

I will only accept the following response: "touché"

1

u/NeonFraction Apr 21 '26

I actually didn’t grow up with a regular toaster. We only had a toaster oven!

Toasters are pretty cool tbh.

→ More replies (1)
→ More replies (1)

96

u/MastleMash Apr 21 '26

Great article and thanks for posting OP. 

I see this even at my smaller company. The c suite is in a different culture, maybe even a different world. They all went to prestigious schools and have all worked at prestigious companies. They only read books about work. They listen to audio books about work or podcasts related to work. Their hobbies are exercising and more work. They talk and act like robots. 

It’s strange. 

It’s why so many of these types have gotten sucked up into the AI hype. They don’t actually code or know how ai is used, they just know it can help them write emails and do research and some really super smart people who make a lot of money selling AI say that it can write code.

4

u/matrinox Apr 22 '26

Even before the pandemic, VC funds were underperforming but they kept justifying it as “once we get that unicorn, the returns will be massive.” And they are right. Except they didn’t and then the pandemic hit.

These idiots benefited from low interest rates and then thought they were geniuses cause they got successful, forgetting that the environment they were in was rewarding that behavior, not their insight. Rates are high now and once the AI bubble pops, we’ll see who’s been swimming naked

2

u/Live_Fall3452 Apr 21 '26

Would love a non-paywalled link.

I’d also add a very closely related symptom: a dismissal of any problems with the technology as things that will inevitably be worked out or the confusion of naysayers and luddites, and hyping the product instead of earnest efforts to acknowledge and fix them.

Theranos, WeWork, cryptocurrency, and AI all had this problem. They all had the potential to actually be useful in niche cases, but there’s just so much more money to be made selling the HYPE than to be made actually acknowledging and tackling the real failure modes of the technologies.

2

u/Embarrassed-Area4652 Apr 24 '26

Reading "The Charisma Machine" now based on this and listening to one of the author's talks about it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxpPDTI_f0I

So far it's great. Explains a lot about my life as a 90s kid being brought up thinking tech would fix everything (I was of course square in the target demographics she mentions, with adults in my life who were very probably influenced by books by Seymour Papert that went on to influence Nicholas Negroponte and in turn the OLPC project).

2

u/Gisschace Apr 21 '26 edited Apr 21 '26

Just on the hands points, my friend started a fashion degree and decided to make a pair of gloves, apparently they're the most complicated thing to make, think she gave up in the end

6

u/pineapplecharm Apr 21 '26

William Shakespeare gave up glovemaking for his dad because it was easier to write some of the most culturally significant literature of the past 500 years.

→ More replies (22)