All Things Alt-Tech

City living seems to have become more and more unpredictable if not outright dangerous. Unrest and large scale protests that devolve into riots, arson, fist fights and even shootings. You would imagine a lot of business owners in the central districts of cities like Seattle are now considering their options.

Meanwhile, with today’s communications technology, it's becoming apparent that a great proportion of professionals can get their work done from virtually anywhere, using just their internet connection and a few simple tools. Counter-urbanization is about to set in, if it hasn't already started. People are able to explore alternatives to living in the city, and this is creating changes in living location preferences.

Two of the key reasons you might have moved to the city in the past would have been employment opportunities, and the abundance of choice the city offers. Restaurants, social gatherings, networking, luxuries and conveniences of all sorts. Thanks to Covid, and now the growing unrest to boot, you can no longer comfortably enjoy those. If you are fortunate enough to live in the countryside, you have the luxury of mobility, safety, access to green spaces and fresh produce, and you generally suffer fewer restrictions generally.

To top it off, the cost of living in the countryside is far lower than in cities. You have all the liberty and open space, and you pay less for your accommodation. So all in all, it's obvious that more people are going to take to the suburbs, to the countryside, and perhaps even off-grid altogether. Why pay a fortune to be holed up in an expensive, oftentimes small apartment in a big metropolis, when you can't enjoy the fittings that you came to the city to enjoy in the first place? If you were 'fortunate' enough to have an apartment in Seattle, LA, New York, chances are today is a totally different picture from a year ago, and you'll probably want to get away from the downtown area.

It's no surprise that off-grid living, mobile home living and the tiny homes movements have skyrocketed -- and they are only going to continue to do so. Why? Because a lot of people are anticipating even further troubles: there's a good change we'll have another wave of the virus, meaning another excruciating period of lockdown -- and a lot of people have had more than enough of being holed up inside; particularly in a large city with no access to green space and fresh air.

As the issues compound another issue looming on the horizon is further disruptions to the food supply. While this might have been manageable the first time around, the social tensions are now far larger, people's fuses are a lot shorter, and the unrest developing from further strains to our way of life would be even larger.

Where does this leave the cities? Assuming the ball keeps rolling, i.e. we have a second wave and the various protests also accelerate, there will be bigger outflows from the cities. The more affluent; the knowledge workers. People who are not tied to a physical location. This will mean a lot of the de-urbanizing population will take a big chunk of the tax revenue with them.

This will of course have put a compounding strain on the city economy. With less tax revenue, you’ll have deteriorating service, infrastructure and security in the city. This will probably exacerbate social tensions even further. That said, if we end up in a situation with ever more chaos in the cities, we shouldn’t assume that all the knowledge workers now in exodus would be welcome with open arms out in the sticks. Small towns want to be 'bugout locations' and they don't want to host the refuge for the influx of city dwellers getting out of dodge. They also don’t want more Covid cases, they don’t want to import the various problems from the big cities.

While the increased digitalization of work brings about many positives, you can see signs of people getting tech-fatig

Trump has put forth an Executive Order on Preventing Online Censorship. It’s seeking to empower federal regulators to strip social media companies' authority to moderate speech. Corporations should not be able to selectively throttle the transfer of data across the Internet. In a similar fashion, we shouldn't allow a limited number of online platforms to throttle the speech that Americans may access and convey on the internet -- right?

The order states that when large, powerful social media companies censor opinions with which they disagree, they exercise a dangerous power. If Obama had said this, people would have agreed. When Trump says it -- not so much. What the press has done, is to claim that Trump doesn’t cite any examples of censorship, but this is clearly untrue. In the order itself, Trump & co cite some of the most horrendous examples of Big Tech censoring information. 

Trump mentions that Google created a search engine for the Chinese Communist Party (Project Dragonfly) that would have blacklisted searches for “human rights,” hid data unfavorable to the Chinese Communist Party, and tracked users determined appropriate for surveillance.

Since the 2010’s, with the increased concentration in the media space, the increased monopolization, the unrestrained acquisitions etc, the few players that now control the market are indeed the public square. Worse yet, they all have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, and they are for the most part aligned in their stance on free speech.

Ever since 2010, the Big Tech players have all gone down the road of acting like a publisher, i.e. intervening in the words spoken on the platform. Meanwhile, they claim they are platforms, meaning they are not liable for the content they host. Well, you can't have it both ways, and that’s what the original The Communications Decency Act from 1996 is getting at (specifically section 230C). The act gives websites broad legal immunity: namely it states that online platforms can't be sued for something posted by a user. On the flip side, it’s supposed to make sure that companies in return for that protection were also behaving responsible in terms of policing their platforms.

Trump’s executive order is essentially geared towards enabling federal agencies to enforce it... and then some. What does this mean for bit tech moving forwards? Take a listen.

Supporters of taim.io.

Musk is in the headlines yet again, and once more, it’s not good publicity as of late. Call it what you like, but his antics are stirring up controversy. All that aside, he’s still largely heralded as a great genius; as an unprecedented businessman with unique features. But is he really unique, and is he really a genius? 

There are some analogies to be drawn between Musk and other so called visionaries who ran what the next big thing at the time. Jeff Skilling came to run what was often referred to as the most innovative company in the US in the early 2000s. The company was named "America's Most Innovative Company" by the magazine Fortune for six consecutive years, from 1996 to 2001. That company was of course, Enron.

As Enron’s financial situation started attracting more and more scrutiny, Skilling developed a habit of lashing out at critics. This of course reminds us of how Musk and how musk dealt with questions on their delayed roll-outs, and how he referred to analysts’ questions as ‘boneheaded’.

The similarity between Enron and Tesla, is that if you raised concerns, however valid or credible they might be, chances are you’d be looked at as something of a buffoon, as if you just didn’t get it. With Tesla, if you’re confused by their opaque accounting practices, their scattered and haphazard approach to product management, or even the actual environmental upside to the EV’s, you’ll quickly be labelled a FUDster, for someone who spreads fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Over the course of its lifetime, Enron branched into trading in a plethora of products. They were originally involved in the transmission of natural gas and electricity, but branched out into trading a variety of products, such as petrochemicals, plastics, paper and pulp, and even weather risk management — it all just got more and more exotic as the fraud went on. This is of course somewhat similar to how Tesla have ventured into tunnel drilling, solar panels, insurance, autonomous driving, flamethrowers. 

Sociopaths have a reputation for being dishonest and deceitful. They often feel comfortable lying to get their own way, or to get themselves out of trouble. In fact, it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. When it comes to Musk, the list of dishonest statements or outright lies runs extremely long. Of course, given his status as the environmental savor, his claims, promises and predictions are very rarely scrutinized (or even remembered for that long), and he remains a media darling. 

For a very long time, people assumed that the reason some analysts couldn’t understand Enron’s books was because they couldn’t decipher the genius behind the business. In this episode, we take a look at some of Elon's more egregious predictions and promises. Will the Tesla saga end in a similar fashion to Enron?

Supporters of taim.io.

In the late 1990’s, many prominent figures in business, technology and economics started worrying about the so called year 2000 problem, also known as the Millennium bug or Y2K. This problem refers to how computers back then stored calendar dates with only two digits, making the year 2000 indistinguishable from 1900. Therefore, many people were anticipating critical issues at the turning of the millennium, as this would render all sorts of dated records and real-time events wildly incorrect. It was speculated that this would trip up anything from stock markets to manufacturing processes to your alarm clock. After all, if the computers think it’s 1900, surely that would have some side effects... Right?

Meanwhile, Alan Greenspan, then head of the Federal reserve, the central bank of the US, took a particularly keen interest in this issue. In fact, he was particularly worried about it — or at least, the possible societal side effects stemming from the bug. Greenspan said that if Americans were worried about frozen bank accounts and disabled ATM machines, that would lead them to withdraw large sums of cash in advance, all of which would of course place stress on the system. While he was urging citizens to remain calm and not to prepare, he had the Federal Reserve banks prepare by literally stockpiling shrink-wrapped currency at nine locations across the country. All of this harkens back to today, and the scrambling for facial masks.

Greenspan also promised more liquidity if needed, and he kept interest rates relatively low. All of this helped perpetuate easy credit to flow into the most speculative assets of the time — Dotcom stocks. So yes, in some small part, we do have one man’s overblown worries to thank for the creation the Dotcom stock market bubble. When it became clear that the dotcoms were not really going to change everything we knew about the world (at least not yet), and that many of the Dotcom startups were just pipe dreams, frauds and unnecessary technology for technology’s sake, the Dotcom bubble of course popped. 

Of course, Greenspan’s reaction was to lower interest rates even more to try and facilitate more credit creation, and elevate the markets once again. So, throughout the next few years, interest rates were held low to try and bolster the economy, which was now sorely needed considering the country had now launched into war with Iraq. Again, the easy money flowed to the next big thing that seemed to have legs — the asset class that up until that point had never seen a secular decline in prices: the housing market.

Fast-forward to 2005, when Ben Bernanke started raising rates, and as people could now no longer afford their mortgages at the rising interest rates, the bubble popped. Because you now had more leverage in the system, more credit and more instruments built on top of housing assets, the ensuing chaos now threatened the greater financial system, and the banks themselves. And as the market forces started coming into play to clean up the mess and liquidate the over leveraged banks, the fed’s solution was, of course, to lower interest rates again and to provide liquidity to save the banks. (The ones that got us in this mess in the first place).

This time, with yet another sugar rush created by the fed, capital started flowing into the next set of risk assets — yes, the fed had blown up the everything bubble. In 2010 and onwards, stocks, bonds, housing — everything rallied. It rallied, of course until it found its next real world obstacle. A pin that would prick the bubble. That turned out to be, not a bug, but a virus. 

Fast forward to 2020. As the market forces once again caught up with the artificial bubble, sending stocks into free fall. In fact, stock markets came crashing down at the fastest rate ever. And right on cue, as the crisis deepened, both the central bank and the greater government panicked went into hype

During the Blitz in World War II; British cities were bombed relentlessly by the Luftwaffe in an attempt to destroy, kill and spread panic and fear. At least 40k people died in the city of London alone, which at the time had a population around 8M people living in it, meaning around 0.5% of the population died. Those numbers seem familiar and they harken back to today. As we descend deeper and deeper into chaos today, it’s useful to look at how we dealt with crisis in the past; the measures taken and the outcomes experienced. Have we gotten smarter, more organized, more resourceful, more resilient? Are we listening to the right people, and are the solutions that are emerging; those of locking down citizens, increasing surveillance and data collection and digitalizing healthcare going to work?

In spite of all the carnage during the Blitz, it did not shut down the city nor did it stop people from doing what they were doing and carrying on with their lives. People didn’t flee the cities for the countryside even though that could have saved thousands of lives in the short-run. 

Britain had a highly successful record of mobilizing the home front for the war effort, in terms of mobilizing the greatest proportion of potential workers, maximizing output, assigning the right skills to the right task, and maintaining the morale and spirit of the people. There was a nationalist spirit — something that people have come to despise today. It’s been replaced by this nonsensical notion of international solidarity, which proved very short lived at the first sign of crisis.

Some of the overly protectionist, nanny state measures we’re seeing fits in well with the general coddling of our minds that we’ve seen so much in the past decade. In a way, the stay-at-home idea is making one big safe space of the entire world. The idea that we don’t need an economy, that some universal basic income confetti money will help us go back to normal if we just stay home and watch Netflix for long enough, that is just as indicative of the fairytales we have come to believe in. Nevermind that an enormous proportion of the population, the younger ones, and the ones living outside the cities, could carry on with their lives as per normal without much risk or ramifications to the greater population. 

No, you see, all of us, young or old, urban or rural, have to sit this out while ol’ Bill Gates concocts a vaccine. It could take 18 months, could take 18 years, could never happen, but rest assured that halting the world economy indefinitely is the right move. Already, we are starting to hear mumblings of vaccine certificates and even chip implants tracking your medical profile.

By the way, when and why did Bill Gates become such an authority in health? He’s not a doctor. He’s certainly not an epidemiologist. The only virus he knows is Windows 95, and the only thing he does best is to ruthlessly seek profit, preferably by crushing the little guy. Let’s not forget that Gates led Microsoft straight into an antitrust situation, where Microsoft illegally maintained its monopoly position in the PC software market. The court found that Microsoft taken actions to crush threats to that monopoly, including Apple, Java, Linux, and others. Yes, that Bill Gates — the very same. The saint who’ll save the world through technology. Because, if you’re a technologist, you’ll come up with technological solutions — regardless of whether the problems themselves are technological in nature.

Anyway, if you dispute any of the received wisdom and the  official recommendations, say you advocate for taking vitamin-C, then the powers that be, such as YouTube, might well delete your video to silence you. Also, if you exercise your constitutional right to organize and protest the draconian lockdown measures, you may well find yourself arrested. If you are an American, you have freed

It looks like our friendly overlords in big tech are here to save us once again. That’s right, the benevolent masters over at Google and Apple are now looking to to use your location data to piece together just how well everyone obeying the social distancing recommendations, and who has been exposed to the dreaded cerveza sickness. 

Not to worry, though Apple have confirmed that the data they gather isn’t tied to any Apple ID, so they supposedly won’t know what each individual person is up to. That’s right, they pinky promise they won’t collect any more data than necessary. Ah, I feel so relieved. In all seriousness though, if the government wants to know who is running around town too much, and who we are meeting (and they certainly do), not only will they find out, but they’ll probably find out in secret.

So how does this tool work? The contact-tracing tool that Apple and Google want to create here would have your smartphone log when you’ve come into close contact with other people. If one of those people report symptoms to a health authority, your phone receives an alert about the diagnosis. That’s right, it essentially exchanges contact information with everyone you meet. No big deal!

Apparently, this solution makes uses of bluetooth signals. Of course, bluetooth signals can also travel through physical barriers, so the tool might well deliver contact notifications falsely, say for example if there’s a wall between two devices. That means you could get a notification about being exposed to the coronavirus when, in reality, you and the other person are in two separate apartments. No problem, it’s not like many people live in apartments. 

Here’s the problem (well, one of them. We’re already misleading ourselves by over-consuming realtime data without any kind of context or sense of scale. Look at how badly we confused ourselves with the daily infection data. Not to mention, the tests themselves are still not completely accurate. This is going to be another, case of ever more panic because of big dumb data.

Moreover, you don’t fight pandemics with an opt-in smartphone update. An app can’t trace which surfaces you touch or who touched them before you. An app won’t make you sneeze into your elbow. An app won’t trace whether you had washed your hands before touching those lemons at the supermarket, nor if the person prior to you had done so. Life is not as absolute as a software developer might hope. The real world cannot easily be reduced down to simple events like some video game. At the moment, we see lots of simulations, visualizations and modeling of the virus spread, but as sophisticated as these might seem, they are crude guestimations, approximations, blunt renderings of the infinitely complex thing we call reality. The real world is not some video game where each interaction can be neatly translated into a point on a score board. 

Technology exists on the level of the abstract; it doesn’t have as much of a bearing on the physical world as you might hope. Apps and data collection will not save the world, but they will destroy privacy, facilitate surveillance and enable an un-erasable life history on everyone. We are told that the contact tracing solutions are going to be opt-in. There is some debate about how many people might opt in to the tracking, but this is a moot point. If enough people don’t opt in (60% required), rest assured that they’ll simply fill in the gaps in adoption with other means. You can do the same thing with 4G carrier signal, or with all the other surveillance that your phone conducts 24/7. 

For instance, you can incorporate the gyroscopic and accelerometer data from your phone. Used together, your phone can store your location and movements even if your phone is in flight mode. That data is transmitted to the cloud when you reenable your data connection. So if you thin

What’s happening to money in this brave new chapter following the Cerveza Sickness? Things are moving very fast, and there are quite a few themes to keep track of. First off, authorities now have yet another excuse to ban paper currency, because it supposedly helps spread the disease. That might be true, but it’s likely a secondary reason behind the prospective banning of cash. Governments have been waiting to pounce on any opportunity to digitalize all transactions for quite some time. The control at hand with having all economic transmissions take place digitally is too much to pass up for your average authoritarian. Why? Because cash is anonymous, physical but without a paper trail. If you are a persona non grata, a government can halt your credit cards and put a hold on your bank account, but they cannot halt someone’s cash expenditures. 

In a digital system, you can punish your enemies and censor people very effectively, and that’s also true on much higher levels, not just the consumer level. For example, you can kick non-compliant players out of the SWIFT system, you can un-bank wrong-thinkers if they behave in a manner that is politically incorrect, but you can’t ‘un-cash’ someone. You can also halt ATM withdrawals during a bank-run, you can set a negative interest rate to force people to spend their digital money from their accounts, but this doesn’t apply to cash-holders. Cash is not subject to the same manipulations as digital currency. It’s the last bastion of economic sovereignty that common people have. It’s not subject to the tyrannical policies the way digital channels are, and that’s precisely why most authorities hate cash and try so hard to ban it.

Speaking of tyrannical policies: we’re now witnessing umpteen trillions being printed to ‘save’ the economy — what’s going to happen to prices moving forwards? There has been some talk of the threat of inflation. Inflation is certainly on the horizon as it pertains to consumer goods, but it’s unlikely that we’re going straight into hyper-inflation any time soon. How so? The coming surge in defaults and bankruptcies are very much deflationary events. When you don’t pay your mortgage and you default, your loan is extinguished. When the bank reclaims your home, that home will be sold, along with many other homes hitting the market at the same time in your neighborhood, which further contributes to price declines. As the value of the banks holdings decreases, the amount of money that the bank can lend out decreases. Fewer loans means less money chasing goods and services — deflationary. 

To compound this further, as we head deeper into recession and people lose their jobs, they are scared to waste money. They might even detect and appreciate that prices decline, all of which are reasons to save their money; save cash specifically. This slows down the velocity of money (the speed at which money changes hands), which further contributes to deflation. When I stop spending money on Uber rides, the Uber driver has less money to spend, and so on. On aggregate, it’s quite possible that in the short term, we see a decrease or plateauing of price levels. This might sound perverse considering the trillions that are printed, but that is feasible — at least in the short to mid-term.

As the real economy continues to decline, central banks will become more desperate, and they will try to stimulate or ‘kick start the economy’ with ever more aggressive means. Of course, this makes about as much sense as throwing around confetti to combat a hangover. The reasoning is, if they can just generate inflation, it’ll cause people to spend their money more quickly, and spending money of course causes economic activity and businesses to operate. If you stop to think about it, it’s an incredibly Machiavellian and manipulative construct, but this is one of the pillars the Keynesian economics rests upon, and that’s the philosophy that the world

Digital nomadism is dead — at least for now. It seems like a thing of the past; something people did years ago. The thought of a gallivanting programmer circling the globe, or an Instagram travel influencer sampling luxury hotels — it seems like an almost alien concept at this point. It’s hard to think that this phenomenon only peaked just a few months ago. You might have heard of people who are now making the most of the low travel costs, and enjoying the lack of people, but air travel is down by something like 90% in terms of daily passengers. If you do travel, hardly anything is going to be open and most cities have an eerie vibe. Also, you don’t know where you could get stranded, nor how the local lockdown policy applies to travelers, especially amidst the mass closure of hotels. In other words, if you do travel, rest assured that your experience is not going to be particularly glamorous. 

If you travel as a digital nomad, please note that the networking that typically comes with it, is dead. The meetups are gone. After work drinks, get-togethers and social events are just not happening. Longer term, in a post-corona world, I the very appetite for travel might also remain weak, and people may not be too interested in cosmopolitan, sprawling megacities. What a lot of people are finding out now, is that being holed up in a box in a big city indefinitely, is not fun. By the looks of it, it’s going to get a lot worse still, and even when the immediate ordeal is over, people are not going to forget this any time soon. Longer term, many people may even choose to live in smaller towns, closer to nature, away from the claustrophobic beehives that are today’s busy megacities.

Speaking of busy, one thing that definitely isn’t dead, is working from home. Overnight, this became the modus operandi for virtually everyone. Necessity is the mother of invention, and sudden constraints can really force a change, and that’s exactly what’s happening here. People who are lucky enough to have a job are going to try to cling on to it and deliver value. What we’re about to see is that many business processes can totally be managed from the comforts of people’s homes. A lot of middle-managers and executives are going to find out that workers don’t need to be chained to a cubicle to deliver value. At the same time, most companies now find themselves having to conduct extremely Spartan and immediate cost cutting exercises. Working from home or not, a lot of those middle-managers are going to find these themselves out of a job very shortly (if they haven’t already joined the ten million newly unemployed Americans the past two weeks alone).

Remember though, there are entire companies that are run completely virtually; they are very lean, flat organizations with few BS jobs in them. More companies are going to be trimmed and run this way. As for the workers who do successfully convert into remote workers, I’m not convinced that they’ll want to go back into business as usual afterwards. Longer term, if and when this is over, and people are herded back into corporate captivity in an open plan office, I predict that many people will start looking elsewhere for more flexible jobs.

What about the people who work in startups? Startup funding is dead or dying. I made a bet back in 2016 with a friend (who ran a tech accelerator that shall remain nameless), as to when the startup bubble would pop. I was off by a year (and I believe I might owe someone a steak dinner). I did predict an abrupt and unceremonious end to it (like most asset bubbles pop); not because I suspected a virus, but because I did anticipate some exogenous shock to shed light on the weak financial situation (for instance the complete lack of an real earnings) you generally saw in the startup space. I used to do a lot of startup mentoring, I’ve worked with many startups and even taken a stake, and the one indicator that convinced m

What we’re seeing now in the Covid media coverage is starting to resemble an absolute frenzy. When too many people are on the same side of the boat, it's time to start asking questions — its's usually a sign of people abandoning their critical thinking faculties, and are just lazily embracing the consensus.

We are not at such a level of alarm, that a lot of people are showing physiological signs of anxiety. This is the consequence of consuming weeks worth of horrendous, gruesome news. The news is what it is, and it may be all bad and all true, but still, there’s only so much you can bear every day. You don’t need to check the news every hour — it’ll be there later, so you don’t need to wallow in it every waking moment.

Meanwhile, we also keep getting ever more dire extrapolations on how many are going to die, etc. Let’s go back to the data at hand, and evaluate what we truly know; where we are right now and what we know to be the baseline conditions. How many people die every day from natural causes? While this may sound crass and insensitive, it is a meaningful metric in assessing the severity of the situation. 

What’s the ratio of corona deaths to total, natural deaths? Looking at the sheer number of deaths seems obvious, but it’s a very blunt metric that offers no perspective, and does not have much bearing on projecting the immediate risk to you. 100,000 people die every day due to age-related causes. We’re at 13k virus deaths globally so far, and that’s over several months, while the situation is coming under control in several countries.

It’s also quite common for elderly people to die from conditions, such as from the flu or pneumonia. In fact, you can also have several thousand flu deaths per day in a very severe flu season. As of now, the coronavirus has not exactly delivered existential levels of carnage; in fact it's very, very far from it.

As far as the media is concerned there are a few effects at play here. The proximity effect: when we see pictures of people who have recently passed away, it gives us a very palpable sense that we’re next. In this day and age of one-liners, 140 character messages and memeified news, we forget that the vast majority of deaths represent elderly or people with pre-existing conditions. This should offer some sense of hope and consolation to the majority of us. But this is not the story we hear on a daily basis. When we hear of a case that resonates with us (for instance, the alarming and sentimental image of a 20-somethings falling ill), it doesn’t come with any sense of proportion or any sense of scale. The typical case here is not a 20-year-old, and even though there are such cases, it doesn’t mean you are next. 

There’s also a knee-jerk or bandwagon effect going on, and this takes place on every level: individual, community, government. You saw this knee-jerk/bandwagon effect on the individual level very quickly. Once you see a line forming to the grocery store — suddenly everyone is a prepper. Panic feeds more panic. You also saw the bandwagon effect on the government level, for instance, with the decision to effectively shut down the entire economy. First, governments were quite indecisive: they essentially adopted a wait-and-see approach. Then, once one player acted, they all quickly followed suit.  Very suddenly, most governments pursued fairly draconian measures, but at that point these measures had already lost most of their potency or proactive power.

The shutdown was something that was done very hastily, sloppily and heavy-handedly, and every country did this in quick succession. The rationale and the core considerations weren’t communicated clearly. This is the most critical decision you can possibly make, and the people have a right to know the underlying projections that were assessed, especially if they point to catastrophy. Also, the instructions the population

Many tech businesses, and particularly the behemoths such as Facebook and Google, have built their business model squarely around advertising. Advertising is heavily sensitive to the business cycle — it tends to be the first expense to tack on in an expanding market and when the times are good and improving. It’s also the first expense to be cut during a slow-down.

Companies don’t cut back on because advertising is an unnecessary expense, it’s because in a down-turn, the potency of all advertising activities decline as consumer spending and discretionary incomes decline. The ROI of marketing campaigns decline, and businesses pare back on their campaign expenditures. It’s really that simple. It matters little how sophisticated the advertising campaigns are, or how clever the underlying ad serving technology is, if the consumers hold their purse strings tightly shut, and that’s what we're about to witness.

In other words, this spells big trouble for big tech. Many products and services peddled on Facebook are discretionary, and to a large degree, even unnecessary in a post-corona world. Facebook had an opportunity to price their service more as a utility and emphasize the value added to consumers to such a degree that they were paid-for, but instead they built a crude money machine built on the business model of 1995. It’s built solely on ads -- they just slapped on some surveillance technology, but it’s still just plain old ads. During the coming times, people will pay their Internet bill, their phone bill, their water bill, their electricity bill, but they won’t be ordering that online course they saw a Facebook ad for. In fact, they can live without Facebook, because it’s not a utility and it’s not essential.

In fact, many of the companies in the NASDAQ represent non-essential goods and services; yes, including Apple, Amazon, Netflix, etc. These were the quickest to rise during the bull market, and they may be the quickest to decline during the crash. We may or may not get a relief rally from here — 20% is possible, but, it’s going to be a small consolation, as the general direction is going to be down. We haven’t even started getting Q1 financial ‘results’ yet, and it’s going to be a bloodbath.

What about the start-up space? It almost goes without saying, that it’s about to go into an ice age. The signs were there all along — for example, the failed WeWork IPO, Tesla with their self-crashing cars, the sardine-cans-on-wheels called Cybertruck, people investing in VirginGalactic on the daydream of conquering space, an Uber clone IPO:ing for billions of dollars. Pinterest IPO:ing! What were we thinking? It seems like a different era in history already, and it is. It’s interesting to see just how quickly not only the investment sentiment changes, but day-to-day-live and the primary issues. Climate change, feminism, the border wall, gender issues, they are suddenly just an afterthought; philosophical luxury items.

What about alt-tech? Alt-tech, meanwhile, is hugely speculative; it’s an off-shoot of tech; a play on the niches. It’s going in for hibernation. It will come back out. If you can hold your nose, soon is the time you’d want to buy even more Bitcoin, Basic Attention Token, Ethereum. Can they go down 50%? Sure. But what’s the upside once this has finally blown over? The survivors will stand tall. There will eventually be another tech-boom. It’s far into the future, but it’ll be there. And soon is the time when real fortunes are made. 

We did learn that Bitcoin is decidedly a risk-asset — it is not a safe haven. Bitcoiners have repeatedly said that Bitcoin is different from any other asset class, in that it’s crashed but gotten back again repeatedly, and that his supposedly means it’s different, it’s safe, it’s a prudent investment. It’s not. The reason it rose again after the previous crashes, was because we were still in an absolutely f