A multiverse of Metaverses — When a self-proclaimed Metaverse champion (Hello, Mr. Zuckerberg) announced his futuristic vision, he rushed straight to the finish line, desperate to describe his fanciful visions of how the world will spend its work and play time in this new digital environment. But he jumped the gun. Some 18 months after…

If A.I. isn’t assisting you, it’s replacing you — Early this year, BuzzFeed was one of the first major media companies to announce that it would experiment with A.I. to produce content. In an internal memo, BuzzFeed chief executive Jonah Peretti said, “In 2023, you’ll see A.I. inspired content move from an R&D stage to part of our core…

As WeWork plummets, Adam Neumann is on the comeback tour — “The We Company’s guiding mission will be to elevate the world’s consciousness.” Those were actual words written in WeWork’s S-1 filing that not only derailed the company’s splashy IPO, but triggered the domino collapse that resulted in founder Adam Neumann being removed and billions of value being wiped out almost…

The meme stocks are dying — What do you get when you mix pandemic-forced lockdowns, stimulus checks, the Reddit sub r/WallStreetBets, access to the entire trading market in the palm of your hand, and a collective desire to disrupt the status quo and stick it to the man? Yup, you guessed it. Meme stocks. This perfect…

Shiny object syndrome at its finest — “People will look back a decade from now and talk about the importance of the work being done here.” Forget a decade; we didn’t even make it six months. That statement was the rallying cry Mark Zuckerberg told investors in Meta’s Q3 earnings call late last year. It was justification…

Musk, Memecoins and a $258 billion lawsuit — What’s the main benefit of spending $44 billion on a past-its-prime social media network? Pumping the price of the shitcoins. Elon Musk has had a strange relationship with Dogecoin. The coin started as a joke based on an internet meme featuring a Shiba Inu dog and was the crypto industry’s…

The technology is Now Fully Toxic — Last month, NFTs returned to the spotlight, seemingly regaining some of their former glory. Sales surged to $2 billion in February — numbers not seen since the Terra crash and a massive increase from the $117 million sales in January. “We’re back baby,” rejoiced the JPEG monkey-holding diehards. Unfortunately, the…

The company’s Twitter clone will be a guaranteed loser — Copy-Acquire-Kill. Meta has been deploying this strategy for years, going back to Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, perhaps even further back, with Facebook being a copy of Myspace and Friendster). In sum, the strategy plays out like so: If you can’t copy the product (likely a competitor), copy its best features…

Spotify is the latest company to copy TikTok — but at what cost? — If you can’t beat them, join them. This phrase appropriately describes the tech industry over the last five years. Innovation has been drying up, replaced by frenzied copying and maniac desperation to implement the current trend into a product, regardless of whether it makes sense to do so. The king…