It's the old Upton Sinclair line, at the end of the day there's so much money on the line and so much pressure to buy in that people just do. People are easily influenced and overwhelmed by their environment, especially when economic and social incentives are strong to do so. We saw it here with the blind worship of Elon Musk many years ago, then Crypto, then NFT's, and now with this. In every case it wasn't as if there was NOTHING there to admire, whatever I feel about Musk personally SpaceX has achieved remarkable things. Admittedly crypto and NFT's are a lot less useful outside of speculation and some really dark use cases. ML really is incredible and it's going to be something that helps humanity cope with the sheer volume of information that's become available.
But that's been conflated with "Actually a $2T Anthropic IPO makes perfect sense because they're going to replace white collar work."
I’d argue productivity is declining in this context.
The PowerPoint object is meant to be a package of one’s insights. If those insights are of zero value (the less time you spend the less value - correlation) - that time expended is a net negative for he firm’s productivity.
Obviously there were plays from the dotcom era that just were not going to work on the timeframes expected because the rest of the infrastructure also hadn't caught up - not just internet, but shipping in general took a long time to catch up, and Amazon having to basically build their own logistics empire shows that ecommerce just wasn't going to be able to be The Thing at the speed those investments required.
But let's say you invested in the NASDAQ at it's peak during the bubble - late 2010s you're whole, inflation adjusted. Obviously, not ideal, but a decade and a half isn't the worst turnaround to make your money back if you just sit. Lots of trades that have gone far, far, far worse.
Smartphones overtook regular cell phones ~2013-2014 as the majority of owned cell phones in the US.
But the NASDAQ started on clear trajectory up and up since 08, several years before smartphones became big.
Smartphones accelerated it, but obviously the internet was going to keep growing and growing and everyone could see where it was heading well before smartphones. A huge amount of the value generated by the internet is on the business side. The amount of productivity from making it basically frictionless to collaborate from anywhere in the world is hard to understate.
Young people and vanilla users might only see "the internet" as something that primarily happens on smartphones, but there are entire industries out there dependent on software that doesn't even exist for mobile phones yet still requires an internet connection. Smartphone internet is primarily an end-user/casual consumer thing. Sure there is a lot of money in that too if you can capture millions of users, but the real easy money is in B2B. And everyone in the dotcom era correctly saw that coming, but the digitalisation simply happened too slow for most industries because there was a whole generation of people who grew up without computers and who didn't mind wasting hours everyday on something senseless.
Dont talk LoC. Talk about projects.