2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
This seems to extend even beyond the arts. I would say that the race to add more features to web and mobile apps will face a similar obstacle.
How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
Damn, enshittification was already one of the toughest unsolved problems that successful software platforms face. It had not yet occurred to me that AI was going to increase the pace.
Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore? I mean, companies seem to be having massive layoffs and placing ever more work on the remaining employees. At what point will the remaining employees just collapse?
Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
> Does it seem like companies just aren’t that well run anymore?
If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.
Previously on “companies just aren’t run that well anymore”, HN considered this analysis of Boeing’s collapse following a reverse-takeover by an acquired, collapsing, competitor that ended up kicking out the quality-focused management in favor of profits: (6 years ago, 281 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21971040
I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.
It seems like Google, Microsoft, and Apple have all switched into "extract max profit" mode. They don't care about quality or even features anymore.
And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.
The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform.
You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives.
In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
> In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA
As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase.
As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
Well, we don't see a slight trimming of workforces, we see 20-80% layoffs in most cases with good financial performance. You see breathless claims of AI doing all the work one year, tokenmaxxing, then less than a year later everybody says don't spend so much on AI, progress wasn't as far as we expected. You see this in what people say about AI as well - one year everybody will be jobless in 5 years, next year "actually jobs are gonna be ok".
My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
I think they just want, broadly, to divest from the American tech work force, whether that's via AI or outsourcing. If "the remaining employees just collapse" it's a data point in support of the thesis that developing software in HCOL markets is unsustainable, and if they don't, margins are better!
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
I don't go back quite to the 90s, but this has been true across my entire experience working in a few big multinationals (including one in tech).
Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
>They're trying to have a CEO press a button that makes a game, and then everyone else somehow buys it without a job.
If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor?
The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
>Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.
I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
> Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
There will just be a lot more workers competing for those blue collar and service industry jobs in the future which will drive down their wages.
"Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI"
I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
A sizable portion of the blue collar economy collapses too if the white collar portion stops having money to spend or suddenly has an influx of time to do some of the stuff the blue collar workers were doing for them like lawns, home repair, painting etc.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
I think that even back in early farming days, there were usually some guys who were good at using spears and didn't know much about farming who would go around taking part of the farmers' output. If the farmers were relatively lucky, the guys with the spears would stick around and defend the farmers from other guys with spears in a long-term arrangement of trading protection for material goods instead of just roaming around robbing farmers without giving anything back.
The issue isn’t every other CEO having access to the “make game” button, but who will buy that game when the customers have access to their own “make game” button?
Part of the problem is that some investor somewhere making profits is considered the only real marker for success. It’s an insane perspective that devalues all other (arguably more important) aspects of a work’s success.
Ford's vision wasn't that much better. Old school manager controlled companies only work if the people in charge are great like him with big plans and the skills to realize them. If the CEO is just average it will end badly, and if they good but retire or die in office their successor will probably be worse.
And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
The profitable videogames are mobileslop appstorespam games loaded to the brim with microtransactions, as well as the really good games that everyone wants to play, which are impossible to create more of on a whim.
Profit in video games as an industry is largely the gambling industry hiding under the another umbrella. I'm not even talking about loot boxes. Just old school gambling games like roulette and slot machines but in a digital format. Once you strip that away and loot boxes, the numbers are great for classic games.
Worse then gambling at least I can take cash out. These are pure extraction machines. When I was part of a game studio startup all the VCs wanted the loot gambling games, some of the teams they funded hired casino guys.
Which is exactly the problem. All the folks in charge care about is money. Money has absolutely nothing to do with whether a game is fun to play or not.
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
... which is why it was, and still is, common economic knowledge that the government must control marketplaces. Meaning the physical areas where trading is taking place.
We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments.
But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well.
And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores.
Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend.
This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes.
You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play.
Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this.
So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no.
Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
Video games are profitable as ever, but they take years to produce, and the mass layoffs makes me wonder who’s going to be making the games coming out in 2-5 years. Also it has required a lot of write-offs from closing studios to maintain this profitability, and that’s not a trick you can keep up for long.
I have never been a gamer, but I have gained huge respect for gamers, gamer magazines and game developers for pushing back against this AI curse.
Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else.
I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.
2. Digital media allows a single authored work to consume the attention of an unbounded number of people with near zero marginal cost. Further, once a work has been authored, it is available to be consumed forever.
3. Computers, software, the web, and now AI have drastically lowered the cost to produce a work of digital media.
You can't have fixed demand and have the supply increase 10x every year without something going off the rails eventually.
Now, granted, a unit of digital media is not a commodity good. People have preferences and not all works are created equal. But people are also demonstrably not that discriminating at what they spend their attention on now matter how unsatisfying the experience was, once it's spent it's gone.
Our economic systems around making and consuming media were not set up to handle this level of imbalance between creator and audience and something will have to change if we want to still have a functioning world where people make good art and others are enriched by it.
How long can we continue making 10x more features just because we can, until somebody realizes that users do not have the attention to spend on them? There might be a shift, but currently, we are too focused on pleasing shareholders.
Are we just reverting to the mean after years of zero interest rate policy? Would love for folks with experience working in tech in the 90s and 00s especially to chime in.
If you mean the games industry, it was always poorly run. I worked in games in the 90s and 00s it was a cottage industry of nerds, many of whom had success with an 8bit game in the 80s (where they did everything: a one person team), to then have to run large teams of devs/artists/designers/etc without any leadership experience and more complex hardware.
Happy days :D
I assume a similar analysis exists somewhere for the big names in gaming that financial engineers have similarly destroyed other formerly-great companies; ZA/UM comes to mind as one example.
And it comes from the top: the CEOs are not caring anymore, so their lieutenants are not interested in doing any work either. So the companies get turned into fiefdoms without any central guiding direction.
The thing to realize about the SV executive class is that they have constructed a closed ecosystem around them where they only talk amongst themselves and a small number of supporting actors who say what the execs need to hear. A CEO will talk to other CEOs he will not talk to his skip reports. Alternative viewpoints or dissent are not part of this social circle, and despite their 'conterarian' self-image, there's an immense amount of social pressure to conform.
You can can see hints of this outside - for example this site used to see YC folks as regular commenters, but no more. Twitter was changed so that only views favoured by Musk show up prominently in replies. These people certainly do not encounter normal people in their day-to-day lives.
In this information environment you see extremely rapid horizontal spread of weird, stupid and esoteric ideas - one CEO does a layoff, all of them will do layoffs. One turns MAGA, they all turn MAGA, etc. One guy starts yapping about some snake oil, they all yap about snake oil. There no negative feedback loop there.
As for the layoffs, that one was to be expected, a correction after the insane hiring sprees during the ZIRP phase.
As for MAGA... well, Trump made it clear. Either you walk the line with him, or you get screwed.
My point is that its hard to ignore just how in-tune and well-coordinated all these people are, and I don't think it's a coincidence. If CEOs were responding to actual political, economic and company developments, you'd see far more diversity of opinion. Some you see their companies are growing and profitable and wouldn't jump on the layoff bandwagon. Others may ask "Don't we need rule of law? What happens when the other party gets in power?" and fight the administration in courts etc.
So I think decision-makers are seeing layoffs as win/win.
Companies will do what Wall Street wants (Wall Street likes layoffs), and at a certain level, they don't want unemployment to get too low, lest their workers gain too much leverage.
If AIs get just a few times better than they are now, the CEO probably actually will be able to press a button that makes a good quality game. The problem for the CEO is that every other CEO will be able to do the same thing, so what will be the distinguishing factor?
The buying without a job part isn't necessarily a devastating problem for now. Blue collar workers and service industry workers aren't in immediate danger of being replaced by AI, so there is a cushion period in which there is still a large number of people who have jobs.
>Since the advent of modern capitalism (and likely a long while before that), those in charge have often misunderstood, underestimated, or dismissed the hard work that goes into labour they don't understand.
I'm no big capitalism fan, but this sentence is funny. The author just had to put in a dig against capitalism, mildly qualified with the "and likely a long while before that". What do you mean "likely"? Lol. It's absolutely obvious that this has been true for a long while before modern capitalism.
There will just be a lot more workers competing for those blue collar and service industry jobs in the future which will drive down their wages.
I wouldn't be so sure about this; robotics is advancing rapidly. I do think there'll be a substantial market for "human-made" products and services as luxuries, though, so at least some humans will retain these jobs.
Its all tied together. The current system cannot function if unemployment goes double digits.
Back when everyone was a farmer, yeah sure everyone understood the job
It seemed more like the understandable frustration of someone whose profession is being automated. Schumpeter creative destruction, but not shambles.
And it's extremely vulnerable to bad ideas that get amplified by wealth and power, like Ford's antisemitic paper that inspired the Nazis. Putting one person in charge of everything is never good. The best outcomes come from distributing power as widely as possible to people who are affected the most, aka worker ownership.
The result was not regulated gambling but extermination of cash out options (well, and sometimes very obvious illegal gambling houses).
An eternal curse on the houses of anyone involved with these AIs.
We've been through this rodeo before you know. Private ownership of markets, with the obvious result monopoly abuses. Hell we've had private money and that was a total disaster too. And now we have VISA as opposed to government controlled payments.
But then people stopped caring about that. With abuse upon abuse the result. Because it's not like this result, that only by buying a prominent position on a marketplace you can have success as a seller is only the case online. This is very much true in meatspace as well.
And now almost everything you can buy is effectively through a privately owned (semi-)monopoly rather than a marketplace. From supermarkets to app stores.
Addendum: and then governments must NOT let anyone, not even other governments, force "whoever pays most" rules (like the EU is forcing through in Europe)
100% not. To equate fun to play to people buying the game is 100% not how you should say making more money is more people buying the game. Money is money. If the game is mediocre but it is fun enough, it can get more money than a game that is more fun but doesn't have as many opportunities to spend.
This is why things like dark patterns exist that try to get you to spend money through FOMO and other mechanisms like loot boxes.
You can argue that all of these things are people having "fun," but I wouldn't define that as fun to play.
Finally, none of these necessitate people buying the game, but rather spending money in the game. Usually, it's free games where people buy a secondary currency to spend on virtual items. Mobile apps, for example, are huge with this.
So the real answer to your question on multiple grounds is no.
Edit: Now, I will give you that people do have to make a choice, but that's like saying that gambling addiction is not real and it's a choice, or drug addiction is real and it's a choice. The reason for alcoholism and Alcoholics Anonymous is bogus because it's just a choice, but it would be dangerous to classify it as just a choice.
Any why always call critics "frustrated" in order to depict them as weak and spiteful? Isn't the Dwarf Fortress guy independent anyway?
Contrast this with "open" source where some Gen-Xers who are too tired to program need the AI wheelchair and simultaneously build power in their corporations for selling out everyone else.
I fell that also gamers are still able to articulate themselves rather than just spewing corporate talking points all day long.