The Tech Bubble

So, yeah, this is where the world meets startups, didn’t you know…

As you know, the economy is a collective hallucination. It is not a natural occurrence that we have no control over, it is agreed-upon consensus reality that we create by implementing policies, laws, tariffs, and all kinds of regulations that are agreements between humans. For historic reasons that are worthy of a book and not a blog post, the current collective hallucination we have agreed on is benefitting a very few incomprehensibly rich people at the expense of most of us. This is not news. But what I do want to make sure we all understand is that this is a collective hallucination, and as such, we can choose a different vision.

Case in point: I live in San Francisco and I’m fascinated by the tech sector, which is like water to a fish if you live in my town. Pervasive, unavoidable, omnipresent. And, as someone who grew up waiting by a radio for hours to hit record on a cassette tape to get my favorite songs, of course I feel like Spotify™ is The Future and I Have Arrived. So, not a hater, a big fan of tech in many respects. But back to my argument about the economy. Check this out: last week, I read this article on Angel List (Angel.co) about a company that went public but is not doing as well as investors expected. This seems to happen a lot in Silicon Valley. This is Angel List’s analysis of why that might be the case:

The common thread among all of these companies is that, while their large growth numbers and massive addressable markets made them darlings in the venture capital world, their lack of profitability devalues them in the eyes of investors on the public market.

The fact that there is some misalignment of value models between venture capitalists in the private market and stock traders on the public market isn’t news by any means, but exactly how misaligned the two markets are is still uncertain.

Translation: companies are growing and growing and growing (because investors are pumping a shitton of money into them, whether the companies are profitable or not), and once they have to actually make money “in the real world” like the rest of us, the companies kinda fail because without a sugar daddy supporting them, the rest of us realize that what they’re selling is kinda bullshit and we’re not buying it.  Oops.

I’m writing about this in the context of my work, which is spiritual and planetary evolution, because an economic system that ignores the ultimate reality of birth, death, and rebirth, is ultimately doomed. We cannot expect a company to grow and grow and grow without shifting over time or providing some real value to the people it’s meant to serve (which is where the profit would be coming from). Why are we prodding up companies that apparently offer no real value to real people? And in the process mess with entire economic systems that affect real people’s real lives?  I genuinely don’t get it. This is what I do know: I’m not an economist, I’m certainly not an investor, and I’m not a technologist. So why aren’t those folks wondering what kind of insane elements they are contributing to the collective hallucination that is our economy? Why aren’t they wondering if we can ground work in the reality of life, which is about constant change i.e., birth, death, and rebirth, and not perpetual growth? It just baffles me. I’m sorry I can’t offer you any more definitive answers, but we have got to at the very least dare pose the questions.