Stagnation in a World of Fiat Fakeness and AI Slop

I saw an advertisement the other day on the side of a bus for ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’.

‘Black Ops 7?’ I thought to myself, astonished.

Do they really need a seventh iteration of that game?

As I walked home that afternoon, I saw another advertisement that caught my eye:

‘iPhone 17 Pro’, blasted on a huge billboard.

17 iterations of the iPhone.

My lord.

Is this what we call progress now? Just adding a new number to what is functionally the same game, and functionally the same iPhone?

Just some slightly better graphics, and a better camera?

How much has our society really progressed over the past decade or so?

It’s a question that’s been on my mind a lot lately, because it’s one that’s hard to answer positively.

Technology has improved, but has it really improved in ways that benefit the average person’s quality of life?

In my view, the answer is no.

If we measure quality of life as determined by ‘the big 3’ - where you live, your work, and your relationships - a strong case can be made that all 3 are worse than they were a decade ago, mostly due to cost of living and massively inflated house prices.

Technology that makes you more addicted to things you don’t need is not a net positive for the world.

And in many ways, this is what modern technology has become: a dopamine hijacker.

It’s worth understanding why this is, and how it happened.

I’ll sum it up for you simply: technology has become yet another victim of the fiat monetary system.

Most startups in tech are downstream of the capital required to fund them.

In other words, they are downstream of venture capital.

And venture capital itself is downstream of liquidity.

Where does that liquidity come from?

It comes from how much money is floating around in the system - how low rates are, and how favourable the macro environment is.

In other words, it’s determined by the money supply in the economy.

In an environment of increased money supply, more high net worth individuals, family offices, and financial institutions are willing to invest in startups - they become limited partners in venture funds, and those funds deploy capital on their behalf.

Given we operate in a fiat monetary system, the money supply is effectively unlimited, which means that those closest to the source of where the money is coming from (bankers, and financial institutions of all kinds) receive most of the benefits.

It has nothing to do with skill, and everything to do with proximity to the central bank’s money printer.

Which is unfortunate, because these venture capitalists are the ones allocating capital in the modern economy: they place bets on which startup founders may win and which won’t.

And their bets follow a power law: in order for their business model to work, they need to make hundreds (if not more) of investments in startups just for a single bet to hopefully result in a >$1bn company valuation in the long run. They do not care about your startup that hits $1m ARR - this is as good as a 0 to them. If they cannot find early unicorns to invest in, they go out of business.

It’s worth noting that the funding environment didn’t always operate like this. In Australia, at least, commercial banks used to lend to small businesses at a rate far higher than today.

Guess what these banks do now?

Increasingly they just focus on mortgage lending. They’re not actually interested in funding small businesses nor startups anymore - you know, the thing that actually makes an economy function.

Okay, so we’ve established that the banks aren’t lending to businesses, and startup creation is now heavily influenced by the money venture capitalists invest.

What does this mean in practice?