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Back in 2017 Long Island Ice Tea – known for its undistinguished, barely drinkable sugar-water – changed its name to "Long Blockchain Corp." Its shares surged to a peak of 400% over their pre-announcement price. The company announced no specific integrations with any kind of blockchain, nor has it made any such integrations since.
[...] The most remarkable thing about this incredibly stupid story is that LBCC wasn't the peak of the blockchain bubble – rather, it was the start of blockchain's final pump-and-dump. By the standards of 2022's blockchain grifters, LBCC was small potatoes, a mere $138m sugar-water grift.
[...] They were amateurs. Their attempt to "make fetch happen" only succeeded for a brief instant. By contrast, the superpredators of the crypto bubble were able to make fetch happen over an improbably long timescale, deploying the most powerful reality distortion fields since Pets.com.
[...] Like any Ponzi scheme, crypto was a way to separate normies from their savings through the pretense that they were "investing" in a vast enterprise – but the only real money ("fiat" in cryptospeak) in the system was the hardscrabble retirement savings of working people, which the bubble's energetic inflaters swapped for illiquid, worthless shitcoins.
We've stopped believing in the illusory billions. Sam Bankman-Fried is under house arrest. But the people who gave him money – and the nimbler Ponzi artists who evaded arrest – are looking for new scams to separate the marks from their money.
Take Morganstanley, who spent 2021 and 2022 hyping cryptocurrency as a massive growth opportunity:
Today, Morganstanley wants you to know that AI is a $6 trillion opportunity.
They're not alone. The CEOs of Endeavor, Buzzfeed, Microsoft, Spotify, Youtube, Snap, Sports Illustrated, and CAA are all out there, pumping up the AI bubble with every hour that god sends, declaring that the future is AI.
[...] Google and Bing are locked in an arms-race to see whose search engine can attain the speediest, most profound enshittification via chatbot, replacing links to web-pages with florid paragraphs composed by fully automated, supremely confident liars:
Blockchain was a solution in search of a problem. So is AI. Yes, Buzzfeed will be able to reduce its wage-bill by automating its personality quiz vertical, and Spotify's "AI DJ" will produce slightly less terrible playlists (at least, to the extent that Spotify doesn't put its thumb on the scales by inserting tracks into the playlists whose only fitness factor is that someone paid to boost them).
But even if you add all of this up, double it, square it, and add a billion dollar confidence interval, it still doesn't add up to what Bank Of America analysts called "a defining moment — like the internet in the '90s." For one thing, the most exciting part of the "internet in the '90s" was that it had incredibly low barriers to entry and wasn't dominated by large companies – indeed, it had them running scared.
The AI bubble, by contrast, is being inflated by massive incumbents, whose excitement boils down to "This will let the biggest companies get much, much bigger and the rest of you can go fuck yourselves." Some revolution.
AI has all the hallmarks of a classic pump-and-dump, starting with terminology. AI isn't "artificial" and it's not "intelligent." "Machine learning" doesn't learn. On this week's Trashfuture podcast, they made an excellent (and profane and hilarious) case that ChatGPT is best understood as a sophisticated form of autocomplete – not our new robot overlord.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by darkfeline on Thursday March 16 2023, @06:14AM (2 children)
Even as someone who laments that no one understands cryptocurrency, it seems painfully obvious that the recent generative AI advancements have many more practical applications, with immediate avenues toward widespread commercialization, than blockchain. Of course people want to invest in these opportunities.
As you get older, you see these cycles again and again. People get excited about new potential and ideas, and then you get the naysayers. Sometimes it works out, sometimes it doesn't. But no one ever beats a coin flip, and humanity consistently progresses over time.
I for one support the investment of resources toward new technologies that may advance our race.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 4, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16 2023, @06:50AM
> no one ever beats a coin flip
Correction: 1/2^n of people beat n coin flips.
(Score: 3, Informative) by JoeMerchant on Thursday March 16 2023, @03:01PM
Visa (yes, the credit card conglomerate) announced a "program for digital content creators" shortly before the NFT collapse. Apparently some Visa mucky muck with an office overlooking some tropical harbour was motivated to press on with the program after the NFT collapse, so we attended their video conference for creators which had pivoted from the still image video art NFT landscape that we were actually curious about to the "old reliable" video log channels content creators.
>it seems painfully obvious that the recent generative AI advancements have many more practical applications, with immediate avenues toward widespread commercialization,
Apparently, state of the artists in this space consists of "throwing what you have at every available wall and developing anything that sticks at all." Once you find a monetizable channel for your content, the next challenge is retention of your market, usually through a constant stream of new content publication. So, Visa's Zoom call was just a bit before the ChatGPT hype wave hit, they completely failed to mention the obvious: use of AI to either directly generate or assist in the generation of this stream of "similar content" to keep audiences engaged, and thereby monetizable whether through the big beast of advertising, or more niche streams like merch, consulting, etc.
>Of course people want to invest in these opportunities.
On the Visa (financial services) zoom call, they had speakers from a few "services" companies who would do things like consolidate your various income streams into a single account for you, help you manage and understand your effort investment vs actual payoff in the various streams.... you know, really, it sounded like a whole lot of nothing to me - a little bit of investment / short term credit line income smoothing but otherwise just kind of "chewing your food for you" turning the raw income statements into more understandable decision making information for the "artists" to prioritize their future efforts. How large and successful or fast growing these various financial services companies are was unclear, but what was clear was that they exist and appear to be part of the overall ecosystem, offering to help content creators manage the financial end of their operations - for a fee.
For the artists, primary monetizable channels mentioned were TikTok and YouTube, but they emphasized the diversity of channels available and the imperative to diversify your distribution and monetization to survive the rather arbitrary and frequent shifts in market behavior and channel provider's policies.
>People get excited about new potential and ideas
Our man Cory here is a long time master of digital content creation, and I assume at least acceptable levels of monetization to meet his needs. AI is the new hotness indirectly driving the value of his content. He's not alone, publication outlets (HackerNoon comes to mind, there are many others) are attempting to gather content related to "the latest hotness" and distribute it to eager readers... The fun thing about AI as a topic is the meta-potential of AI to subsume the content itself, sort of an Ouroburos, and the implications of all that - although, in a way, it's not much different from the vacuum basis of "cryptocurrency value."
🌻🌻 [google.com]