Everybody who knows me, knows that I love everything tech. Deepfakes, privacy-busting cameras, conspiracy theories galore—the pace of change is getting faster, and darker, than ever before.
I couldn’t resist posting this article by Nick Bilton that appeared in Vanity Fair.
The best way to put the past year into context is to simply look at the numbers. For example, over the course of 2021, as of this writing, Elon Musk’s personal net worth grew by $87 billion. That’s more than the market capitalization of Ford. Musk wasn’t alone—Larry Page’s and Sergey Brin’s net worths grew by $46 billion and $43 billion, respectively; Mark Zuckerberg’s by $21 billion, and Jeff Bezos’s by $4 billion. Over the same period, Apple’s worth grew to almost $3 trillion, up some $700 billion from 12 months ago. (That means it grew by about the entire GDP of Saudi Arabia.) The market cap of cryptocurrencies grew from around $770 billion to over $2 trillion, and that’s on a bad day (at its peak this year, in November, crypto was worth almost $3 trillion). Even the internet itself added 222 million new users—nearly 90 million people more than the average number of births per year—bringing us 100 million shy of 5 billion users. All connected together like billions of little synapses in one giant, discombobulated, meme-making, fake-news-sharing, Netflix-and-chilling chatterbox of a network. Be sure to read the rest …
