How the Social Tech Bubble Is Different

theodp writes "Tech bubbles happen, writes BW's Ashlee Vance, but we usually gain from the innovation left behind. But this one — driven by social networking — could leave us empty-handed. Math whiz Jeff Hammerbacher provides a good case study. One year out of Harvard, 23-year-old Hammerbacher arrived at Facebook, was given the lofty title of research scientist and put to work analyzing how people used the social networking service. Over the next two years, Hammerbacher assembled a team that built a new class of analytical technology, one which translated insights into people's relationships, tendencies, and desires into precision advertising and higher sales. But something gnawed at him. Hammerbacher looked around Silicon Valley at companies like his own, Google, and Twitter, and saw his peers wasting their talents. 'The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,' he says. 'That sucks.' Silicon Valley historian Christophe Lecuyer agrees: 'It's clear that the new industry that is building around Internet advertising and these other services doesn't create that many jobs. The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.'"

Comments

Yeah, This Time It's Different

[WrongSizeGlass]

Every time is different, right? Isn't that what they always tell us??

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[Surt]

Yes, but to be clear, they are saying that this one is not only going to bust, it is going to be worse because there is less fundamental real value.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[ColdWetDog]

My fear is that Silicon Valley has become more like Hollywood," says Glenn Kelman, chief executive officer of online real estate brokerage Redfin, who has been a software executive for 20 years. "An entertainment-oriented, hit-driven business that doesn't fundamentally increase American competitiveness

Movies. Microcode. Pizza Delivery.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

At least the internet ad-clicking business should be able to implode relatively neatly into a pile of its own worthlessness, rather than blowing up outward and taking a nontrivial chunk of the real economy with it, like our last adventure in letting smart people produce nonsense for money. Plus, Facebook doesn't quite enjoy Goldman-Sachs levels of regulatory capture, so we might even avoid paying the people who fucked it up. Progress!

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[SeaFox]

People already complain about how their bimbo boxes are more plastic than metal now.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[russotto]

Yes, but to be clear, they are saying that this one is not only going to bust, it is going to be worse because there is less fundamental real value.

Less fundamental value than pets.com and drkoop.com? That's quite a bar to meet.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[hairyfeet]

Ya know, I really think we outta give credit where credit is due, and I don't see how these young 'uns will ever be able to top the level of worthless in Cuecat. I mean get VCs to pay for scanners to be passed out so folks can go to the trouble of hooking it up, installing a buggy driver that spied on you AND all for the "privilege" of scanning AN AD so you could be hit with ads on your PC? that is sheer genius levels of worthless right there pal, I don't see FB or any of these kids being able to top THAT nuclear powered failure!

I think the bigger question than "what happens when this bubble bursts" is the much more fundamental question of "What do you do when you don't have a use for people anymore?" Because as it is we are ALL playing IQ musical chairs with less seats for a bigger population every. single. day. and the next to go WILL be the entire service industry. what then?

You think MickeyD's bitches about having to pay minimum wage now, which frankly in America one can't live on and actually keep from going under, what do you think they will do when they can replace the ENTIRE workforce with machines? hell there really isn't anything that can't be done in your average fast food joint that assembly line automation couldn't do better, more accurately, and 24/7 without breaks, the only thing keeping them with humans is cost, but what happens when the robot is cheaper? you can't expect to hire everyone part time at $6 an hour when gas is $6 a gallon and a bag of groceries costs them $60, so what then?

I'd say you have a good 60% of the population that are working C and D level jobs that WILL be either shipped overseas where there is no working regs and you can run sweatshops and pollute the entire area, what are we gonna do with them? Execute them? lock them up? make up bullshit jobs (BTW currently government employs MORE than manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined source here) so now what?

So I'd say that is the bigger question we are facing. If the top 25% have everything while the bottom 75% starve society will collapse, crime will be rampant as they try to survive, yet at the same time we simply don't need the labor of more and more people on this planet. What do we do with these jobless masses? Blowing more bubbles doesn't change it, neither does pushing the "education!" meme that politicians keep harping about while ignoring that more and more that graduate from all these colleges and trade schools have nothing to show but debt they can't pay, because in the end machines will do it better.

And before anyone pops in with the capitalist meme of "wages will go down and they'll balance!" I'd like to point to what the race to the bottom gets us, aka the the Halliburton clause where more and more of our precious water is being contaminated and being rendered unfit for use by those that want to make money NOW and screw later. Meanwhile the super rich just got a giant tax break thanks to outright bribery, so trying to beat the third world at who can be the most polluted and corrupt probably ain't the right way to go, that is unless you like the idea of paying $10 for a bottle of drinkable water and having your kids wear masks just to go outside.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[russotto]

In a sensible economic system, if all the work could be done by machines, we'd live in abundance. Alan Watts had an interesting idea about how each citizen ought to get a share in the wealth created the machines.

In the real economic system prevailing in the US, those bastards who invented the machines, who built them, who serviced and installed them, and (above all) who financed them always seem to get the lion's share of the wealth created.

Though i'm not sure how, in this "sensible economic system", you get anybody to do the machine building.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[telekon]

Damn kids with their parents' bimbo boxes rattling around my burbclave... I'm moving to Mr. Lee's Greater Hong Kong

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[hoppo]

Yes, but to be clear, they are saying that this one is not only going to bust, it is going to be worse because there is less fundamental real value.

From what are you deriving your analysis that the tech industry of today has less fundamental real value than in the first dot com era? Given that it's /., I'm guessing your statement is rectally-originated, but I'll give you the benefit of the doubt.

The real difference of today is that a lot of these companies actually DO have real value. 9- or 10-figure IPOs in 1999 were not unheard of, and they were happening for businesses that not only had no revenue streams, but had no plans for making revenue. The scale on which these companies operated could not be justified with the size of the potential customer base -- the number of millions of people online at the time could be counted on two hands, which makes selling a billion dollars of pet supplies in a year a rather daunting feat. The industry has changed, drastically, since then. Most of the money is around online marketing, which has a good reach, now that potential audiences are measured in billions, not millions. Microtransactions are now capable of supporting a multi-billion dollar operation. This was unheard of over 10 years ago.

This is not to say there won't be another tech bubble. It is legitimately scary when you consider the exuberance around a handful of companies whose path to money is sketchy at best. However, we'll see how severe the bubble is -- there is less investment money to go around, IPOs aren't popping out of thin air, and a very healthy portion of the companies in the general sector are at a minimum cash-positive.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[dargaud]

In a sensible economic system, if all the work could be done by machines, we'd live in abundance. Alan Watts had an interesting idea about how each citizen ought to get a share in the wealth created the machines.

Re-read science fiction stories from the 50s: they already thought about plenty of variations of that. What they didn't think about would be that the investors of those machines would get 90% of the profits and leave the others to rot. Why wouldn't they, they have the money, the political influence and the power, so why would they share any of it, short of plenty of heads on spikes like in 1789.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[TheRaven64]

In a Marxist system, the means of production is owned by the workers. If they can improve the efficiency of their system of production, then they have an incentive to do so because they share ownership of it. If they can replace 8 hours of manual labour a day with one hour a week of calibrating the machine, then they have a strong incentive to do so, because they continue to share in the output from the factory, they just have to do less work.

In a capitalist system, the same incentives apply, but to the person who owns the capital, not to the people who do the work. They can improve the efficiency of the factory by replacing the workers with machines, so they do. And then the workers become unemployed, starve and die.

In the hybrid system that most western societies have, the factory owner benefits from making the workers unemployed, and society as a whole picks up the tab for feeding and housing them.

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[rufty_tufty]

Okay so you have the endgame of the post-scarcity society where machines make everything limited only by materials and energy input(and with orbital factories those are effectively infinite). Eventually everything goes beyond very cheap and becomes free. It doesn't matter who owns anything anymore because there is more than enough for everyone. (Except for fashion and IP, but I digress).

Somewhere between where we are and there: goods become cheaper and there are a few super rich who control the means of production. Those with anything are taxed to pay for those who don't and you get social welfare programs, medicare etc to mean that the poor aren't dying on the street of hunger and lack of medical care.
As time goes on you end up with the rich who do little because they own everything, a social underclass who live off benefits and a middle class who are aspirational to become richer and therefore more powerful.
It then becomes if you're born with riches, your machines build it all for you. If you are born without then social welfare keeps you alive. If you want to progress (get the latest good, toys fashions, bigger house etc) you have to work for it. Quite frankly this is almost my idea description of a society that those who can't work or chose not to are still supported and those who want to progress can, and in fact we seem very close to having this now.I just hope we carry on progressing this way until we reach the point where machines can build everything and people don't need to work at all, I don't see why we can't progress to this situation.

So to go back to your original point: Those bastards who made this possible who designed invested in and implemented those machines should be rewarded for that. After all they could have spent their money on paintings, or big parties or mansions but they didn't they build machines that made products cheaper with less human labor. This is a good thing, or would you rather we went back to 90% of the population toiling on the fields in order to scratch a survival?

Re:Yeah, This Time It's Different

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Bubbles are, unfortunately, never entirely collateral-damage free. However, compared to the impact of a bubble involving an unholy alliance of the financial services sector and the residential credit/residential construction sector(the first of which has its tentacles in just about everything, the world over, and crazy levels of regulatory capture and the second is strongly coupled to where real people really live, and also has the magic 'homeownership' ticket to favorable legislative treatment) a bubble involving the socialclickfraud.com sector should be comparatively self-contained.

Not zero, basically nothing in an interlinked economy can be, but there is a relatively clean collapse vector, where a few VCs lose their shirts, a bunch of companies learn that 80% of their "value" was in pretend internet money, the ones that offer a service people actually want start charging modest monthly fees, the others go out of business and their coders are reduced to designing IE6 compatible 'enterprise portals'(may god have mercy upon their souls).

Bubbles are always bad; but, as bubbles go, I'd take 'social' over a lot of other things.

Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.

Re:Amen.

[cyber-vandal]

And the easily annoyed minds are finding ways to turn the ads off.

Re:Amen.

[Surt]

The best minds of his generation are not, in fact, thinking about how to make people click ads. He's just so far from that tier that he doesn't even know a single person in it.

Re:Amen.

[Concerned Onlooker]

Or a poem. You know...

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by Facebook, intellectually starving hysterical,

dragging themselves through the focus groups at dawn looking for a fiscal algorithm,

angelheaded codesters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry cache in the motherboard of night,

who wealth and splendid raiment and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of luxury flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating more..."

Re:Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best minds of his generation are not, in fact, thinking about how to make people click ads. He's just so far from that tier that he doesn't even know a single person in it.

The only way to survive a job where one has to study the clicking of ads (with the intend to get more clicks), is by thinking that one must be among the finest minds of this generation.

Re:Amen.

[mcover]

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.

His statement might be flawed: Maybe so that many bright minds of our generation work for these companies, but these companies don't just "make people click ads". It might be at their business's core, however, they provide services which many of us embrace while they last and it helps us be more productive (exceptions exist), which in turn contributes to the overall achievements we will see in the following years. That is only that. Many of these companies also have people in employment who work, full time, on open-source software, do research and publish academic papers, etc. If ads fund these, by all means, go ahead. His argument can be somewhat justified if the business's ONLY operations surround "making people click ads".

Re:Amen.

[causality]

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.

His statement might be flawed: Maybe so that many bright minds of our generation work for these companies, but these companies don't just "make people click ads". It might be at their business's core, however, they provide services which many of us embrace while they last and it helps us be more productive (exceptions exist), which in turn contributes to the overall achievements we will see in the following years.

That is only that. Many of these companies also have people in employment who work, full time, on open-source software, do research and publish academic papers, etc. If ads fund these, by all means, go ahead.

His argument can be somewhat justified if the business's ONLY operations surround "making people click ads".

I personally took it to mean that someone else noticed one fact about Facebook: they aren't doing anything now that wasn't technologically possible ten years ago. The Flash games might be a bit more complex than ten years ago but that's about all. No real innovation has taken place. They haven't invented anything of significance. They aren't facing problems of scale that weren't already tackled by the likes of Microsoft and Yahoo and Google.

Facebook is a database backend (and those have been around a long time now), some JavaScript (available since 1995), some HTML (circa 1991), and Flash (1996). What have they invented? They're just another advertiser with nothing technically interesting to offer.

Re:Amen.

[lennier]

The best minds of his generation are not, in fact, thinking about how to make people click ads.

Of course not. They're thinking about how to make robots click ads and take the people completely out of the loop.

Re:Amen.

[oliverthered]

I am not allowed
To ever come up with a single original thought
I am not allowed
To meet the criminal government agent who oppresses me

Re:Amen.

[RockoTDF]

Could one argue that even if you are working on a google project that has nothing to do with ads, that you are ultimately contributing to a business that exists to get people to click ads? I think that is his point. Yes, the best and brightest aren't directly involved with ad clicking, but their code and equations are.

Re:Amen.

[The End Of Days]

You can make that argument only if you oversimplify everything to the point of uselessness - at which point you can make just about any argument you want if you're clever enough.

Re:Amen.

[grcumb]

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads" - Has there ever been a brief description that describes so well the technological time we live in? Hammerbacher should write a book or two.

Wow, if the measure of a man's literary talent is the ability to bastardise the poetry of a latter-day Walt Whitman wanna-be, then we surely are seeing an intellectually lost generation.

(Bonus points to anyone who spots allusion to Gertrude Stein, and double-bonus points to anyone who realises that the statement was a description of one of the most energetic and fascinating group of writers in American history.)

Re:Amen.

[causality]

What Facebook has accomplished is to make using technology completely socially acceptable, even mundane. This is not a trivial feat, although I suppose the importance is up for discussion. I think it's very important, especially given the miasma of anti-intellectualism we seem to be in as a society.

Did you ever stop to consider that maybe appreciating technology only when it's socially acceptable, only when "everybody else is doing it", is a large part of the anti-intellectualism? That it doesn't help when the main purpose of this technology is not edification or academic advancement, but advertisement and small talk? If the 99% enjoy new and interesting technologies that enhance their lives and allow them to do things that were once difficult or impossible, it's not because of them. It's because of the 1%.

I am sure some of them exist someplace, but I have never known intellectuals to be trendy crowd-followers. It is not something associated with independent thought, with those who are learned. I'd also speculate that the most rudimentary ability to use a complex tool is not nearly so intellectually challenging and stimulating as developing an actual understanding of how and why the tool works.

Significant intelligence is often accompanied by a sort of natural curiosity that delights in learning new things. That's usually how it developed in the first place. Either no one taught the person that learning is tedious, boring work that can only be done by rote, never by first principles and reasoning from them in order to apply knowledge to new situations and make personal discoveries ... or more likely, the public schools attempted to teach this to the person but the teaching was rejected.

Re:Amen.

[RockoTDF]

Not really. There is a difference between solving the problems of the world (which the author claims the best and brightest should be doing) which cannot be reduced unless you think the survival of our planet or species is pointless.

Re:Amen.

[Anonymous Coward]

The best minds of Ginsberg's generation were working to break the sound barrier and put a man on the moon.

American academia chose the beat poets' masturbatory pyrotechnics over technology - onanism over aerodynamics.

50 years later America is a nation of under-employed attorneys, marketing guys and lumpen-consumers.

Re:Amen.

[shutdown -p now]

Indeed. As we all well know, the best minds of his generation are thinking about how to do HFT faster than competitors. Which is an even more meaningless (if not downright harmful) thing than making people click ads.

well no shit.

[bmo]

Manufacturing is dirty and nasty and you don't ever want to do it. It's for the dummies. It's buggywhips.

That's what's pounded into the heads of everyone going through school that scores above 100 on IQ. As Mike Rowe said at TED, there's a war on work that's been going on for 40 years.

--
BMO

Re:well no shit.

[bmo]

To follow up, here's the video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRVdiHu1VCc

--
BMO

Re:well no shit.

[cyber-vandal]

No. But in those days manufacturing was very dangerous and paid very badly. Much like it is now in countries that don't have any inconvenient laws requiring factory owners to treat their staff like human beings.

Re:well no shit.

[MoonBuggy]

While you may be right about the psychological issues, they are overlaid by more distinctly practical ones. I can start a moderately large website with nothing but good ideas and $100 worth of hosting; a musical prodigy (or a tone-deaf teenager) can be heard by millions of people simply with a webcam, a mic, and a YouTube account.

If I have a brilliant manufacturing idea I have little choice other than to lay down thousands on machinery and materials, and since I don't have said thousands lying around, that means I need investment, which means aversion to risk, which means killing many of the radical ideas that might really be something special. It's not always the case, and rapid prototyping/on-demand manufacturing is helping, but there are still orders of magnitude between the start-up costs of an 'information' business compared to a physical one (assuming that you've got the skills in the field yourself, rather than needing to buy them in from outside).

It's why we're seeing billionaires coming from nowhere in the tech field - near-zero barrier to entry means the market decides (for better or worse) fairly directly on the products that survive. In manufacturing, the gatekeepers with the capital have their say long before the consumer does.

Re:well no shit.

[mbkennel]

"Manufacturing is dirty and nasty and you don't ever want to do it. It's for the dummies. It's buggywhips.

That's what's pounded into the heads of everyone going through school that scores above 100 on IQ. "

Not exactly.

It's more like, You Will Never Get a Job in Manufacturing Unless You Are Chinese So Just Freaking Get Over It.

And the executives running the enterprises---and their financiers---demand that they make it so.

Real world example. An MIT professor invented a pretty cool new technology for better lithium-ion batteries. He wanted to set up a company and manufacture them in the USA and started doing so. When he needed more money he went to the VC's---they demanded that he close down the US factory and re-open it in China before he gets any money. He did.

BTW, the professor was ethnically Chinese from Taiwan.

Re:well no shit.

[Toze]

Rapid prototyping is starting to change that, to an extent, though. Or at least the initial "Here's the physical object" prototyping stage is getting easier to enter.

Stick with what you know

[MM-tng]

Most American companies are about the marketing anyway. Fast food, candy bars, cars. Lots of fancy colors. Sell as much crap with a fancy wrapper. Don't see what got lost, maybe we are better off :)

Disturbing Trend?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

A deliberate move.

Concentrate power and wealth for very few, at the cost of all the others... Then? Castigate the losers in this scheme as stupid or non- adaptable.

This is the new America. It's the perfect cesspit for breeding Zuckerbergs.

Re:Disturbing Trend?

[khallow]

This is the new America. It's the perfect cesspit for breeding Zuckerbergs.

Zuckerbergs wouldn't exist in this dystopia. He didn't start with all that wealth and power. He'd merely be another would-be upsurper shutout of capital, subject to onerous, regulatory burden, and whatever other ploys your dystopia has to keep wealth with the wealthy.

Great wealth only came to him as the result of creating something of value (sure, I think Facebook is overvalued in the markets, but it still has considerable inherent value).

Who's to blame for all the advertisement?

[Raffix]

I use two facebook accounts; one polished and clean for my parents and family, and one for my friends that has very little personal information(for instance i only use initials and dont link to my employer or even my city. I never spent a dime on any apps or services on facebook and I never will. The sad thing isn't the folks at facebook, google or twitter trying to get us to click on ads or buy fake gold for some facebook game, it's the ones of us that do click or buy fake gold. Website advertisement would not exist if it didn't work. This article warms me up and gives me hope that once all the baby boomers will be retired ... the IT workers and advertisement gurus of our generation might finally embrace better values than the ones brought on by capitalism.

Re:Who's to blame for all the advertisement?

[Frosty Piss]

I use two facebook accounts; one polished and clean for my parents and family, and one for my friends...

I have *ONE* Facebook page because I've long ago decided that my parents know who I am, and I don't care to work for people I have to lie to.

It's NEVER different.

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever.

Groupon, which e-mails coupons to people, may be the fastest-growing company of all time. Its revenue could hit $4 billion this year, up from $750 million last year, and the startup has reached a valuation of $25 billion. Its technological legacy is cute e-mail.

Groupon is going to crash and burn like you've never seen.

1. Barriers to entry are pretty much zero and as such, competitors are cropping faster than ever.

2. The merchants are disillusioned with them: all they get are the people looking for deals and no repeat business and in the meantime, the business they get form Groupon hardly makes any money and most of the time, it's at a loss.

HPs, Oracles, SUN, the Slashdot hated Microsoft all created products - not easily duplicated services that are basically advertising which is what this whole new bubble is. That's all. No new technology. No new "paradigm" like the Internet was - just using bits and bytes instead of paper.

I will enjoy this show immensely!

consumer products are price constrained

[OrangeTide]

Unless you can manufacture the candy and soda efficiently, no amount of marketing is going to save your ass.

Re:consumer products are price constrained

[im_thatoneguy]

I just went to an event yesterday sponsored by Monster Energy. I imagine the profit margins on a $5 can of non-carbonated pop is *at least* 500%.

There is a *LOT* of room for manufacturing inefficiency in such a product. But the marketing which produced literally thousands of people paying money to wear a hat or sweater emblazoned with your logo is by far the greater accomplishment than the product.

It's a product that tastes like shit, is grossly over priced and really only exists because of its successful marketing campaign and lifestyle association.

Re:consumer products are price constrained

[MoonBuggy]

I think you've missed the point. It's not to say that their overall profitability is that high, but that the margin on the physical product alone is, meaning that manufacturing efficiency and actual product improvement (something that many people would consider to have value) are largely unimportant to them, whereas improved marketing is everything. Which goes back to the article's point that all we'll be left with when the current bubble bursts is the ability to market really really well.

Honestly I'm not sure I agree, but your conjecture that they spend a lot on marketing, promos, sponsorships and so forth actually reinforces that point - it certainly doesn't refute what the GP post was saying.

So? Advertising is new?

[SmallFurryCreature]

Yes, this guy is in advertising. He is the b-ark but for some reason, he figured it out. Well? Advertising has been around for a long time and has always about getting people to buy more widgets they don't need. There really is no difference between the guy who came up with Soaps to sell soap and the guy who invented the monkey gif ad.

If this guy hates his job, there are plenty others. It is hardly as if the whole world is just working for facebook.

If ANYTHING, this guys attitude "my job is just selling ads, therefor the entire world is about selling ads" is the problem. No, the whole world is NOT you. Don't throw a hissy fit because you found out you work in advertising. Oh and the guy in the example? Now runs a data analysis company. Gosh, he was so upset about this job selling advertising he went into data mining. Two guesses what he mines for.

But there are still countless companies doing real work, just as they have been doing while advertising agencies have been around.

Just accept, most of us lead utterly meaningless lives. The b-ark better be really big.

Re:So? Advertising is new?

[geek]

Advertising has alway existed, but it's never existed on this scale. We're seeing a type of advertising now that dwarfs even the insane propoganda put out during rival governments during war time. You can't go anywhere, do anything without ads everywhere. In movies, buses, signs, TV, radio. Hell even my place of employment covers the walls with ads for products because they get kick backs from the vendors. I walk down a hallway every day with coca cola and apple plastered over the walls.

To say it's always existed is like saying viruses always existed while everyone around you is dying of AIDS. At no other time in history have we been so over come with bullshit. That is the point.

Re:So? Advertising is new?

[EvilAlphonso]

Advertising has alway existed, but it's never existed on this scale. We're seeing a type of advertising now that dwarfs even the insane propoganda put out during rival governments during war time. You can't go anywhere, do anything without ads everywhere. In movies, buses, signs, TV, radio.

While it may be true in the US of A, there are still places where you don't get exposed to that many ads. For example, on this side of the Atlantic I don't see a single ad panel on the way to work (or back), BBC is still advertisement free (and for everything else there is MythTV commercial skipping), AdBlock+ and noScript filter out most of the crap on the web, there are so many freely available interesting podcasts or university lectures that I only tune in the radio for the news. I can't comment much on movies as I haven't set foot in a theater for the last 2 years.

To say it's always existed is like saying viruses always existed while everyone around you is dying of AIDS. At no other time in history have we been so over come with bullshit. That is the point.

Then do something simple about it... turn off the dumb box, stop consuming the mind-crushing drivel that passes as entertainment nowadays. Pick a hobby, any hobby that doesn't require you to sit for hours in front of a screen after spending your entire work day sitting in front of one.

If you really "need" to watch TV, consider watching it time-shifted using a PVR that is able to strip commercials.

If I was a pundit

[cosm]

Fox & Friends: "Mr Cosm, how would you describe the modern American economy?"
Cosm: "Well, we have primarily shifted to a PTE based model."
Fox's Token Blond: "What's that? Is that like China?"
Cosm: "Polished Turd Economics, you should be quite familiar with it by now."
Snide Male Co-Host: "You mean like the democrats?"
Cosm: "...well..kind of...that would make the Republicans unpolished..."
Blond: "[winces] Hey now....We'll be back folks after this commercial break."
commercial fade-in: "The new iPad 4G from....fades off..."

No easy answers

[spike_gran]

I think the real question from TFA is if we all do pointless crap like market analysis, marketing, branding, and search engine optimization like the guy in the article, are we going to someday have a future where these skills can no longer be converted into food and shelter through the magic of the market.

For a while now, I've been wondering what the purpose of the USA economy is.

There are the basics, of course. I work so that I can have food, water, clothing, shelter, free time, fun. But it is through the magic of the world economy that I get those things by writing software specifications and unit tests. The economy somehow figures out how many lines of code I need to write to buy a loaf of bread or a gallon of milk.

I suppose I don't worry too much about the fact that most of the work we do is of dubious importantance, so long as it is still convertible into food and shelter. But there is a tipping point somewhere. If everyone in the USA worked making click-through ads, we'd reach a point where no amount of work could be converted to food and shelter.

Re:No easy answers

[Salamander]

Thank you for making that point. Marketing and finance and such are all wonderful optimizations of the wealth-creation process, but there has to be some actual wealth-creation to optimize. How many people in the US are actually creating wealth, instead of figuring out how to persuade others to spend some of theirs? It's no wonder we have booms and busts, when 90% of the "wealth" out there is total speculative bovine-excrement. BTW, I do know not all readers here are from the US, but I am referring here specifically to the US; as a citizen here all my life, I'm painfully aware that just about every other country has a much more realistic view of the relationship between real value and mere dollar signs. As far as I can tell, Wall Street and Silicon Valley are both turning the US into a big Golgafrincham Ark, full of people whose much-vaunted skills are only of value within a totally inbred economic system increasingly divorced from the actual needs or wants of anyone not born into that economic and sociopolitical environment. JeffH (disclaimer: we've met) had it right: that sucks. Even if we don't personally have the skills to do things that result in direct benefits *somewhere* on a sane Maslow Hierarchy, we can at least turn those skills toward taking the tools that have been developed to serve the vapid goals of "social" media and try to re-orient them toward more productive purposes.

There is worth while technology coming out of this

[i_ate_god]

AI and natural language processing certainly benefit from this, and the technology invented goes beyond just ad placements (even if it's the primary motive).

Not only that, but innovation has taken place just to handle the sheer volume of data created by the "social web".

the technology and resources to predict trends is something that has come out of this whole social thing, and since this kind of information can be compiled and analyzed by just about anyone, just about anyone can capitalize on that information in many ways that don't involve specifically targeted web ads.

Past Generations Were Even Worse

[Toy G]

"The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads,"

... whereas the best minds of the previous generation were thinking about how to make people put money into insurance policies and the stock market. Look how well that turned out. And, surprise, many of those same yuppies were the hungry children of the generation who worked in manufacturing; their fathers themselves told them to study and stay the hell out of that wretched, inhumane sector.

If anything, the current "social" bubble is giving us unprecedented insight in sociological behaviour at mass scale. We are leaving behind the world where "sociology scientists" could only run limited and poorly-defined experiments over their own student population; now "social companies" like Facebook have at their disposal an incredible amount of relevant, up-to-date, *exact*, aggregated data. The field will never be the same.

Isn't it obvious?

[Haedrian]

You now have a large amount of people using the same services, who are giving you a ton of personal information. They're not going to pay for this service.

How else are you going to make your money? Its just asking to be advertised.

It is not only about making people click on ads

[olegalexandrov]

Google, for example, is doing a lot of things except making people click on ads.

* Intelligent search, this one day will progress into natural language understanding and even AI * Image recognition, this one day may help robots understand their surroundings * Voice recognition, again, useful * How to efficiently manage massive data centers, great for creating future infrastructure

Even clicking on ads, requires sophisticated AI techniques which are useful in many other areas

I was going to post

[Anonymous Coward]

I was going to post about how greed and the collapse of the middle class in the US has caused all of this, how intervention and care could have stopped it, how greed, particularly on the part of the political right in concert with greedy corporate interests have shaped this outcome. But I won't. What their greed has created will come to destroy them. Its been posted on /. for a long time now. There is no converting these people. They need to fall hard, and no amount of reasoning will fix them. They are like Adolph Hitler at the end of World War 2; in the bunker, scared, dangerous, not giving a damn about all the damage they caused, and utterly deaf to the collapse all around them. In the end, they bite on the capsule, proclaim their loyalty to Machiavelli and Ayn Rand, and swallow hard.

What about investment banking?

[Knytefall]

It's tragic how our era's finest mathematical and technical minds are working on social networking. It's not right that they're wasting themselves trying to figure out how to monetize people sending pet photos to each other!

Why just a few short years ago people in that field were really doing great things for the world--like repurposing the Black-Scholes theorem to create increasingly complicated derivative financial instruments. Those instruments powered a revolution that brought prosperity to everyone.

If we can't get our best and brightest to go back to investment banks and get to work on developing new financial instruments, I don't know what will happen to our fine nation.

Re:What about investment banking?

[n8_f]

I think that banking is actually a little more honorable than click ads.

Really? Because I don't anticipate having to spend hundreds of billions of dollars of our money to bail out Google and Facebook in order to prevent a global catastrophe. And yet, not only have I had to do that once already in my lifetime for the banking industry, I expect to have to do that again because little has changed since the last time we did it. So, fuck the banks. We're lucky that this bubble is in an industry that is not "too big to fail."

Re:The loss of manufacturing jobs

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hey, be nice.

Working at AOL(not that I do), is like having a Social Security account that works in reverse: Instead of paying for the retirements of increasingly helpless confused old people, increasingly helpless confused old people pay you, a tidy sum a month, for a service they are no longer using; but do not understand.

Gnawing out your own soul is fairly painful during the first week or two; but after that it starts to get easier.

Yeah right

[drsquare]

What makes you think IT workers are the brightest minds? Because your company that gives you free pizza keeps telling you that?

The best minds of his generation?

[Kanel]

The best minds of my generation are creating bio-tech startups in Bangalore
The best minds of my generation design oil rigs for the Santos basin offshore Brazil
The best minds of my generation can't afford education in Nairobi
The best minds of my generation divert rivers in China to power cities not yet built
The best minds of my generation uncover the workings of the brain in a town near the pole
The best minds of my generation overthrew a dictator in Kairo
The best minds of my generation enrolled in a militia in Afghanistan
The best minds of my generation does not read businessweek.com

The best minds of every generation are wasted

[spasm]

The best minds in the 1860s wasted their lives coming up with new colours of synthetic dyes to allow fabric manufacturers to sell more fabric. The best minds of the 1920s wasted their lives in the new(ish) field of advertising. The best minds of.. The vast majority of the 'best minds' of any generation have ended up taking the stable and well paid jobs associated with working for commercial interests, usually on stuff that won't exactly change the world or make it a better place or anything of the sort. The only thing more depressing is when there's a large war and the best minds of the generation spend years of their lives trying to come up with more efficient ways to kill other human beings. However, in any generation some bright people through accident or design work on things that decades later, in hindsight, are seen to have changed the world in some positive way.

And sometimes people who do useful things with their lives started off doing something like helping facebook sell ads, and had a sudden realization one day that this was a waste of their life. I hope this guy now goes and has a go at something he thinks will make the world a better place instead of just whining about how facebook is ruining the world.

High speed robot hand for clicking. :-)

[Paul Fernhout]

http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

We live in abundance

[graymocker]

We _do_ live in abundance, compared to 100 or even 50 years ago. Our standard of living has increased immensely thanks to increased productivity (from automation, computerization, etc.). As an economy we've converted this extra productivity into more/better goods and services, instead of extra time.

Oh, and before you suggest that median 1950 US citizen had a higher SoL than median 2010 citizen... taken quantifiably, SoL includes things like the size of your TV, car, access to medical care (1950 US medical care is worse than 2010 rural Indian medical care), cost of services like travel (inflation-adjusted plane tickets are like 10% the price of what they once were even 35 years ago), etc.

Technology will not take our jobs, technology will increase our standard of living in the future just as it has done throughout all recorded history. The thing is, absolute gains in personal wealth/GDP/SoL don't actually make us happier. It's an unfortunate quirk of human psychology - our absolute wealth doesn't make us happy, our relative wealth is what makes us happy. Because people tend to live around people who are about their wealth level, this means no one is very happy. (Another unfortunate quirk of human psychology - we tend to compare ourselves with people just above us wealth-wise, and assume there are more of them than we think.)

So, now that we are self-aware about our psychological quirks, here is my 3-step plan to lasting happiness
a) Recognize that on an absolute level, we are wealthier in every measurable way than before. Your TV is bigger and sharper than your grandparent's TV. You have access to lifesaving technologies, with new being developed every day. You have the freaking INTERNET for chrissakes. Now of course, _everybody_ around you also has these things... but now you are lapsing into thinking about *relative* wealth, not absolute wealth.
b) When it comes to relative wealth, start hanging out with people poorer than you. It'll make you feel rich.
c) Support some redistributive economic interventions, because more even distributions of wealth lead to more happiness that highly stratified wealth distributions. These policies will reduce our future growth of wealth as an economy, but as long as we are careful not to take it too far, it doesn't matter. Remember - relative wealth makes us happier than absolute wealth, so even if pure pro-growth policies do make us all much wealthier than the alternative, it will actually make us more unhappy if it serves to stratify the economy,

Re:We live in abundance

[aaaaaaargh!]

According to the Center for American Progress (a rather ironical name), the income of the bottom 50% of all Americans has increased by 6% from 1979 to 2007. During the same period the income of the top 1% of all Americans has increased by 229%.

Similarly, according to Cornell's CSI, in 2004 the net assets of the median household in the U.S. equaled approximately $82,000, which is an inflation-adjusted increase of 79% since 1962. Meanwhile, the net assets of the top 1% of the richest households in the US increased to $15 million in 2004 (a 263% increase since 1962).

The bottomline is: Only a small percentage of Americans lives in abundance in comparison to 50 years ago. The rest seems to be a little bit better off than they used to be, but in any case the gap between normal and low incomes and the insanely rich has become incredibly huge.

slave masters

[Tom]

The loss of manufacturing and design know-how is truly worrisome.

And the fact that the best minds of our time are being employed to manipulate the rest of us isn't?

Advertisements has turned evil long ago. The original idea of getting your product out there, letting people know about it so they can come to buy it if they want - how far have we come since? Marketing is psychological warfare on the population.