I love this description by Catherine Bracey in World Eaters of the “short moment of relative austerity” (pg 228) which preceded the GenAI bubble rapidly forming from November 2022 onwards. From pg 227:
The era of easy money, when VCs were happy to subsidize money-losing businesses indefinitely, seems to be over for the time being. As interest rates have risen, limited partners are driving a harder bargain, asking more from VCs and the companies they invest in. While founders have been used to raising venture capital by telling stories of scale, now they are being forced to figure out how they will turn a profit.
This came in the first two years of a Biden administration which was making a serious effort to apply antitrust legislation to the sector, inculcating a defensiveness amongst digital elites who had felt in the early months of the pandemic they were inevitable inheritors of a dark new world.
I don’t think you can understand the swing of Crypto capital (following the fallout from FTX), VC capital and Big Tech beyond Trump without considering this prior context. In Archerian terms the regulatory agenda and the ‘relative austerity’ are the T1 of a new morphogenetic cycle which we’re now in the early stages of, with Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter in October 2022* and the launch of ChatGPT in November 2022 providing the causal kick off which threw us into our present conjuncture.
*Less than a month before ChatGPT launched! Why am I seemingly the only person fixated on the synchronicity of these events?
Mark Carrigan 