Shundo David Haye – Zen Priest

‘If you want to know what a bubble looks like, it’s this:

The graphic isn’t properly credited so I can’t give the right person their due but the accompanying article “OpenAI, Nvidia Fuel $1 Trillion AI Market With Web of Circular Deals” is by two journalists Emily Forgash and Agnee Ghosh and what it does is instantly illuminate a circular economy of loans and debts and froth and hype…all entirely dependent upon one another. This emperor has $1 trillion and not a stitch to wear.

What we’re seeing is a closed doom loop underpinned by… well, what exactly? The promise of a world-changing technology that, guess what, isn’t here yet and there’s no real sign that it ever will be. These companies are stealing every scrap of data they can find, throwing compute power at it, draining our aquifers of water and our national grids of electricity and all we have so far is some software that you can’t trust not to make things up…

I’ve had vivid flashbacks this week to the last tech bubble. I had a front row seat to the dot com boom as a cub reporter at the Daily Telegraph and have vivid memories of both its peak and crash. In the UK, the peak of the peak was the day the travel start-up, Lastminute.com went public, and the entire country was swept up in the hype, as was my own newsroom. As the paper pumped out stories about how oversubscribed the share offer was, how revolutionary the technology, how high the valuation, I watched several journalists spend their lunch hour desperately trying to buy shares.

Weeks later, the share price tanked as the entire dot com boom collapsed. The media hadn’t just fallen for the bubble. It was the bubble. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about this week, the difference between then and now, and how back at the turn of millennium, there was no other source of news and information.

Now there’s information everywhere. And in a week in which Sam Altman shat the bed and Epstein’s secrets have started to leaking out, these old airlocked systems cannot hold. You’re going to see that OpenAI diagram everywhere in the coming weeks and months. And if a slide begins, it could happen fast. And the Epstein bubble? That’s already burst. Why do you think Trump is threatening to sue the BBC? It’s a classic attention bait-and-switch. Don’t look over there…look here!

Trump is on the run. The problem is that, years on from the Arab Spring, we’re all a little wiser about the idea that information will set us free. The opposite of a lack of news and information is not truth or justice or even transparency, it’s chaos.

Information flows through platforms owned and controlled and manipulated for their ends by these same men. And shocks to the system are exactly what the disaster surveillance capitalists want.’ (from Substack)