Thank You

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2024-12-24 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/thank-you/

Summary

A year-end reflection and thank-you piece rather than a critical argument, but one that crystallizes Ed’s thesis for 2024: tech companies’ products get worse while remaining profitable because shareholder supremacy decouples quality from reward. He spent the year documenting platform decline at Google and Meta and predicting that when the AI bubble bursts, “there’s nothing left afterwards” — job losses and industry depression without the infrastructure legacies the dot-com bubble at least produced.

Implications

• AI financial sustainability. “Nothing left afterwards” is Ed’s specific claim about the AI bubble’s post-correction landscape: unlike the dot-com crash that left behind fiber infrastructure and surviving platform companies, the AI bubble leaves behind depreciating GPU farms and subscription chatbots with no durable utility.
• Enshittification. Products getting worse while remaining profitable is the definition of enshittification at scale — shareholder supremacy removes the market feedback mechanism that would normally punish quality degradation. Year-end synthesis confirms this as Ed’s central analytical frame.