Premium: Notes From The Bubble, Volume 1

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2026-06-26 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/premium-notes-from-the-bubble-volume-1/

Summary

Ed Zitron’s “Notes From The Bubble, Volume 1” argues the tech industry is in a hype-maintenance cycle driven by fear that AI won’t deliver promised returns. He cites specific examples — Meta building a Polymarket competitor, Google investing $75M in A24 with vague AI filmmaking rationale, Microsoft’s oscillating allegiances between OpenAI, Anthropic, and open source — as symptoms of an industry that has exhausted genuine hypergrowth ideas and is now manufacturing activity to sustain investor narrative. The through-line is that executives have become so insulated from ordinary experience that they’ve lost the ability to evaluate whether products solve real problems.

Implications

Feeds the AI-bubble critique thread directly — this is one of the sharper recurring voices in that space.

• Zitron’s “cargo cultism” framing is analytically useful even if you discount the rhetoric: when companies ship products that don’t connect to a real user need, they’re optimizing for press cycle not product-market fit. The A24 investment is a clean example — nobody could articulate the mechanism by which it benefits AI.
• The Microsoft allegiance-oscillation observation is worth taking seriously as a structural signal: if the hyperscalers can’t commit to a model partner for more than a quarter, that’s a sign the model landscape hasn’t settled, not that they’re strategically agile.
• Zitron writes from a firmly skeptical posture, which means he tends to under-weight genuine capability gains. But the bubble-critique angle is useful as a corrective to vendor announcements — a press release is not a product, and a product is not adoption.
• Watch whether the “premium” framing (paywalled newsletter) limits the essay’s circulation or signals that AI-skeptic discourse is building a sustainable readership outside the hype-publication ecosystem.