I saw recently that Amazon is launching an internet over satellite network. I thought that is a good sign the tech world is totally saturated with super expensive garbage nobody cares about or needs. I worked at companies that built satellite internet crap since the early 2000s.
In the early 2000s there were very few internet over satellite businesses. It was an esoteric, niche market. I worked at a small company that was building such systems, and it was purchased by a publicly traded company that subsequently launched some satellites and provides network service for homes and airplanes.
Then SpaceX/Starlink got bazillions of dollars somehow to build rockets and low earth orbit satellites for internet service. Then years later Amazon did the same thing. There are serious questions about the profitability of Starlink even years after the service was deployed. In spite of that Amazon decided to invest billions in doing an identical service.
Anyway, that same type of thing is happening in every nook and cranny of the tech industry. There's always some new gizmo, a new CPU, a new GPU whatever. The cost to develop all the tech stuff keeps dropping as well. An individual can spend a few hundred dollars and start working on RISC-V processor core development for example.
This problem happened multiple times in US history. In the 1890s economics commentator newspaper people were complaining about the lack of investment opportunities because the US didn't need any new bicycle factories. Similarly, the railroad industry became saturated in the US in maybe 1870? 1880? There was a crash/consolidation in the railroad industry in 1893.
This problem has two facets. One is "investors" have a much harder time making money with their money. They have to find weirder, more exotic niches to try to make money on. That also makes it easier for scammers to exploit them. The other problem is the workforce gets diluted and spends their life on stupid projects. There's not enough qualified people to do all these things.
Let's go back to the Internet over satellite business. Did the number of qualified tech workers quadruple from 2000 to 2025 so there will be a sufficient population of tech dudes to work at amazon, starlink, ViaSat, etc...? Nope. Did tech work get 1/4 easier over that timespan? No, it's definitely better/easier than it was in the 2000s in terms of tools and foundational solutions to problems that tech systems need to solve, but is it 4x better? I doubt it.
I think all this leads to major dysfunction. I see it on a daily basis. Tech junk doesn't work very well. New tech heavy products often have major bugs. Software updates have a very good chance of breaking things that used to work, etc...
Another major problem with all this tech crap is it has been financed with money printing and dollar devaluation. That devaluation went mainly to improve the quality of life of corporate executives and shareholders. The rest of the population has been fucked over by it. It is a disincentive to work and certainly to slave away like a dope for free doing over 40 hours of work at some corporate job.
