I don’t know if you’re a masochist^Wfan of a 19,000-word Ed Zitron rant, but if you are, this is a good read.
Ed’s framing of the present-day stock hype cycle as “enshittification of shareholders” is pretty apt. Analysts are incentivized to *sell stock*, not provide a reporting of things as they are. As a result, they become complicit in risk-laundering, causing stock prices to go ever higher, and putting shareholders (that’s you and me) at higher risk than we realize.
Although this seems to be a market-wide problem, nowhere is it worse than in the AI industry. The article claims that the valuations of AI companies are based on future promises of revenue in a way that is *way* beyond the norm; the odds that all of these promises come to pass is basically zero, and the odds that many, MANY dominos fall when only a few of those promises fail to deliver is quite high; and the time of reckoning for those promises is nigh: probably starting in 2026.
