tl;dr - just a rant. you're not missing anything.

And it all comes back to the fact that has been true since 2003 that Google earns 90% of its revenue on ads, and despite decades of trying at this point they still can't figure out how to move past that.

I mean, I think they've improved a bit, I've seen the number 70%, but still; a company as innovative as Google should be making money from innovations, not selling ads. Where's the disconnect?

I read this the other day and it's really stuck with me: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

It's about how we live in a world where companies are incentivized by short term quarterly growth expectations to outsource literally everything, including its core competency. What is left of a company like this? It's a legal structure and holder of IP, all of which is completely imaginary, yet every company aspires to be as such. Why? Because it's profitable, which is of course a made up concept.

Yet what if every company aspires to do evolve this way? What happens to an entire country if the corporations therein are just empty shells that hold IP? What happens if everything important you do is done "somewhere else"?.

So if every company is either just holding intellectual property (imaginary), moving around money (imaginary), producing advertising (imaginary), holding other companies (imaginary concepts), redirecting eyeballs, aggregating data (but never doing anything with it), and all the legal machinations therein... then what actual work is anyone doing?! All of that is just imaginary made-up trifling nonsense.

I once read that RedBull is really just an advertising firm. The whole company. They don't do a damn thing but make ads. Everything that goes into the actual drink itself is "done elsewhere".

Even the actual work that gets done, like building homes, is meaningless. Yes people do actual work to create the home and the materials, but to what end? To house a human being? No! Of course not! All that work was done to create an investment vehicle that will remain empty, but whose sole purpose is to inflate a number on a balance sheet (imaginary). All of the trees that were felled and processed into lumber, the iron that was extracted from the ground and turned into nails, the tools, the shipping of all the materials around the world, the equipment delivered to the job site, the innumerable man hours of all the humans involved in directing this supply chain to bring this house into existence... all of that work just to inflate an imaginary number that will be traded on an imaginary market.

And so we see the consequence is the emergence of proto-trillionaires who use their ownership of assets (imaginary) to borrow money (imaginary) to buy companies (imaginary) that have a real impact on public discourse. If you think I'm talking about Musk here, I had Bezos in mind, but the point is that if you're a billionaire, you buy a media company to influence public discourse. It's part of your evolution. And you might say the assets are real but of course their values are not! Covid times revealed a complete disconnect between stock price and company valuation, revenue, or any other real metrics and proved once and for all that the stock market as a system is completely imaginary as well. It's measuring nothing of worth whatsoever.

But that's not the worst of it. Circling back to Google, and let's throw Facebook into the mix as well, is that they have such an outsized impact on the industry that they and the rest of FAANG suck up so much talent that it creates a vortex. And what do they do with that talent but put them to work on maximizing metrics like "engagement" so that they can drive eyeballs to advertisements, and collect data for resell. Again, completely imaginary work. So then everyone wants to do this kind of thing. And even if you don't, you need to compete with everyone who does, because they're offering ridiculous salaries of $200k+, which of course are pegged to ridiculous stock prices that are completely disconnected from anything tangible Google produces. So Google and Facebook and all the rest of them are paying their employees imaginary wages pegged to imaginary valuations so they can do imaginary work.

And it impacts absolutely everything! Universities can't hire professors because FAANG is sucking up all the CS PhDs. Research is funded by FAANG; conferences are funded by FAANG; grad students are therefore doing research aligned with FAANG interests; professors are writing grant proposals on those same lines and getting governments to fund them as well; undergrads dream of working for FAANG; professors are therefor asked to spend time teaching students to pass FAANG entrance exams... all for what? For what?! To drive eyeballs to ads and collect data. It's maddening.

So anyway... seems like this should hold up in the long run yeah? A society of people devoted to doing imaginary work sounds durable and will certainly hold up well under a crisis like a global pandemic, or worse.