Episode 2537: How to Survive our Age of Technological Mayhem

“That he not busy being born is busy dying”, Dylan noted in “It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding)”, his grim 1965 masterpiece about reinvention. Sixty years later, at a time when “everything is technology”, these words have particular resonance in Silicon Valley. As That Was The Week publisher Keith Teare and I discuss in our weekly roundup of tech news, every Big Tech firm - from OpenAI and Airbnb to YouTube and Netflix — is in the perpetual business of radical reinvention. It’s what Keith identifies as “the truth” of our technological age. Surviving this mayhem, then, requires not just perpetual birth, but also a lot of conscious dying.

5 takeaways

* Keith Teare argues that "truth" can only meaningfully apply to facts and past events, not to opinions or future possibilities. He suggests that what becomes "true" is created after the fact through human actions and choices.

* Our discussion explores how technological change is accelerating, with Paki McCormick's article "Everything is Technology" framing technology broadly as "the process of human ingenuity transforming conditions and creating change" rather than just gadgets.

* We discuss AI's impact on education, with Keith sharing an example of a professor who allegedly resigned in real-time after discovering students had created a website with AI-generated lecture summaries and essay responses, highlighting the disruption to traditional academic models.

* Our conversation covers how established companies like Airbnb and Netflix are evolving their business models, with Netflix adding an ad-supported tier alongside its subscription service and Airbnb expanding from accommodations to curated experiences.

* We discuss economic differences between regions, referencing Yascha Mounk's article on the "great divergence" between the US and Europe in terms of GDP per capita, noting that the US has roughly three times the GDP per capita of Europe (approximately $85,000 versus $30,000).