November 7, 2022 - 5:40pm

“We wanted flying cars. Instead we got 140 characters.”

It’s now almost ten years since Peter Thiel expressed his disappointment with the pace and direction of technological change, and time has not dimmed the strength of his argument. The 21st century had clearly not delivered the space age future we were promised in the 20th. In place of science fiction wonders like the flying car, we got smartphones and social media — including Twitter (hence the reference to 140 characters). Not much has changed in the intervening period. The tweet limit is now 280 characters, but the ongoing fuss over Elon Musk’s blue-tick decision shows just how little there is to talk about.

If the internet were still evolving at the same speed that it did in the 1990s or 2000s, then we wouldn’t care about Twitter’s change of management. Indeed, we might not be thinking about Twitter at all. In a truly disruptive tech sector, the website might have been swept aside in the manner of a Myspace or a Bebo.

However, the story of the last ten years is one of consolidation (or stagnation, depending on one’s point of view). The dominant tech companies like Apple and Amazon have tightened their grip on their respective markets, while technological breakthroughs on the scale of the first iPhone (2007) have been few and far between.

Of course, there have been upgrades and re-designs but very little that has genuinely changed our lives. The technologies that we have now were pretty much in place in 2012. Progress has been a matter of  incremental improvement and growth in consumer uptake.

But as markets become saturated and existing products become boringly familiar, we have to ask if Big Tech has peaked. Indeed, the real story at Twitter isn’t the blue-tick palaver, but rather the dramatic downsizing of the workforce. Nor is it the only tech giant going through painful adjustments. According to Jeff Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal, Meta (a.k.a. Facebook) is also about to announce significant job losses.

Meta is at least interesting in that the company is visibly trying to make the next tech revolution happen. Its core product, Facebook, is emblematic of a previous era, and Zuckerberg and co. are surely right to change the script.

However, the tech they’ve placed their bets on — the metaverse — has yet to set the world alight.  It could be that hundreds of millions of consumers are ready to strap on a headset and live half their lives in a 3-D virtual environment, but so far there’s little sign that this is the case. Indeed, Meta’s efforts are frequently met with mockery — as when the company announced that its avatars will now have legs.

Perhaps Big Tech needs to focus on the real world instead, where legs come as standard. If the application of AI and robotics produces actual breakthroughs like the fully self-driving car, then that would be transformative. But, despite the promises, it hasn’t happened yet, some partially-automated features aside.

Consumer tech still awaits the Next Big Thing. In the meantime, make the most of your $8 blue-tick.


Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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