For more than ten years now, probably 15, the center of gravity in tech has been Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Tinder, YouTube, and other tools like this. While this is “tech” in the big picture, and as we improve in all facets of society, it truly becomes the lowest form of tech. If you peel back the curtain far enough, it is quite literally just media.
Those products whose core “innovation” was better ways to keep you scrolling.
It was tech when it started – wow we can send messages globally, create content, and share this fast? But as time evolves, the magic wears off, and it becomes something else entirely.
It is not tech.
The market will soon understand this. But first, we must go a tad deeper to really reflect on this story.
For more than a decade, the brightest minds, the best scientists, have been hard at work “optimizing social media feeds” or little digital bits that you swipe with your finger and your brain says “ohhh” and “ahhh” and “arghhh” as the interaction between finger tap, swipe, and visual all interconnect.
Billions in capital and many of the best engineering minds went into refining one thing: how to keep a human thumb flicking a glass screen for just a little bit longer. Over the years, we wrapped this in noble language like “connecting the world,” “building communities,” “democratizing content” but come on people, now with AI, rockets to space, robotics, and autonomous vehicles, the relative value of these things becomes as “emperor swimming naked” as it can be.
Under the hood it has and is only thing: an extraction of people’s time in exchange for ads while showing media. Nothing more.
The Smartest Minds Created The Brain Rot, The Capital Formation Funded It
If you zoom out, the pattern is almost comical.
Since about 2012, Elite software talent has been deployed to:
- Tune recommender systems that predict exactly which video will keep you on the couch.
- Personalize social feeds so precisely that you feel like you’re “choosing,” even as the machine chooses for you.
- Gamify likes, streaks, and notifications to hijack the same reward circuits casinos target.
In plain English: the smartest people on earth have been training algorithms to steal time from people who have the least self-control.
It’s not that these systems are “evil” in some cartoonish sense. They are just ruthlessly efficient at doing exactly what they were asked to do: capture attention, convert it into ad impressions, and then convert those ad impressions into revenue. The collateral damage is an entire generation that thinks “being online” is the same thing as “using technology.”
We Are Now At Peak Social Media
There is an important caveat whenever someone celebrates the triumph of “technology” that social media must now be remvoed entirely from this term. Technology is now in rockets, robotics, and rolling vehicles with AI.
Today, we are at peak social media and peak content. Everyone is online. Everyone is posting. Every niche, every subculture, every micro-interest has been discovered, optimized for, and monetized.
You can feel the saturation:
- New social media apps are just slightly remixed timelines with different filters, inside jokes, and now AI that can create even more content from scratch reducing the cost of creating content even closer to zero
- Audiences are fragmented, tired, and increasingly aware that most of what they consume is making their lives worse, not better.
- The core way these platforms earn money is by extracting time from people in exchange from ads – the longer you scroll, the more time you waste, and the more money they make. You trade your time for their ads. But time is the most precious asset. As physical take reawakens, more people will become aware of this.
When an ecosystem hits this point, marginal innovation doesn’t create new value, no, it actually just reshuffles the same eyeballs. That’s where social media is now. There is very little new frontier left in squeezing more hours out of the human nervous system.
So what’s broken here is the idea that “technology” equals “apps that sit between my face and a screen.” The real frontier is reconnecting bits to atoms—using code to move matter, energy, people, goods, and capital in the physical world.
Less screens, more machines.
AI Is The Great Commoditizer of Social Media
AI is the plot twist no one in social media really saw coming. If you can ask a model to build you a decent app, write your marketing copy, cut a video, or design a UI, then the old moat of “we have the team and the code” collapses.
We’re already seeing signs of this:
- A rising share of software code is now AI-generated, which means many features that once took teams months can be replicated in days.
- What once took a team of content creators and products, can now be created with a couple of video tokens on one of the AI websites.
- AI is getting better at automating tasks on repeat, daily, every week, and on schedule without interruption creating the largest content creation wave in recent memory.
AI doesn’t just commoditize software; it commoditizes content. The marginal cost of another opinion, another clip, another hot take is effectively zero.
That’s bad news if your business is “own the feed.” It’s great news if your business is “use software as a tool to build something tangible” that improves your current business.
Capital Flows Back to the Physical World
Once social media and AI commoditize the digital frontier, the natural move for capital is back into the physical world. You can already see investors hunting for businesses in this area and as I have been writing for almost 2 years now. Caterpillar’s stock is a sight to behold, for example.
Physical assets stand to benefit most from AI:
- Software is an enabler, not the product: robotics, manufacturing automation, logistics, energy, biotech, agriculture.
- Real-world constraints matter: supply chains, power, housing, transportation, health, infrastructure and AI fixes all of this, or at least improves it.
- The moat is now built on atoms: factories, distribution networks, regulatory approvals, specialized hardware, and long-term customer relationships.
The next decade’s frontier companies won’t be trying to squeeze another minute of doomscrolling out of bored users. They’ll be using the same math, the same algorithms, and the same AI models to:
- Build new machines and materials.
- Optimize energy and resource use.
- Coordinate large numbers of people and devices in the physical world.
Technology needs to come home again—to our cities, homes, factories, farms, and bodies. We’ve proven what social media and AI can do to minds. Now we get to find out what they can do to matter.
Less screens, more machines.