> Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this Well, we need to calibrate a baseline otherwise its just a waste of my precious minute. Digital tech as

> Should take a person less than a minute to grasp this Well, we need to calibrate a baseline otherwise its just a waste of my precious minute. Digital tech as such, especially the hardware side is not a fluke. It evolves inexorably in capability, follows physical laws (e.g. the endless shrinking of transistor sizes has stopped) and is the tooling supporting a range of potentially long-term sustainable economic activities. This reality does not exactly fix the relative size of the tech economy to the rest of the economy, much less so in terms of market valuation (which is the driver for most the actors involved). There are various important factors that people simply assume are "normal" in the tech landscape but they are not. They are the result of arbitrary political decisions. 1) The degree of allowed concentration (monopolization) that essentially guarantees rent extraction and prohibits commoditization. 2) Lax attitudes towards data privacy that effectively simply siphon wealth from others. These two regulatory malfuctions could be reversed without much impact on the actual tech but a major impact on valuations. In fact the engineered hypes serve as much the need to keep inquiring minds at bay (by arguing now is not the time to stifle the exponential innovation) as they do to inflate stock options. Finally you have the fact that a certain fraction of "tech" is essentially disemboweling and substituting (rather than growing) other industries. For each triumphant Amazon type entity (that you seem to celebrate so much), you have the millions of boarded-up city bookstores and shops. This is a more complicated economic calculus. You could argue that all those vendors, publishers, taxi drivers, hoteliers etc should have been more proactive in adopting technology rather than have their lunch eaten. I would like to reverse the compliment and argue that it should take a person of any awareness less than a minute to grasp the rotten foundations on which quite a bit of the "tech economy" has built its edifice.