What It Will Sound Like When the Content Bubble Bursts

It’s not what we even wildly imagine.

What will it sound like when the content bubble bursts?

The Silicon Valley Bank collapse has only led to a louder and louder cacophony of voices, and drawn attention away from the spiritual emptiness and moral confusion of most people in the business world — especially the venture capitalists who helped create the problem in the first place.

One of the most prominent VC’s — who was loudest on Twitter these past couple of weeks — told me with a straight face, at the peak of the crypto and “Series A” bubble: “It’s just math, and the math works.” This was in the context of me expressing skepticism about the Tiger model. He saw absolutely no reason why the run he was on could not continue. He even seemed to relish how easy it was. He was winning at math.

Maybe he was talking about math in a zero-interest rate environment.

This person, like many other extremely wealthy VC’s, tellingly pivoted to building a huge media presence during the pandemic in a kind of Audience Grift, moving strangely in concert with about a couple dozen other similar types, building a huge following and pumping out content to serve some utilitarian purpose. When there is nothing valuable left to invest in, these people invested in themselves — creating Hot Take content as a way to distract from the declining quality of the deal-flow, perhaps. And hey: at least when it all comes crashing down, they’ll have 623,721 Twitter followers and a bunch of YouTube subscriptions and podcast downloads to show for it. These people are not stupid.

The content bubble extends beyond Substacks and podcasts.

One of the worst purveyor’s of content in the world, PornHub (which is, ironically, owned by a company called “MindGeek”) was just purchased by a private equity firm named — even more ironically — Ethical Capital Partners. ECP says it is looking for more acquisition opportunities where it can exercise “principled ethical leadership.”

Language is losing all meaning, and humanity has been eclipsed. Who can wonder why we’re in a meaning crisis when a private equity firm can put out a press release touting their moral virtue after buying a…