Could this time be different? The tools are now in the hands of the "masses", not behind closed doors or in lofty ivory towers. People can run this stuff on their laptops etc
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Every time someone says “this time it’s different” (e.g. 1998 internet bubble, 2007 housing bubble, 2020 crypto bubble, etc) time proves that this time was not really that different.
Well, of those 3 the 1998 internet bubble actually was different and modern society actually was fundamentally changed by the technology in question, so idk if that's the best counterargument. The other two, sure yeah those amounted to essentially nothing. But there have been plenty of bubbles where the concept underlying the bubble actually did have large societal impacts even if the investors all lost money, like tulipmania with futures contracts and railway mania with trains
But the internet did change things? Even crypto is debatable. BTC still exists and still has pretty high value, just not as high as at its peak.
TBH, I'm not sure how to quantify housing bubbles either. I'd bet most of the country has much higher home prices now than in 2007. I bet they were higher than 2007 in most places and most years between then and now too.
> (e.g. 1998 internet bubble, 2007 housing bubble, 2020 crypto bubble, etc)
That's some extreme cherry picking.
During that time period, the internet and smartphones alone have completely changed society (for better and worse) in the span of only three decades, despite the former going causing a minor economic crash in its infancy.
Almost everything is different except human nature. The scammers are innovating just like everyone else.
When someone says a technology completely changed society, I think of the hypothetical singularity that Kurzweil and company predict, where it's basically impossible for us to predict what the future looks like after. But when you look back at the world before the rise of the web and then smartphones, it's just taking preexisting technologies and making them available in more mobile formats. TV, radio, satellite and computers existed before then (1968 mother of all demos had word processing, hypertext, networking, online video). And some people did more or less foresee what we've done online since.
We still burn fossil fuels to a large extent, still drive but not fly cars, still live on Earth not in space, still die of the same causes, etc.
I watch a long cargo train that looks like it's form the 80s go by and wonder how much the internet changed cargo hauling. I'm sure with the logistics the internet made things a lot more efficient, but the actual hauling is not much different. It's not like we teleport things around now. You can order online instead of out of a catalog, but brick stores remain. You can read digital books, but still plenty of printed materials, bookstores, libraries.
> the internet and smartphones alone have completely changed society
I honestly think this overstates the case pretty severely. They have certainly caused societal change, but from what I can see, society as a whole is not actually all that different from what it was before all of that.
Could yes? Will it be? I can tell you when you don't need the answer anymore, i.e. in a few years.
It's the very nature of the hype cycle that it is very hard to distinguish from a real thing.