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Tech Fads
Ever since the invention of technology folks have been chasing new developments in the hopes of getting rich. Some of these developments have panned out, others have been panned. Lately, the cycle of discovery->hype->boom->bust seems like it's churning ever faster. To better understand this phenomenon, I have developed a non-exhaustive list of such fads as I see them. The way I figure it, even successful things like video games and smartphones start out as fads, so the end date is when it stops being the Next Big Thing and is just a normal part of life.
| Dates Active | Fad | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 1961- 1973 | Manned Space Exploration | What if we go up there and walk around? |
| 1975- 1983 | Video Games | What if you make little dots move around a TV screen? |
| 1986- 1995 | Desktop Publishing | What if you use these newfangled computers to format documents? |
| 1989- 1995 | Multimedia CDs | What if you could hold a whole library in the palm of your hand? |
| 1994- 2012 | The World Wide Web | What if every company makes a website for some reason? |
| 1997- 2000 | eCommerce | What if we make a million shitty startups to sell things online? |
| 2004- 2013 | Blogging | What if we write for free on the internet until we get a sweet book deal? |
| 2006- 2013 | Motion Controls | What if you had to wiggle around to play a video game? |
| 2008- 2019 | Social Media | What if we let giant companies track everything about our personal habits? |
| 2008- 2016 | Smartphones | What if we carry around a little slab that helps giant companies track us? |
| 2010- 2013 | 3D TVs | What if you had to wear stupid glasses to see your TV properly? |
| 2011- 2015 | Toys to Life | What if you had to buy plastic crap to unlock things in a video game? |
| 2012- 2015 | Mobile games | What if everyone just plays games on their smartphones from now on? |
| 2013- 2020 | Streaming TV Services | What if you buy a dozen different subscriptions to watch TV? |
| 2014- 2025 | Games as a Service | What if you kept paying for our video game forever? |
| 2016- 2018 | Pivot to Video | What if media companies lay off all their writers to chase literally unbelievable video metrics? |
| 2016- 2020 | Virtual Reality | What if you had to strap a thing to your face to play a video game? |
| 2020- ???? | Cryptocurrency | What if we commit financial crimes on a resource-limited distributed ledger? |
| 2021- 2023 | NFTs | What if we use distributed ledgers to make and sell worthless tokens? |
| 2022- ???? | Large Language Model AI | What if companies lay off all our employees and have a computer make eerily realistic text at great cost? |
| 2024- ???? | Handheld Gaming | What if a tablet PC had buttons and joysticks on the side? |