Is the next Dot.com bubble is about to burst….
…it certainly looks like it.*
You may or may not have heard of Peter Thiel, he’s one of the 100 wealthiest humans on our planet and is working actively on plans to achieve immortality. (Not joking).
In the last few weeks, the immensely powerful and influential Mr Thiel, the man behind J D Vance, backer of the Project 2025 Maga movement and Palantir – the US company that is being drafted in to the NHS, just cashed his entire stock in the tech company Nvidia for around 100 million dollars or so. Why is this significant? Well. Artificial Intelligence is all the rage right now and those unscruplous types who find a way to make money out of anything have gone nuclear with it.
Nvideo are the chip company at the centre of an AI driven financial bubble that has inflated to proportions the world has never seen before. It is now the biggest company on earth. In 2023 it made headlines by being the first to reach $1 trillion in value. Now only 2 years later, it is apparently worth 4.5 times that. At time of writing that is because, this ‘value’ attracting investors who want ‘in’ on the biggest investment of all time. But Peter Thiel just sold 100% of his shares. So is that insane valuation going to remain resolute or, as seems worringly likely, a bubble (the biggest one we’ve ever seen) that’s about to go pop? If it does, get ready for further austerity, because you can bet your bottom dollar that it won’t be the oligarchs that suffer.
So what’s this got to do with Totnes?
Well, a Totnes resident, Mayel de Borniol is working on a set of open source and federated [or decentralised] social networking apps that is being created to push-back on corporate control and wrest it back to a community-led system that works for people, not billionaires. The Bonfire team is made up of programmers, university professors, writers and free thinkers getting together to offer a tangible alternative. Encompassing the more egalitarian ambitions of the World Wide Web back in the 90’s when modem’s squealed and images took 3 minutes to appear. The project is called Bonfire. A digital commons where people can gather, co-create, and care together without the big tech extractions of data, time and social control or the algorhythm feeding you content that adjusts and warps your worldview. In short, a social media that doesn’t enshittify your online life.
Bonfire – not a vanity project
A crowdfunder that is already 85% funded has been set up to strengthen the core systems that will make up an infrastucture that is available for anyone to use. Some will be coders who can create a system such as a local resource very much like FaceBook and normal everyday folk who would use it. In fact the Totnes Pulse are working with Mayel with an aim to create Totnes’ very own social media site and possibly more exciting projects that benefit communities rather than world’s fat cats.
Click for more information on the Bonfire Project here and click here for details of the Crowdfunder
*Taking financial advice from me is not recommended.