This year in tech felt like a simulation

Too much happened and not much of it made sense. It was like we were being controlled by a random number generator that would dictate the way the tech industry was run, leading to multiple "biggest news stories of the year" happening over the course of a month.

The absurdity of the year was summed up by a very goodtweet I saw last month, which said, "Meta laid off 11,000 people and it's only the third biggest tech story of the week" Normally, a social media giant laying off 13% of its workforce would be the week's top story, but this was the moment when FTX went bankrupt and everyone was pretending to be corporations on social media. Good times!

Sometimes I feel like someone threw some words in a hat and tried to connect the dots when I hear about the latest tech news. That isn't what's happening In January, would you have believed me if I said that Musk was going to unban Trump?

There are consequences to absurd events in technology. People who invested large sums of money into something that they thought was a good investment have been hurt by the collapses of cryptocurrencies. Ten years ago, if someone told you that Meta was losing billions of dollars every quarter to build virtual reality technology that no one wants, you would be angry. The employees who lost their jobs because of those decisions are not jokes.

What do we do with this left us? Nothing is too absurd to be possible right now. It is both inspiring and terrifying. It is possible for a team of Amazon fulfillment center workers in Staten Island to win a union election.

There is a delicate balance between innovation and horror with the help of artificial intelligence. You can make art in seconds, but you can also endanger the work of artists. There is no way to know if the answer to your question is accurate unless you do further research.

Artificial intelligence generators seem to feel natural to us. The tech news of this year feels so strange that they might have been created by the same people.

Maybe reality is not as good as an artificial intelligence could make it out to be. I asked ChatGPT to write some headlines about tech news for me, and it came up with these snoozers, in addition to some inaccurate headlines.

• “Apple’s iOS 15 update brings major improvements to iPhones and iPads”
• “Amazon’s new line of autonomous delivery robots causes controversy”
• “Intel announces new line of processors with advanced security features”

It's pretty boring. There are some real things that happened in technology this year.

• Tony the Tiger made his debut as a VTuber.
• Someone claimed to be a laid off Twitter employee named Rahul Ligma, and a herd of reporters did not get the joke, inadvertently meaning that I had to explain the “ligma” joke on like four different tech podcasts.
• Three people got arrested for operating a Club Penguin clone.
• One of the Department of Justice’s main suspects in a $3.6 billion crypto money laundering scheme is an entrepreneur-slash-rapper named Razzlekhan.
• The new Pokémon game has a line of dialogue with the word “cheugy.”
• Donald Trump dropped an NFT collection.
• A bad Twitter feature update impacted the stock of a pharmaceutical company.
• Elon Musk’s greatest rival is a University of Central Florida sophomore.
• FTC chair Lina Khan said that Taylor Swift did more to educate Gen Z about antitrust law than she ever could.
• Meta is selling a $1,499 VR headset to be used for remote work.
• The UK Treasury made a Discord account to share public announcements but was immediately spammed with people using emoji reactions to make dirty jokes (and speaking of the UK, there have been three different Prime Ministers since September.)

These are not normal times. The tech news is more amusing than harmful if the rules are made up and the points are unimportant. Fewer tech CEOs being sentenced for fraud is something I would like to see. It's too much to ask.

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