When does Herd Intelligence kick in?

Why is it that collectively we seem to be fawning over tech visionaries, celebrities and politicians who have no connection with reality?

  • A tweet from the end of 2018 “You can summon your Tesla from your phone. Only short distances today, but in a few years summon will work from across the continent”. – Were there any plans for unattended recharging? How was this supposed to work?
  • Non-fungible Tokens (NFTs) – finally we have a use for the blockchain that is not a ponzi scheme – Really?
  • Microservices and the Cloud – Useful at massive scale in some organizations and contexts, seem to be being adopted cargo cult fashion, by everyone, even for small scale applications. Luckily not everyone buys into this, You Don’t need the cloud.
  • Single Page Applications (SPA) – in context, occasionally useful, but for many websites the overall effect is to make the information on the webpage slower to load and harder to bookmark

If the covid pandemic has taught us anything, it is that a lot of people with an audience are absolutely clueless about the topics on which they are pontificating. On Bullshit, a book published all the way back in 2005, could usefully be required reading for our current age.