Is the technology good? It’s not just Mass layoffs. It is, to a foreign observer, that many of the wildest ideas emerging from the ostentatious American tech industry over the past few years would seem uninhibited, if not entirely uninhibited, by reality.

Facebook has renamed itself Meta Install our Metaverse, insisting that we will all soon want to plunge into a giant, split 3D cartoon where no one has legs. The so-called emerging web3 Enlist celebrities to sell us on NFTs And blockchain technology designed to prove we have the depressed monkey doodle. encryption companies I suggest we give up A regulated financial system for a free digital system rife with volatility and fraud.

You might argue that being a little naughty is a good thing. Where would civilization be if we didn’t take some big technological swings? Making vast amounts of information easily searchable to billions of people, and then making it accessible through a screen that fits in your pocket – all of that once seemed like a great idea. It’s also true that buzzy concepts have filtered in and out of Silicon Valley for decades, some fadeAnd others last. But something feels different this time.

Buzzwords seem to come in faster, and ideas more disconnected from the real world and the average consumer. The industry that gave us the iPhone, Google search, social media and Uber seems to have entered a period of prolonged magical thinking. Technology, one might say, found itself in La La Land.

It’s interesting, then, that the metaphorical drift of that technology has coincided with its physical migration to Los Angeles, where Silicon Valley companies have recently established themselves. Recent years have seen the invasion of Netflix and streaming, both tech giants accelerating their presence in the so-called Silicon Beach, and the cross-pollination of Hollywood and Silicon Valley – resulting in a merger. Science fiction industrial complex and the technology sector that turns to his visions for inspiration for their products. It makes sense: After the pipes were built, in the forms of internet servers and social media networks, the next need was to pump content through them — and who produces better content than Los Angeles?

Was the Hollywoodland effect blamed on the latest period of virtual development of technology? not necessarily. Am I being overly clever in order to provide some of the main topics that will appear in a column about technology written in Los Angeles? Some questions may never find answers.

But keep in mind, for a moment, that when I moved to Los Angeles nearly eight years ago, in 2015, the trend in technology was on-demand app services. Remember the “Uber for everything” days? (dirty For Uber, by the way, it was very tangible and attractive: what if you could summon goods and services with a single click from your smartphone? It was all about giving the user access to physical things and experiences: a trip to the airport, sushi to your doorstep, groceries for the week ahead.) Virtual reality was convenient, TikTok didn’t exist, and Netflix hardly had a presence here. Spurred on by the pandemic, this trend has changed, bringing us back into the online spaces with a vengeance.

since then, Stream and produce digital content flourishedAnd every tech giant has become a content producer as well as an entertainment platform — Amazon Prime, Apple Plus, YouTube Premium, Meta’s Horizon Worlds, you name it. Video game studios such as Santa Monica-based Activision Blizzard’s Goliath are challenging Hollywood for revenue supremacy. And the advent of virtual and augmented reality, technologies that live or die based on the content that can be produced for them, has spawned startups and content studios all over Los Angeles.

“Technology is now a bedrock of Los Angeles,” Petra Dornen, head of market analytics at Los Angeles, said Raise commercial real estateAnd He said back in 2020. This is still the case, if not more so now. “If the coronavirus hadn’t constrained demand, we would have seen 15-20% growth in what I call entertainment technology,” Dornen told me.

Raise collects data on how much office space tech companies buy or lease, and according to the numbers, the tech takeover of Los Angeles is pretty staggering. In 2015, technology companies leased about 500,000 square feet of office space. Now Netflix alone has close to a million. Tech owns about 5.5 million square feet of space in Los Angeles today – about 10% of all commercial real estate on the West Side. “From 2018 onwards, the increases have been really big and steady,” she says.

As technology invaded Los Angeles and rubbed shoulders with the entertainment industry, new assortments of what we consider “technology” were born. Don’t take it from me. the Lisa Missiri is an anthropologist at Yale University, who previously studied Silicon Valley, has conducted her most recent fieldwork in the growing virtual reality community in Los Angeles. Although Southern California has a huge aerospace industry and was an early player in electronics manufacturing and internet research, she says Los Angeles’ roots and role in the development of modern technology are often overlooked.

“Thinking Tech from Los Angeles,” Misseri tells me, “is a project that both remembers that there is a tech history in the city, but also reflects on how important entertainment and storytelling are in today’s technological climate.” How, perhaps, maneuvers like the metaverse might less a given technological achievement depends on the stories and experiences one might encounter within it. Or even on the novels she was born with “Ready Player One” was a blueprint for Facebook’s metaverse, and Tom Cruise’s swipe-based futuristic policing in “Minority Report” is known to have helped inspire touch user interfaces.

“And entertainment, of course, is a ‘technology industry’ in itself,” Missiri adds.

It certainly is, and now more than ever, the lines are blurred. Movie franchises like “Avatar” and the seemingly endless Marvel Cinematic Universe require cutting-edge film production technology. Big Tech is hiring Special Effects Artists in Hollywood To build virtual realities, and make movies Discuss the advantages of AI effects and actors. The current formula of VR and the metaverse, Misseri says, is the result of cross-pollination between Los Angeles and Silicon Valley. Technology is, quite literally, at La La Land.

(Trends like cryptocurrency, web3, and NFTs are another story—cases from the valley emerging from a frothy period during which investors had access to cheap money and splurged on some wild ideas the way they always did. La Land.)

Regardless, given the connection between Silicon Valley’s latest visions of tomorrow’s technology and City of Angels technology, it provides a fascinating perspective for thinking about where everything is headed.

For all of the above reasons, and so much more, Los Angeles is a particularly interesting place to watch the future of technology unfold; Not just to take a seat in front of the innovations happening in entertainment and virtual reality, but to explore the impact of all the technologies on the La La Land stage.

Take Uber, which I mentioned above as an example of a Silicon Valley idea that resonated with consumers — which it undoubtedly did. Uber has become a global phenomenon, changing and redefining an entire category of work. But it turns out that its business model is mostly magical thinking, and neither it nor the competitors who followed suit, You made a meaningful profit. They have turned instead to finding new ways to keep wages low and drivers overworked at their weaknesses. Los Angeles, one of the largest markets for gigs in the country, has left it swarming Struggling drivers were forced to sleep in their cars Because they can’t afford the rent.

But rather than creating sustainable solutions, rectifying the situation, or offering workers meaningful seats at the table, technology often seems to double down on noble thinking. Take Facebook, which only turned itself into a Meta after facing years of scandals over how it chose to allow harmful or misleading content to spread on its massive social media platform. Facebook has chosen to play its own way of running its huge and unwieldy social platform. It’s one of the reasons people own it Growing negative opinions towards technology companiesand why things like web3 and NFTs seem to be fading away so quickly – we’re seeing the issues piling up, and we’re increasingly worried about receiving a new wave of hype when the issues from the last issue are still so prevalent.

That would be a major thrust for this column: What is fact, what is fiction, what made it palatable with impressive special effects but lacking any real depth or staying power? Even beyond the nexus of technology and entertainment, Los Angeles is an ideal setting for how technology feels, hacks, and embraces — and who you’ll ignore. It has the largest port, some of Amazon’s largest fulfillment centers and the largest fleet of accompanying delivery trucks, all of the above increasingly automated and algorithmically driven. What happens to those huge interconnected machines, and the people who make them, as temperatures and costs rise?

(To that end, my inbox is always open – I want to know how you use or make technology, how you use or make technology You.)

Because L.A. is also where teens swing through camps of unhoused people on bird scooters, where smoke from wildfires billows into new home air-filtering systems, and where Hollywood’s top talent agencies hire metaverse officers while production crews beat for conditions. decent work. In other words, it is a theme park of technological wonders and a potential incubator for dystopia.

It’s La La Land, and it produces the future. I suggest we keep tabs on him.