We've been in a bubble ever since people starting believing "data is the new oil".
Data has only driven advertising, and it's done it in such a botched way that it's tearing down the whole discipline of advertising. These companies know all the little tidbits of information about all of us that they need to put the right products directly in front of our eyes multiple times per day, and they still get it wrong.
Advert engagement goes down, people who use advertising realise their budgets are being wasted on the wrong audience and the whole thing will pop. It was naïve to ever believe that data really means anything. At a certain scale it just becomes loads of noise.
This is not remotely true. I mean it's so incredibly not true I wonder how you came to believe this.
Haven't you ever heard of how hedge funds pay for cellular data to understand retail store traffic, or how satellite photos help them estimate the fullness of gas tanks at ports to predict pricing?
Or how data about predicted electrical pricing based on usage helps factories schedule energy-intensive production during times of low pricing?
Or how aircraft maintenance companies like AAR rely on "big data" to position replacement parts in a globally distributed system of warehouses to reduce the time it takes to repair aircraft (their contracts are based on airline uptime), thereby reducing passenger delays due to mechanical issues?
Or how farms use weather and satellite data to deal with droughts, identify areas to spray, and estimate competitor yields for the purposes of planning?
Or how governments now conduct surveillance of pathogens and drug use through sewer water data?
Or how semiconductor companies use massive amounts of data collected from production line sensors to massively increase yields and reduce chip prices, despite the complexity of chip production having increased massively?
You benefit directly or indirectly from companies using data all the time.
I got a bit carried away in my original statement and undersold data a little bit. I think the point of the statement at the time ("data is the new oil" as an article in The Economist) was mostly hinging on data for use in digital advertising, but I didn't provide any of that context in my original post, and I was mostly considering user data.
Similar to dot-com, part of the reason is the multiplier effect of all the AI investments. If these investments prove to be uneconomic, which I strongly suspect, the backend of this investment cycle is going to be brutal.
