The ideal way to put the past year into context is to simply just glance at the figures. For case in point, around the course of 2021, as of this crafting, Elon Musk’s private internet really worth grew by $87 billion. Which is additional than the industry capitalization of Ford. Musk wasn’t alone—Larry Web site’s and Sergey Brin’s internet worths grew by $46 billion and $43 billion, respectively Mark Zuckerberg’s by $21 billion, and Jeff Bezos’s by $4 billion. Around the identical period of time, Apple’s really worth grew to virtually $3 trillion, up some $700 billion from 12 months back. (That indicates it grew by about the full GDP of Saudi Arabia.) The market cap of cryptocurrencies grew from about $770 billion to about $2 trillion, and which is on a poor working day (at its peak this calendar year, in November, crypto was really worth just about $3 trillion). Even the internet alone included 222 million new users—nearly 90 million people today much more than the typical amount of births for every year—bringing us 100 million shy of 5 billion buyers. All related with each other like billions of tiny synapses in one giant, discombobulated, meme-creating, bogus-information-sharing, Netflix-and-chilling chatterbox of a community.

 But these figures convey to us one thing else. Although the worldwide pandemic fucked up really much everything—creating mass unemployment, stretching inequality to its bleeding edges, and killing additional than 5.3 million people—tech just seemed to retain expanding. Absolutely sure, we were being all caught at home, downloading application soon after app, slicing absent our time with dancing meme video clips and unlimited opinions. And it wasn’t just the previous things, like Apple and Microsoft and Instagram, that grew. More than the earlier 12 months, we observed an explosion of new technologies, like NFTs, DAOs, and DeFi, plus a slew of other terms that just a calendar year in the past ended up not even in the public’s consciousness. Now, of study course, they are all any one can converse about. 

In March, Beeple, a electronic artist couple of persons experienced even read of at the start off of the yr, offered a electronic artwork for $69 million—around the same price as Claude Monet’s breathtaking Le Bassin aux Nymphéas. Then there’s the assortment of NFTs termed the Bored Ape Yacht Club, whose 10,000 ape drawings were being first…