The crisis is upon us. Meta has lost its bet that we will all volunteer to live out the rest of our days as heavily surveilled, legless, sexless, low-polygon cartoon characters. It is firing thousands of technologists and hemorrhaging money.

Amazon has lost its bet that we will all volunteer to install hidden microphones in every room of our house so that the company can mine our every thought for actionable market intelligence. Alexa has lost billions and Amazon is reducing its team to a skeleton crew.

Softbank, the investment fund that funneled tens of billions in Saudi royal oil money into bets on monopolies like Uber and WeWork is now broke, and its founder, Masayoshi Son, is in disgrace and billions of dollars in debt.

The idea that we could strip-mine useful and productive businesses forever has an obvious flaw: eventually you will run out of productive businesses. But there’s another, slightly less obvious flaw: long before the entire productive economy grinds to a halt, everyone who relies on it will get very, very angry.