Nick Bilton’s Ghost of Christmas Past Haunts Tech Bros Everywhere as His 2018 ‘Techlash’ Predictions All Come True at Once
SAN FRANCISCO, CA – In what historians are calling the “ultimate slow-burn victory lap,” journalist and former *New York Times* tech columnist Nick Bilton is currently trending across X/Twitter, not for anything he said today, but for the collective realization that he basically called the entire 2024 tech apocalypse in a single article from six years ago. As Silicon Valley executives scramble to explain why their AI chatbots are hallucinating marriage advice and why their “metaverse” is now a $15 billion digital ghost town, users are dusting off Bilton’s 2018 Vanity Fair piece, “The End of the Techlash,” which read more like a prophecy than a column. The irony? Bilton was accused of being overly dramatic and “anti-innovation” at the time. Now, his article is being treated like a Rosetta Stone for understanding why your smart fridge just ordered 500 pounds of onions. The meme of the day features a Photoshop of Bilton in a hoodie, sitting on a digital throne, surrounded by the broken faces of former crypto bros, with the caption: “You either die a hero or live long enough to see your old tweets become a verified blue check reality.” The viral snippet reads: “Nick Bilton didn’t break the tech industry. He just had the audacity to tell us it was already broken. Now we’re all going to the comments section to apologize.”