Megapocalypse Now - or how Black Swans are coming home to roost

It was pointed out to me that one of the reasons the Financial Meltdown may not have made it into fair Social Medialand (see my post here) was that no SocMed geeks were writing about it. This is of course not strictly true - Umair Haque has been warning for a while of the coming Megapocalypse. . Paul Kedrosky, a paid up geek, has been blogging on the subject too for some time. Henry Blodget is (very publicly) ex Wall Street, though you have to treat his stuff with care, as another financial blogger, Graham Pieterz, shows. But to give him his due, SAI is the earliest place I know of to examine this impact on the Tech community.

(And to be fair, so have many other non techgeek bloggers and economists, but they tend to use dreary words like "correction", "de-leverage", "end of the 1930's Kondratieff cycle" - its so depressing, who reads that stuff ? - even "downwave isn't really the epitome of excitement)

And this is the problem - compared with the Dory-fish like attraction of Shiny Shiny new toys, and the California Cult like raptures of the Web 2.0 neo-hippies, the tarnishing of the World We Live In pales into insignificance. What is needed is some viral va-va-voom, some sexiness to make all this sad stuff more Sticky, a term that will capture the zero growth zeitgeist.

Nicholas Taleb uses the term "black swan" for the concept of the unpredictable event, ie seeing 1,000 white swans will not predict the black one. You can argue that it's a lousy metaphor here, but it serves the purpose of striking a strong chord as people behaved as if it was impossible. In this case, the Megapocalypse was not unpredictable - many have predicted it over the past few years - but its exact timing, impact etc were unpredictable, leading to "last fool in the bubble" behaviour:

“Last fool Theory”. When the Last fool has purchased the highest priced item, the market will collapse. This happens, especially in manipulated markets. However, it usually happens when the general public or trading funds, such as retirement plans, are sold a bill of goods, or just get the “bug” and go nuts.

Though we knew it would be big when it broke, we were silent as lambs to the slaughter while it went on around us. We have only had shiny white swans in the tech news for so long, so the returning to the roost of the black ones is a fitting metaphor for Techpression 2.0.

(Update - in the comments, Jof Arnold reckons a better metaphor would be Elephant in Room)

(Update 2 - its the evening, and I see a Lehman related story on Techmeme now - about IT spend and an interview with H&Q's Bill Hambrecht on GigaOm touches on these subjects as well)