Very Bad Things #1

From the crash of the NFT market to plastics inside babies, the world of tomorrow looks crappy right now.

The future is probably going to be a horrible place to live. That is, unless we start to turn things around right now, tomorrow will not be friendly to humans.

We’ve all heard this before. The scientific community has been screaming from the rooftops for four decades, yet scarce are those who listen.

Thus we have the first edition of Very Bad Things, a new segment of the Drescher Drop which shows all the awful stuff we’re doing today to ruin our tomorrow. Don’t despair, because the point of this is to serve as a warning.

Researchers Find Microplastics In Newborn Babies

Human babies (and I presume babies from other species) are being born with microplastics floating around their bodies. Researchers have even discovered microplastics in embryos as young as three months.

Microplastics are microscopic plastic particles that occur as plastic breaks down. Reusing a disposable plastic cup is one source of microplastics, but as our oceans become clogged with plastic debris, microplastics are finding their way into our food chain.

The effects on health caused by microplastics are still unknown, although doctors suspect microplastics can cause higher instances of cancers, birth defects, allergies, and overall poor health.

NFT Market Heading For “Cataclysm”

Colborn Bell owns millions of dollars of NFTs and he’s warning investors that the entire NFT crypto market is heading for doomsday.

One of the key problems in NFT is basic supply-and-demand economics: there are many NFT creators, and only a handful of buyers. Prices are astronomically high but as supply outstrips demand, those prices are going to plummet.

NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are digital items staked to a blockchain. They can be gifs, or digital art, or even an online real estate address in some metaverse. Because they’re on a blockchain, ownership is verifiable and indisputable.

2021 saw a boom in NFT trading as wealthy people sheltered their money in digital artwork and addresses, driving the price of NFTs up to the millions of dollars for something as silly as a gif.

Bell claims those people are about to lose their money. This could ripple through the wider economy as billions of dollars gets wiped out.

TikTok-style Videos Are The Future of Social Media

Finally, experts agree that TikTok is the new Facebook, and short, stupid videos are the future of social media.

Facebook exploded in popularity 13 years ago and became the “in” thing. Everyone had a Facebook profile. That’s all changed.

In last week’s earnings call, Meta (the company formerly known as Facebook) CEO Mark Zuckerberg reported to investors that the company not only lost over $200 billion in market cap, but that Facebook had lost 100 million users in the last quarter of 2021.

TikTok, meanwhile, grew to become the number one social media network with nearly 3 billion users. SnapChat also posted its first-ever profit as it saw a swell of 130 million new users in 2021.

Both platforms have something in common: easily produced vertical videos which last 30 seconds to three minutes at most. Snapchat is more of a private messaging platform, but the concept is the same.

Expect Meta to push out its flailing Reels in an attempt to get users hyped again. Google has also been trying to tempt users back to YouTube with Shorts, which are basically TikTok videos.

The future of social media begins now, for better or worse.

---