

It’s supposed to be growth related to the things which didn’t progress, so to say. So it’s not literally supposed to be growth of processes, just that stagnation makes things diminish in value, and compared to them things more alive “grow”. Something like that.
Kinda like inflation. And that’s fine, that can describe a pretty sustainable society, it’s not about consuming more and more, it’s like rotation.
Except with today’s oligopolies there’s a different idea, that they really have to grow as in capturing more and more of humanity’s resources. The AI bubble (or not) is their most recent approach to that.
That’s because expectations were shaped by the 90s when many things exploded (unfortunately much of that were countries, also landmines and other expendable means of destruction).
In the 00s it was possible to create illusion of that explosion still going on brighter and brighter, despite just continuing what started in the 90s, and then to create a few large-scale scams (or madness pandemics, or tech fashions, whatever ; point is they weren’t the same as years 1993-1999) with iPhones, new Apple in general, Google, Facebook, Twitter.
I’m not saying it was fake or worthless, it was a revolution too, but not what companies try to show since the dotcom bubble.
So - they are still trying to show that, with kinda rough, generic, and insincere effort, a bit like sex workers in their makeup.
And they can’t show that without such expansion in width, not in height.
Yes, I meant in case you have a library of FLACs. In that case it wouldn’t be too problematic cause, well, it’s just a script recursing your library, encoding from FLAC to Opus and if succeeded, removing FLAC files.