It Could Happen Here - The Dead Future of Big Tech

Episode Date: January 6, 2023

Robert ventures to the Consumer Electronics Show in the wake of a year of massive tech industry losses to ask, what does the future look like?See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Things fall apart. The center will not hold and journalists will make a pretty good living writing about it all. It's a good time to work the dystopia beat. The pillars of our society have been crumbling for most of my adult life, and probably yours too. One exception to this up until recently has been the tech industry. When the rest of the economy shit the bed back in 2008,

big tech roared into the gap to prop up the groaning timbers of capitalism. Sure, the housing market was in free fall, huge numbers of people were out of work, and American infrastructure was crumbling like a twice-baked pot brownie. But then Steve Jobs magicked up the iPhone, and the iPad, and the App Store. Google brought us Android, and a dizzying array of smart and connected devices followed. Companies like Uber disrupted massive industries and, briefly, made hailing a cab the cheapest it's ever been, although they did this by lighting massive piles of VC cash on fire. It was in this period of what would prove to be a rational exuberance that I started my career as a tech journalist. That was the job

title my boss gave me, and it's what everybody else in the industry called themselves. In reality, most of us were just extensions of big tech's PR agencies. All the big tech news websites of that era, Slash Gear, Engadget, Boy Genius Review, and the place I worked for, i4U News, made most of their money off the back of a peculiarity in Google's search algorithm. The gist of it was this. If a bunch of websites all published articles that were basically rewritten press releases about, say, a new gadget, or rewrites of someone else's report on rumors about an Apple product, Google would assume that this was a hot topic, and they would bump everybody up on the algorithm. You could make a tidy profit just paying a handful of writers to rewrite press releases or copy reports from some of the few sites doing actual tech

journalism. And this is where I got my start in reporting. I wrote 10 articles a day, five days a week for several years until Google fixed their algorithm and wiped my silly little industry out in the blink of an eye. It's fine. In this case, we kind of had it coming. It was nice to get paid to sit home and write, and the experience putting out a shitload of words every single day that were polished enough to print was pretty good for me. But it wasn't journalism. And so, while I was doing it, I started seeking opportunities to actually get out into the world and do original reporting. And that's what first brought me to the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in 2010. CES, as it's known, is a tech industry insider event for analysts, manufacturers,

and media. They come and they show off new products and gadgets and apps, and journalists walk around and look at everything and then write articles about it. Companies spend millions of dollars every year on massive multi-acre showrooms for their products and dream up ludicrous demonstrations of their new tech. One that sticks out to me from, again, about 13 years ago, is watching some company or another charge an electric car inductively. That means there was nothing actually plugged into the vehicle. They just parked it like you would put your phone on an inductive charger, and they charged it that way. The whole process was so energy intensive that it dimmed the lights in the Las Vegas Convention Center, which, if you've never been inside of it, is about the size of a small city.

The spectacle was always the best part of CES, and with all the money pouring into big tech, it was a great place to be a reporter. Every big booth had free wet bars and piles of free swag. I left every year with a sack full of USB drives and thousands of dollars in products to test. There was so much goddamn money everywhere that even a dumb kid like me with no real connections could do okay. Collapse was always and has always been present at CES, however, looming in the background over doomed product categories and vast, tottering businesses that didn't realize they were already dead. I'm thinking primarily of R.I.M., the people who used to make Blackberries here. Another good example would be Motorola.

In 2011, their booth was one of the largest at CES. Now, Apple was, and still is, the biggest name on the block when it comes to making consumer gadgets, but they don't go to CES, preferring to hold their own annual event to announce new products. This has always irritated

the people who run the show, and so in the early 2010s, when Android started to blow up as a rival to Apple's iOS, a huge deal was made about Motorola's Droid line of phones. They actually had to license the name from Lucasfilm for obvious reasons. In 2010, Motorola won the Best in Show award for their Droid phone, despite the fact that they hadn't actually brought a working example of it to the show, something that kind of pissed me off at the time. Now, today, Motorola's basically dead. It's a shadow of its former self. It's been bought and sold several times as companies like Samsung and HTC beat the piss out of it on the open market. and HTC beat the piss out of it on the open market. Other famous collapses from CES's past include the entire 3D television market. If you can remember those heady days after the release of the first Avatar movie, the tech industry blew billions in R&D and ad money trying to convince everyone that people would actually sit down in their actual ass living rooms and wear fucking

3D glasses to watch movies or TV. It was preposterous and obviously doomed. I have fond memories of harassing PR hacks on the show floor, asking them, isn't this just a big con from the entertainment industry to make it harder for people to pirate media? Are there any actual signs that regular people will pay thousands of dollars for one of these things? At one point, a rep from Samsung, I think, tried to show me a glasses-free 3D TV. It only worked if a trained professional told you precisely where to stand in order to view it. I laughed so hard I snorted whiskey and lukewarm Starbucks onto a stack of glossy product brochures. Despite how obviously doomed it all was, the internet filled with fawning articles about all of the exciting new 3D televisions

that were surely going to be in homes in the very near future. Now, because the internet moves quickly, most of the websites that did tech news back then are dead, and the ones that remain are filled with busted links. But you can still find monuments to the failure of 3D television if you know where to look. Take this excerpt from a PC World article on The the best of CES 2010. It's titled, The 3D Revolution is Here, and underneath a broken link to an image that is no longer available is the line, I don't think it's a false start this time. The 3D product plans for the coming year represent the initial salvos of the coming 3D revolution. Panasonic's 3D demos were among the most convincing, but the

best implementation I saw, unfortunately, is one that won't be coming to market anytime soon. Sony showed us its 24.5-inch 3D OLED HDTV as a technology demo only. Welcome, I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonorum. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures.

I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura Podcast Network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Now, in retrospect, I think the hilarious failure of 3d tv technology is actually what prepared me more than anything for crypto if you actually just go over that paragraph i read a little earlier you could replace the words referring specifically to 3d tvs with various shit coins or blockchain related tech and it would more or less work. The thing that set me off with crypto

was how similar the claim was that, like, this thing is obviously legit because look at how many people are talking about it. It's got to be real now because suddenly it's all over the news. This is why folks like Sam Bankman-Fried bought the naming rights to stadiums and stuck FTX and crypto.com up as publicly as they possibly could. It was all a con to convince casual observers that the crypto market was a serious thing they should invest in. It's one of those things that really made me think a lot about the role journalists play in hyping up nonsense like this. And you can see it in 3D TVs and crypto and a bunch of other spaces. A big part of what convinces people that this stuff is real is suddenly they start seeing

articles everywhere talking about it. Suddenly the press all over the place is talking about the price of Bitcoin or talking about this new thing as if it's going to actually change people's lives. And so folks who maybe are not super high information media consumers just assume that, OK, I guess this is here to stay. It's a danger that still exists. All of this brings me to CES 2023. Collapse looms larger over the proceedings this year than at any other prior event I've attended. Prior to the pandemic, attendance at CES had topped out at around 200,000 people. Last year, though, only 40,000 showed,

which is probably still vastly too many folks to cram into hotel conference rooms and casino restaurants during a pandemic. And yes, CES 2022 was a super spreader event. Korea particularly had a problem as a result of it. The show itself, for decades a central event in the global tech industry, seems to be teetering. It is not alone there. The top 10 big tech stocks lost a combined $4.6 trillion in market cap in 2022. That's significantly more than the GDP of the United Kingdom, around $3.2 trillion, or the state of California, $3.6 trillion. At CES, the rot is most evident in the utter lack of any kind of hypebeast product this year. So far, I've seen a flying hydrogen car, or at least I've seen 3D renders of one. Also, it's meant for Formula One style races, not actual

civilian use. The guy at the booth somewhat angrily told me the anticipated retail price was around $3 million. The Macca flying car was one of many products that I looked into at CES Unveiled, which is one of the headline events of the show. It's basically a bunch of manufacturers and booths showing off their gadgets to an audience of journalists who drink heavily from an open bar, walk around, and prod things. In years past, smartphones and tablets and other consumer gadgets tended to be the main focus. But all that kind of stuff is boring as hell now. The smartphone market has stabilized. It's just not as exciting as it used to be, and CES knows it. The big hype it unveiled was around a mix of electronic and autonomous vehicle technology

and virtual reality. Now, at present, I'm not in a good position to thoroughly analyze the specific promises made by individual autonomous driving companies at CES. I'll just note that TechCrunch, normally all in for hype about this kind of stuff, published an article last October titled, It's Time to Admit Self-Driving Cars Aren't Going to Happen. Here's a relevant quote. Ford announced that it would be winding down Argo AI, the company backed by itself and fellow automaker Volkswagen, focusing on developing full level 4 autonomous driving technologies. Ford explained their justification in doing so when they released their Q3 earnings a

few hours later, noting that not only were they shutting down Argo, but they were also essentially deprioritizing L4 technologies altogether, to instead focus on advanced driver assistance systems with internal resources. Ford CEO Jim Farley justified this by saying on the company's earnings call Wednesday evening that profitable, fully autonomous vehicles at scale are a long way off, and we won't necessarily have to create that technology for ourselves. Now, obviously, autonomous technology will, of course, have niche applications, automating transport of heavy loads at job sites and mines where routes are predictable and controlled. But mass adoption of full level level-four autonomous driving technology is at present a fantasy. The same is true for one of the other major product categories that CES

unveiled. Virtual reality metaverse nonsense. The fact that Facebook lit $15 billion on fire last year chasing Mark Zuckerberg's metaverse dreams has convinced some people that the idea is inevitable. This excerpt from a MarketWatch article published during CES is representative. You can see the same thought process that led people astray with 3D TVs and crypto. In the long run, the metaverse will be a major substitute for in-person conventions like CES, said Jun Nichiguchi, CEO of Toraru, a Japanese company developing its own metaverse. So one of the barriers to any kind of popular metaverse is the fact that VR is actually not as immersive as it needs to be. The technology

does a pretty impressive job of convincing your eyes that you are in fact somewhere else, and this is pretty neat. But the rest of your body is inevitably standing or sitting awkwardly in a room somewhere. This has led to a whole host of products that are in development right now that attempt to engage the rest of your body and basically trick it into believing that you're somewhere else. I tried two products at CES that were meant to do this. The first was the TactSuit X from B-Haptics. It uses haptic feedback technology, which is the stuff that makes your phone buzz when you press a button on your touchscreen, companies like B-Haptics hope to use advanced versions of the tech to mimic physical sensation. This would make the metaverse feel much less awkward and dissociated, and also

provide a whole new market for online sex workers. There are several of these suits at CES, and all of them seem to have won innovation awards, or at least they their honorees in the CES innovation awards, which is a thing that basically anyone seems to get if they make something expensive enough and bring it to the show. To be frank, I think these suits are bullshit. The one slightly cool thing about the tact suit is that the gloves, it had like gloves and a feet component. I was able to test the gloves and the actual chest suit thing. The gloves do a pretty okay job of emulating a physical keyboard, or at least a small keyboard on like a smartphone-style device. Now, that is not a cool enough thing for someone to pay hundreds of dollars

and deal with the hassle of wearing heavy battery-powered gloves every day. The BeHaptics folks eagerly showed me how their suit could simulate hugging and touching another human being in VR, and this seemed to be the major selling point they saw for what they were bringing to the table. I actually tried all this, and it was among the saddest experiences of my life. Hugging someone in a haptic suit through VR feels like having a dozen or so N64 rumble packs activate up your chest and arms. If you touch a virtual person's shoulder, your hand will buzz and vibrate. Now, buzzing and vibrating are not sensations I attribute to physical intimacy with a physical person. I actually found this attempt at mimicking the sensation of human contact much

more disturbing than the lack of contact in most VR experiences. The tech industry has also pinned a lot of hopes on augmented reality. I think this is closer to being realistic but there are still a metric fuck ton of vaporware and snake oil products often marketed as increasing accessibility one example would be the luvik this is a device you wear around your neck it's roughly the size of a pair of headphones it's supposed to buzz on one side or the other of your body to let you know when to turn, all the while delivering audio map directions for you. Luvik's press materials highlight what a win this is for accessibility, saying, Luvik is a device designed to solve the challenges of those who have difficulty with spatial cognition.

It is an IoT, Internet of Things, device that is worn around your neck and uses tactile notifications and bone conduction voice to guide the user along the way naturally. Now, this tech does identify a real need, but I'm sorry to say it does not work at all. I tried this thing. Luvik's people put it on me and ran through a walking route of New York City. I couldn't tell which side of my body was being buzzed, so that was useless. It just felt like a smartphone was ringing on the back of my neck. And the speakers weren't loud enough to hear directions.

Now, when I mentioned this, the Luvik people told me, well, there's too much noise in the conference room for you to hear it. Of course, New York City being famously quiet. And then there's the stuff that I suspect was just outright snake oil, rather than being broken like the Luvik. This is probably best embodied by the electric circlet I saw there that's supposed to stimulate your brain to reduce your stress while you sleep. They advertised, I think the number was brain to reduce your stress while you sleep. They advertised,

I think the number was 80% reduction in stress while you sleep. This is not a product I feel the need to review. Some claims are not worth taking seriously, and this is one of them. So far, I've seen little at CES that struck me as likely to be a massive financial success, but there were some potentially groundbreaking products on display. Unfortunately, nearly all of these were in the realm of health and medical technology. Let me explain why this is troubling with an example from the show. The most potentially influential device I saw there was called Viral Warn by Optiv. It is a multiple-use breath analyzer self-test that will tell you if you are positive for COVID-19, RSV, or influenza. It just lights up

if you're positive for one of them. They promise that in the future it'll tell you which you have, but that's still useful, right? Still a hell of a lot better than anything we've got right now. Rather than sticking a thing up your nose, you just blow into this thing like a breathalyzer. It's about the size of a key fob and you can charge it with a normal USB cable. It can be used dozens of times before being reloaded. Optiv's rough price point is around $100. If this thing works the way they say it does, I cannot exaggerate what a big deal it would be.

Imagine being able to blow into a little device and know in a couple of seconds if you're safe before you go into a store or a bar or a party, go see an elderly relative for a birthday. Lives could be saved by this thing if it works. And to their credit, the good folks at Optiv immediately told me that this was not on sale yet as it was still waiting for FDA approval. I take this as a good sign and I sincerely hope it works as well as advertised. But products like this do present a problem for the tech press.

When I'm at a show like CES, it's generally easy to determine if something has promise. If I step into a booth for a company advertising rugged speakers, well, I can drop those speakers from a height. I can drop stuff onto them. I can throw them. I can test if they're rugged because I can try to break them, and if I can't, then they're rugged. Likewise, I can strap on a VR suit and I can tell you if it makes the experience more immersive. Neither I nor any other members of the press can tell you how well a medical diagnostic device works in the same manner. This isn't anyone's fault, but as connected tech and AI are included in more healthcare devices, the potential for snake oil and for dangerous failures to generate mass hype increases exponentially.

mass hype increases exponentially. and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you.

Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to be clear that the medical devices I have seen so far at CES do not strike me as suspicious in any way. Company representatives were extremely good at explaining what stage in the FDA approval process they were at, and I saw some really cool shit. My favorite was probably a new streamlined AED from LifeAZ. At $1,000 or $35 a month with a four to five year shelf life, this thing makes having a defibrillator on hand affordable for regular people. It's extremely light and small and can be easily carried in a backpack. I do have a

little bit of medical training and I tried this thing out on a dummy in test mode. I can confirm it appears to work like any other more expensive AED. The device is still awaiting FDA approval, but it has been approved and is being sold in France and Germany, so I feel pretty good saying this thing probably works the way LifeAZ says it does. And then there's my favorite product from CES Unveiled, the Nanshi Domestic Violence app from Athbash, which is a French company. This was first suggested to me via one of the most awkward PR emails I've ever received. Forward, media alert, groundbreaking domestic violence reporting app launching at CES 2023. And when I got it in my email, it just said, forward, media alert, groundbreaking domestic violence, which, fun thing to get in your inbox.

In fairness to their very nice PR lady, there's probably not a non-awkward way to title an email about this kind of thing. The app itself is really innovative, though. It provides you with options to record voice or video and to take photos of documents or to photographically document your own injuries. All the data that you save is stored off-site, so you take a picture or you record audio and it's immediately off the phone and off the app. You actually can't access it without contacting the company directly to get it. All of it is stored on the cloud and it's also on the blockchain, which is used to verify data integrity, making this probably the first blockchain-related product I've ever heard of with a realistic use case.

Nanshi seems to be pretty well thought out from the top to bottom. Once you start recording, you can swipe away from the app, and it will keep recording without being visible anywhere on your phone. So if you're in a fight with a domestic abuser and they take your phone away, they will not see that you're recording, but it will keep recording. You can also change the logo and name that the app displays itself under on your phone so that it won't say that you have Nanshy anywhere. You can make it look like basically anything you want. It really does seem like they've thought this through, and it's about

the best version of this kind of thing that's possible. There's more. A particular note at the show was an unpowered mechanical exoskeleton I got to try on. It doesn't increase your physical strength, but it does allow you to sit while standing. The manufacturer, Arkellis, sees this as a way to let workers stand on factory production lines and in retail stores all day long without straining themselves. I feel profoundly mixed about this product, more so than anything else at CES. On one hand, it works really well. I got to try it on, and it's kind of a marvel on the mechanical level. You can still walk perfectly well with it on, but you can just kind of sit at any point going limp, and it's actually really comfortable. On the other hand, it costs $3,000, which means very few retail workers are ever going to see one. So far, its primary use in the real world has

been helping to keep auto workers comfortable while they shotgun more cars out into a world with far too many of them. It's all very emblematic of the way CES makes me feel these days. Inside the roiling sea of snake oil and broken shit are some really cool ideas, but they're all wedded to an industry that has mostly forgotten how to do anything new. Over the coming days, I'm going to look at a new smartphone from Samsung. It rolls up, I guess. Check out more VR haptic devices, none of which I expect to work very well, and I will hopefully get to lift some heavy weights wearing a powered exoskeleton. That one I'm actually looking forward to. I am open to the

possibility of finding stuff that's cool here. But at the end of the day, nothing I've seen, and nothing I'm likely to see, has changed my overall impression of where the tech industry is today. It's a big bloated monster slowly bleeding out before our eyes. It Could Happen Here is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here updated monthly at CoolZoneMedia.com slash sources.

Thanks for listening. You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadow. Join me, Danny Trails, and step into the flames of riot. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.