Why Tech Launches Stopped Feeling Magical

You can pinpoint the exact moment of the high point of enthusiasm for technology: January 9, 2007, 9:41 a.m. PST, the moment Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world.

Cell phones weren’t new, nor were touchscreen cell phones, but this one was different: so high-tech that it seemed like it couldn’t be real, but so perfectly designed that it seemed inevitable. And the people were excited. Not just tech enthusiasts: normal people. The crowd at the 2007 Macworld Conference & Expo erupted into enthusiastic applause when Jobs introduced iPhone multi-touch – a standing ovation for a software feature! – because it seemed like Jobs was touching on a better future.

The iPhone, people said, was like something out of Star Trek. But unlike communicators or tricorders, it was possible to obtain (if you had $500) proof of a future where technology would finally free us from the drudgery of our lives so that we could boldly go — anywhere that didn’t matter.

The science fiction fathers of modern technology

Steve Jobs mentioned Star Trek as a source of inspiration for the iPhone at any time; Apparently the show is very popular among techies. Creation by Gene Roddenberry Star Trekand was therefore the spiritual father of the iPhone. He spent the 1960s lounging poolside in Los Angeles, dreaming of a post-scarcity tomorrow where the wise and brave men of the Federation kept the Romulans at bay and there were pretty alien girls on every Class-M planet. At the same time, the true prophet of the future, Philip K. Dick, was huddled in a dank Oakland apartment, a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, popping amphetamines like candy mint and feverishly typing dystopian visions of corporate-policed states and nightmarish techno realities into his Hermes Rocket typewriter.

The Roddenberry Federation promised that technology would help humanity evolve beyond its baser instincts. Dick saw technology amplifying our worst impulses.

So what happened? How did we go from a Roddenberry future where every new product release seemed like a step closer to collective utopia to our Dick-like present, where the first question we ask about any new technology is “How will this hurt me?” »

Where does enthusiasm for technology come from?

Visionary startup leaders like to chatter about “paradigm shifts” and “world-changing technologies,” but people aren’t excited about tech products that will, say, cure cancer. Most of life (for pampered Westerners, anyway) is faced with routine inconveniences, and technology promises a way out. Remember printing out MapQuest directions before leaving the house? It was really boring. People were excited about the iPhone because it solved the MapQuest problem and many other small, intimate problems, like “I can’t instantly send a photo to my friend” or “I’m bored while I’m riding the bus.” Products that do this thrive and those that fail are thrown out like a Juicero.

It’s hard to overstate how great the iPhone was in 2007 in terms of solving annoyances. Buying one meant you no longer needed to carry a notepad, camera, laptop, MP3 player, GPS device, flashlight or alarm clock. Everything was crammed into a single black mirror. But speaking of black mirror…

Excitement turns to boredom

“We’re in an era of incremental updates, not industry-defining breakthroughs,” says Heather Sliwinski, founder of tech PR firm Changemaker Communications. “Today’s new iPhone offers a slightly better camera, slightly different dimensions, or AI features that no one is asking for. These aren’t updates that go viral or justify consumers spending thousands of dollars on a device that’s barely better than the one they already own.”

In economics, “marginal utility” is the additional satisfaction or benefit a consumer obtains from consuming an additional unit of a good or service. The marginal leap from a flip phone to the first iPhone was huge. But economics teaches us that marginal utility decreases with each additional unit consumed. Each new version of the iPhone brought progressively less additional satisfaction over what users already had. Slightly faster chips, slightly better cameras, USB-C instead of Lightning, titanium instead of aluminum, who cares?

If we were just bored of tech products, that would be one thing. But increasingly, devices sought after because we want to make our lives easier or more pleasant are making them harder and worse.

The big technological hassle

“When you buy a new technology product today, you’re not just buying a physical product. You’re committing to downloading another app, creating another account, and managing another subscription,” says Sliwinski. “Consumers are exhausted by the endless management that comes with each new device.”

In economics, we would call this “diseconomies of scale”: what happens when a company becomes so large that its bureaucratic costs exceed efficiency gains? In personal terms, it’s when the time and energy it takes to sync, charge, and coordinate your “time-saving” device makes you the middle manager of your own life.

And then there is the kipple. In Do androids dream of electric sheep?, Philip K. Dick defines “kipple” as useless objects that accumulate: “junk mail or correspondence files after using the last match, chewing gum wrappers or yesterday’s homoeopape”. That drawer full of orphaned power cords and connectors, your broken headphones, extra game controllers, Roku, Chomecast, and old Fitbit are physical kipples, but virtual kipples are worse. “Personally, I have at least four different apps that I have to download and manage just to live in my apartment complex: smart lock system, community laundry, rent payments, maintenance requests,” says Sliwinski.

According to Dick, the kipple doesn’t just accumulate; it metastasizes, constantly growing until the Star Trek The lifestyle you envision becomes a Dick-like swamp of addictions, and the future shifts from a place you want to live to a place where you’re trapped.

The enshitification of everything

The door refused to open. He said, “Five hundred, please.” » He reached into his pockets. No more coins; Nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he said at the door. -Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“Companies have spent years trying to generate excitement around relatively unimportant features instead of genuinely useful developments, and consumers have learned to recognize this pattern,” says Kaveh Vahdat, founder of RiseOpp, a CMO and fractional SEO company based in San Francisco.

Nowhere does this consumer indifference seem greater than with AI. “Consumers are testing Sora or Grok and all that, but there hasn’t really been a single use case or product for AI that I think consumers are excited about,” Sliwinski says.

This won’t stop tech companies. Even without enthusiasm, artificial intelligence is everywhere in technology, from toothbrushes to strollers (I think PKD would have found the AI ​​stroller very funny: it’s autonomous, but it won’t work if you put a baby in it.) “There’s a lot of buzz around AI but we’re missing the ‘so what?'”

Beyond indifference and towards fear

Beyond the “so what?” » Consumers began to ask themselves, “How will this hurt me?” » “Will AI encourage my child to commit suicide? Will it steal my job? Will it destroy everything about humanity?”

Tech companies don’t seem to want to scale back AI or effectively explain its benefits, and if the recent past is any indicator, if they can’t make our lives easier, they will instead try to imprison us, employing psychologists, neuroscientists, and “growth hackers” specifically to make products harder to let go of. Innovation lies not in new products that make life easier, but in encouraging addiction through variable reward programs, social validation measures, parasocial relationships, and other dark arts until we end up like the half-lives of Ubikhusks in cryopods, living in a manufactured reality where we still have to pay for the doors to open. That’s the PKD’s point of view, anyway.

“Maybe in 10 to 20 years we’ll have another major change, like the iPhone, which can condense all of these different devices that we use or apps that we use — but the technology isn’t there yet,” Sliwinski says.

In Star Trekhumanity does not abandon scarcity. Technology eventually makes scarcity indefensible, and this is only possible after a planet-wide war. From this Roddenberry perspective, enshittification is what happens when old economic systems try to survive in a world where technology continues to erode their rationale, and each small iteration of “I don’t care” towards technological products is a small step closer to the emergence of technological products. Star Trekis the promised land of holodecks, abundance and sexy aliens.