The Flop that was the CES show

Given how doom-and-gloom I was in my last OP, I thought that I should at least rise to the level of schadenfreude. As a lifelong techie, I have been saddened by the utter triviality and banality of apps that have made some 20-somethings into billionaires. My reaction to the CES news before this story was "what crap. who would buy it?".

So, have a good laugh about the faceplant by the tech class.

Lorenz went to the what is the biggest, most important consumer tech trade show in the US, and arguably the world, and found that tons of the great new gotta-have-them wares in the pipeline don’t work. As in unabashedly, obviously don’t work or are so ludicrously not fit for purpose as to be the functional equivalent of not work.

This inability to even credibly fake next gen products, and worse, not even be embarrassed that they aren’t performing, is proof that the tech industry has gone past an event horizon into a state of obvious collective impotence and no one cares or even seems to regard it as unusual. ...

Silicon Valley is no longer about products. It’s about VC hype and pump and dump. One has to assume that investors don’t bother looking to see whether things work. Offering memoranda, glossy sites, and the ability to foist paper onto greater fools is the dominant business model.


CES Shows That the Future Will Not Work

Everything that neoliberalism touches turns to shit as they suck all the profits out by scrimping on the actual product. Silicon Valley is about to become the new Detroit.

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Roy Blakeley's picture

the absurdity of a ridiculously poorly designed user interface leading to the missile scare in Hawaii. It is clear that the reward structure for the tech industry is inappropriate.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

@Roy Blakeley

was operator error b/c when you click the "Send" button, the app pops up an "Are you sure?" confirmation dialog. But I can't tell you how many times I have quickly clicked on confirmation dialogs by mistake because I'm in a rush. Talk about having a bad day at work. The guy must be devastated.

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

Alligator Ed's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

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arendt's picture

@Alligator Ed

But that won't stop some vigilante stalker from making his life scary.

These days, the last thing a commoner (i.e., someone without a security detail) wants is to be famous on the internet.

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Citizen Of Earth's picture

This was not formally part of CES but was a promotion at a vegas strip club to pull in the curious. Very bizarre.

And I saw a TV segment on hot new gadgets from CES -- most of which I wouldn't even want even if I had the money to burn.
For example a snuggle pillow that simulates breathing. Just a bit too creepy for my taste.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/01/09/somnox-s-robotic-pillow-is-designed-...

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Donnie The #ShitHole Douchebag. Fake Friend to the Working Class. Real Asshole.

arendt's picture

@Citizen Of Earth

I'm afraid to click on the link because of the inevitable follow-on spam.

But, I would bet you a sushi dinner that this would be appreciated in Japan, where engineering meets kinky.

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@Citizen Of Earth
Oh, great, now strippers are looking at the unemployment lines... and humanity rendered unnecessary even for sex in the brilliant future to be brought bought by psychopaths incapable of 'the softer' human emotions, who view normals as nothing but machines anyway.

But since so many glitzy new apps apparently don't work, in a situation where, for corporate interests and investors, optics are all and reality-based is 'outdated' - as long as they get their ever-increasing financial data-dots safely stored in off-shored American banking hidey-holes - probably these'll glitch all over anyway.

Makes you wonder how well replacement parts will work when users lose bodily bits due to glitchy sex robots...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

@Citizen Of Earth
From your link:

... The device is also stuffed full of sensors that have yet to be activated, but it's thought that the system will eventually offer sleep tracking as well. When that information is crunched by the Somnox servers, it's plausible that you'll be given insights on how to sleep better than you would otherwise. And the thinking is that what everyone has been missing all these years is to cuddle up with a loved one or pet. ...

Dear gawd, you're so right about creepy! Is Google also going to be tracking your sleep - or a burglar with hacking skills?

We all need someone to love, human or animal, even if a different ways. But only a psychopath would feel that an object can replace human needs for individuals - human or animal -that they cannot feel or understand themselves.

The reality-based need reality, not a virtual lollipop, even if a movie was made about a cast-away pretending that a large ball was another human being, because living creatures are essential to life and it's so sad that so many are isolated and' austeritied' into having virtually nothing, not even pets, yet expected to come up with hundreds of dollars to try to cope better with a virtual nothing that pretends to breathe...

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Psychopathy is not a political position, whether labeled 'conservatism', 'centrism' or 'left'.

A tin labeled 'coffee' may be a can of worms or pathology identified by a lack of empathy/willingness to harm others to achieve personal desires.

WoodsDweller's picture

The startup/VC business model doesn't produce a string of winners - it produces a stream of "stuff" a small fraction of which is good. A long time ago when I worked at a startup they told us that 70% fail completely (some because they never produced a product, most because the product was shit), 20% manage to develop tech that is of interest to major companies that buy them out (you get a little money for your options, maybe it's even worth your time), and 10% actually make it to IPO and you get to cash in your options for big bucks (hello villa in Costa Rica).
When the market is flying high it's easier to get VC money, and the IPOs are bigger. More ideas get funded, which means more bad ideas get funded.
This is a distinction between science and technology. Science is a conservative field where you create a robust barrier to entry for new ideas, and by the time a new idea is broadly shared it has been thoroughly vetted. Technology takes the other approach, try anything you can think of and let it sink or swim in the marketplace.
Go to a trade show to take selfies with the booth babes and collect T-shirts. Don't expect the future to be on display. It might be, somewhere, but you probably will miss it.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

arendt's picture

@WoodsDweller

Rarely have I seen a major trade show get completely panned. Rarely have I heard of so many broken/failed demonstrations.

Yes, there is always a lot of dreck at trade shows. Yes, startups are often run by idiots. (Mrs. Arendt worked for one once whose business plan was to "get acquired" before the buyer figured out the tech sucked.)

I think, now that the main Internet money flows are locked in (Google, Apple, Facebook, Twitter) the big money is moving on to major scams like Uber and Bitcoin. Why? Becasue how much revenue can any of these idiot applications/robots generate over the lifetime of the product or the company? Not much compared to the instant short-term gains to be had by trading Bitcoin futures against the Ralph Kramden's who think buying and holding one or two Bitcoins is the road to riches.

This CES may be to high-tech gadgets what Silverado was to movie Westerns - an expensive flop that killed off a beaten-to-death genre.

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Alligator Ed's picture

Everything that neoliberalism touches turns to shit as they suck all the profits out by scrimping on the actual product. Silicon Valley is about to become the new Detroit.

Apple is now a foremost neoliberal kingdom. Steve Jobs must be turning in his grave.

Bravo. Clapping

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arendt's picture

@Alligator Ed

The man may have been a marketing genius, but he was also a obsessive headcase.

Jobs discussed the walls he had in mind for the offices: “He knew exactly what timber he wanted, but not just ‘I like oak’ or ‘I like maple.’ He knew it had to be quarter-­cut. It had to be cut in the winter, ideally in January, to have the least amount of sap and sugar content. We were all sitting there, architects with gray hair, going, ‘Holy shit!’”...

Jobs had always insisted that most of the site be covered with trees; he even took the step of finding the perfect tree expert to create his corporate Arden. He loved the foliage at the Dish and found one of the arborists responsible. David Muffly, a cheerful, bearded fellow with a Lebowski-ish demeanor, was in a client’s backyard in Menlo Park when he got the call to come to Jobs’ office to talk trees. He was massively impressed with the Apple CEO’s taste and knowledge. “He had a better sense than most arborists,” Muffly says. “He could tell visually which trees looked like they had good structure.” Jobs was adamant that the new campus house indigenous flora, and in particular he wanted fruit trees from the orchards he remembered from growing up in Northern California...

Jobs hated air-conditioning and especially loathed fans. (He vigilantly tried to keep them out of his computers.) But he also didn’t want people opening windows, so he insisted on natural ventilation, a building that breathes just like the people who work inside it.

One More Thing: Inside Apple’s Insanely Great (or Just Insane) New Mothership

And it is being criticized like crazy:

As Apple Park inches toward completion, its critics are getting louder, and what began with aesthetic judgments of the digital renderings—the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic called the Ring a “retrograde cocoon”—has lately turned to social and cultural critiques. That the campus is a snobby isolated preserve, at odds with the trendy urbanist school of corporate headquarters. (Amazon, Twitter, and Airbnb are all part of a movement that hopes to integrate tech employees into cities as opposed to having them commute via fuel-gobbling cars or numbing Wi-Fi-equipped buses. ) That the layout of the Ring is too rigid, and that unlike ­Google’s planned Mountain View headquarters (which that company has described as having “lightweight blocklike structures, which can be moved around easily as we invest in new product areas”), Apple Park is not prepared to adapt to potential changes in how, where, and why people work. That there is no childcare center. “It’s an obsolete model that doesn’t address the work conditions of the future,” says Louise Mozingo, an urban design professor at UC Berkeley.

Not to mention that it cost $5 Billion to build.

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Alligator Ed's picture

@arendt

Investors urging Apple to kick back more of its bounty to shareholders have questioned whether the reported $5 billion in construction costs should have gone into their own pockets instead of a workplace striving for history.

Devoting a huge building to livability and quality of life for the WORKERS--what a non-neoliberal concept. Scheming Tim Cook would never have initiated this project--a waste of shareholder money.

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Lily O Lady's picture

@Alligator Ed

personnel will most likely continue to be male dominated.

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"The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?" ~Orwell, "1984"

Alligator Ed's picture

@Lily O Lady Of course, I may be incorrect in this.

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EdMass's picture

with mega-sized TVees, Drones, $2,000 Vlogging cameras and VR headsets?

This is what we all need, here in the good ole USA and around the world (looking at you shithole countries)..

Tech for food and cooking. Tech for water, Tech for shelter.

Nah. Have you seen Super Mario Cart on a Wall TV? No, have you?

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Prof: Nancy! I’m going to Greece!
Nancy: And swim the English Channel?
Prof: No. No. To ancient Greece where burning Sapho stood beside the wine dark sea. Wa de do da! Nancy, I’ve invented a time machine!

Firesign Theater

Stop the War!

arendt's picture

@EdMass

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SnappleBC's picture

@EdMass

Man, doesn't that just wrap it all up?

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A lot of wanderers in the U.S. political desert recognize that all the duopoly has to offer is a choice of mirages. Come, let us trudge towards empty expanse of sand #1, littered with the bleached bones of Deaniacs and Hope and Changers.
-- lotlizard

arendt's picture

The Hype Cycle

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