It’s not the case that every new technology, every new product craze based on some new way of doing things, lasts and lasts. Newer is not always better. Sometimes, new things come along, people jump all over them, and later realize that it was dumb and you never hear about them again.
I’m beginning to think this is happening all around us. We might be surrounded by gizmos and products that will be relics of ridicule in ten years.
Look at these ridiculous Apple Virtual Reality headsets. They will cost you $3,500 or you can pay per month. But something interesting is happening. Users are amazed by the immersive experience. It’s thrilling! But there are problems. Headaches, soreness from weight, and intense eye strain mean you can’t use it for long.
Apple gives you 14 days to return them. Every Apple store this past week had long lines of people giving them up. They tried the thing and are done with it. Gaming doesn’t require them and there aren’t enough games for them anyway. Gamers prefer regular old screens. And shopping or walking with them makes you seem like some kind of freak.
Maybe they serve some industrial use in design or whatever but as a mass consumer product? They seemed destined for the dustbin.
I would say the same about many products these days, such as lightbulbs that turn on and off and dim with your misnamed smartphone. Really? We can’t walk over to the light switch? This seems like a novelty that will wear off.
Before continuing to speculate, let’s talk about the waterbed. It’s a paradigmatic case.
What is it? Well, it is a bed filled with water. Why would you want that? It seems like in the 1970s and 1980s, people had some sense that it would be good for coupling or something. It became associated with a playboy lifestyle and everyone had to have one.
Yes, there were said to be orthopedic advantages. It was supposed to conform to the body and be more natural. Get back to nature, and all that, even though there is no historical record of human beings sleeping in water. In any case, the manufacturers managed somehow to tap into the cultural belief that these things were the future.
This you won’t believe—I cannot believe it—but there was a brief time when I was young when I sold waterbeds. I know, I know. Very embarrassing. But hear me out. There is an interesting story here.
I was working in a department store, mostly doing maintenance, and someone tipped me off to a higher salary at a furniture store, so I took the job. My job was to sell a bunch of junk to people. I didn’t last long because I’m too sincere for that. In any case, for a few months I was assigned to the mattress department, because it was said to be the easiest place from which to sell things. Even then, I wasn’t very good.
We sold plenty of normal mattresses but also waterbeds. They were just plastic sacks really. When I sold one, I was assigned to install them. I would go to the person’s flat, unfold the dumb thing, drag the garden hose into the bedroom, and fill it up completely, with some tablets that keep the mold away. I felt like an idiot but did it anyway.
Often a leak would happen—we had a 15-day money-back guarantee—because a cat would claw the bag or something would otherwise tear. I would have to go over to flooded homes and patch the thing. So we sold patching kits too. And heaters for the beds because otherwise they were too cold.
In any case, as you can imagine, the craze started wearing thin fast. Customers would come in and say “Hey, this bed is too watery. I feel like I’m getting seasick. I don’t like all the sloshing around. Is there a fix?”
What did we do? Well, we ordered a new product called a beveled waterbed. A bevel was a heavy silicon insert. They came with one bevel. Or two bevels. Or three bevels. Each bevel added firmness and took away some of the slosh. It became ever less watery. It seemed like science or industrial innovation. It was really just an attempt to save a failed idea from itself.
Then at some point, the thing became preposterous. When a waterbed had five bevels, it started to become more like a regular bed. Customers loved it. The five-bevel waterbed became our best selling item. In other words, the more the waterbed felt like an old-fashioned bed, the more people liked it.
Why not just buy a bed? It was strange because it seems like customers did not want to give up the notion of waterbeds. They had become convinced that these were the beds of the future. They wanted to be part of the future. They just didn’t much like the water part of the bed.
In any case, it was about this time that I left this industry and did something else, thank goodness. I was awful at selling furniture anyway. I stopped paying attention to the waterbed market completely.
At some point, these products just disappeared from the market. Or did they? I just checked Amazon and it turns out that you can right now still buy a “waveless” or “full wave” waterbed. The one that is just a plastic sack is only $50.
So there you go: you can still get your waterbed. But most people prefer a regular bed. On a budget there is foam or air, both of which surely do improve on water!
The point is that now waterbeds are mainly a joke or a bad memory, like pet rocks, platform shoes for dudes, or leisure suits. They came, swept the country, and then gradually went away.
I have some sense that the same could happen with most “smart” technology. These days, you can hardly even buy an appliance that doesn’t claim to be smart and require an app. The stationary bike at the gym needs to be plugged in and attached to an app. The lamp needs an app. The car is filled with apps.
What precisely is achieved with all this digital this and that? Do we really want to run the whole of our lives from our cellphones or watches? I personally find this tedious and I’m sick of it all. Give me an old-fashioned stationary bike that you need to power with your legs any day. I don’t always need to look at a dumb screen. And I don’t want my every move surveilled by Microsoft.
Remember the 3D television set? That was about 15 years ago. It was the future. Everyone knew that they would take over. Except that people once they tried them actually hated them. In a few years, you couldn’t find them in stores. They completely failed, despite being truly futuristic and a seeming improvement. They were inconsistent with the way people wanted to watch. So they disappeared.
Let’s talk about the unmentionable subject: breakages and longevity. No one can fix these things. Certainly not a normal person. When they break, you have to pay the virtual assistant, who tells you that you need new hardware, which is likely true, so you order the part but it doesn’t work. In any case, it breaks in two years anyway.
Half the machines at the gym are broken awaiting a fix and no one can fix them. Same with electric car chargers. They are constantly rendered inoperable. In general, this is a gigantic problem for the whole whizbang product world of the last ten years. It is fussy, requires constant updates, it breaks easily, no one can fix this stuff, and must be replaced often.
I can easily foresee a time in the future when people will look back at this “smart” mania and find it all preposterous and embarrassing. You can already see early signs of this with the failure of Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, the decline and fall of the EV market, and now the possible demise of the VisionPro.
Pharma itself has attempted to jump onto the digital/subscription/platform model with mRNA technology but that move has had the roughest start imaginable. The popular movement against that attempt is global, perhaps killing off mRNA for many decades.
And need we even comment on the disaster of fake meat? That market for that stuff is toast.
To understand this interesting phenomenon of rejected innovations requires we dispense with what we might call the Whig theory of technology. This grows out of the Whig theory of history, which is marked by a confidence in linear progress through time.
It comes from an intellectual ethos that developed in 18th century politics, encapsulated in the works of John Locke and Thomas Babington Macaulay. It viewed progress from despotism to universal human rights and democracy as inevitable, such that every era corrects the mistakes of the past to take us upwards to the light.
The Whig theory of progress has other applications such as in science, the belief that whatever is latest and most recent is the best, always correcting the past and preserving the improving what is true. So too, there is a Whig theory of technology, such that whatever gizmo comes along and achieves some market is necessarily better and more advanced than what came before.
There is of course a grain of truth in Whig theory, and a very nice vision of the future. The problem comes from seeing progress as a given, an inevitability so certain that one no longer needs to use critical thinking to evaluate the merit of trends. All one needs to do is snag the latest thing and believe whatever the prevailing consensus is.
You can see that this leads to trouble!
It’s a problem in historical understanding (not all that is new is improved) and in science (often the older science was better) but the same affects technology. The waterbed is nearly extinct. So is the 3D TV set. Vegan “meat” is not long for this world.
Perhaps in a while, the same will be true of the VisionPro VR headset, which is precisely what happened to Google’s goofy glasses some years ago.
You might, for example, prefer a real, old fashioned beautiful watch, not some mini-iPhone Dick Tracy contraption on your wrist. Good for you! Feel no shame!
The lesson: don’t buy into the illusion. And think for yourself!
