The worst tech of 2023

A panel of top journalists, technologists, and critics pick the products they wish would go away this year

The Silicon Valley exports we wished would just go away this year

It’s that time of year again, that glorious and exhausting stretch between Black Friday and the end of December, when the internet overflows with holiday buyer’s guides; each besotted with banner ads and brimming with affiliate links to products competing for your gift budget; each published by beleaguered digital media outlets themselves competing for eyeballs and Amazon payouts.

I do not begrudge any outlet for running these things — it’s tough out there! and some gift-seekers surely find utility in them — but they sit atop an intersection of so many discouraging trendlines that I can’t help but get depressed by them. (To name a couple: A digital media whose revenues have been cannibalized by big tech companies, desperately trying to game their algorithms with some content promoting stuff that profits them further, even though the quality of a lot of that stuff suggests the tech companies’ innovation running on the acrid-smelling fumes. But I digress!)

So, this year, with a little help from some of the best critical tech thinkers in the game, I cobbled together something of an antidote: a list of the worst tech of the year; a sort of anti-gift guide. And that was the subject of this week’s column; we had some fun with this one.

I called in gig law legal wiz Veena Dubal, president of the Signal Foundation Meredith Whittaker, bestselling science fiction authorCory Doctorow, Disconnect writer and Tech Won’t Save Us hostParis Marx, tech journalist and criticEdward Ongweso Jr , and former Motherboard editor in chief and 404 Media co-founderJason Koebler.

Aaaaand the worst tech products, services, and ideas of the year ARE:

-Amazon Ring Doorbell
-Uber
-Generative AI
-Remote attestation tools
-23andMe
-The concentration of power in big tech

I think it’s worth reading the whole thing — each of the participants shared a blurb about why they made their choice, and each knows their stuff.

I want to do a followup with readers’ picks, so if you have a particular technology product or service that you detest, or is a drain on society in a way we have not yet addressed, please drop a note in the comments here or send me an email, and I’ll try to include it in the next one.

BLOODY BOOK STUFF

In book news this week, me and my curiously yellow-hued office dropped by the Beat with Ari Melber on MSNBC to talk luddites and big tech. It was a fun segment, and maybe the largest audience yet for my Luddite rehabilitation campaign. You can check that out here or above.

I also chatted (via DM and email) with the great Katie Notopolous, formerly the best internet culture writer at Buzzfeed and now the best internet culture writer at Business Insider, about what those luddites can tell us about the impact AI might have on jobs.

A snippet:

Based on your understanding of history, what are the chances that AI helps people by lowering the gap between lower skilled and higher skilled workers?

Now, as then, the vast, vast majority of the time, AI absolutely cannot replicate a good writer or worker's output. It can produce output that may be passable to managers looking to tell their managers that they saved on labor costs this quarter by firing Ian and Deborah in marketing or whatever, and teaching an intern how to use ChatGPT, which, by the way, they just purchased enterprise tier for.

But that's the end game, and what needs to be understood as the beating heart of all this AI talk; it's ultimately being sold to every firm that adopts it as a labor-saving and cost-cutting tool, period. 

The whole interview is here.

LINKS AND STUFF YOU SHOULD READ

-I finally read the n+1 piece on Cop City folks have been talking about, “Not One Tree”, by Grace Glass and Sasha Tycko, and I can’t recommend it any more strongly, especially for those like myself who may feel like they haven’t gotten the full context and story of that movement. This fills in all the blanks and then some. The writing is often beautiful, though of course it’s also often deeply sad. Hopeful, too, though, through the cracks.

-This piece from Ryan Broderick on why Twitch has been collapsing, despite once brimming with influence and marketshare, on Garbage Day , begins to answer a lot of questions I’ve had about that service too — I thought it was destined to become something like the next Instagram, given its ubiquity for a minute there.

-Kyle Chayka on what we should call this uniquely hellish digitalized epoch of ours. Rusty Foster says William Gibson’s coinage of ‘the Jackpot’ seems closest, and I’d be inclined to agree but maybe it’s just a tad too generic, and kind of makes it seems, at least to me, like all this happened to us, as opposed to us happening to us. If that makes sense. IDK.

-Enjoyed Dave Karpf , who is reading the entire WIRED back catalog for a research project, highlighting these predictions by tech gurus and celebrities in the year 2000. Grim and bias-confirming.

-Writing that anti-gift guide made me think of back when I was an editor at Motherboard, we had something of a tradition of publishing a prank or just something weird in gift guide season. The best one was when we published a post called “The 10 Best Black Friday Deals at Target, Walmart, Best Buy, and Amazon” and the text was just the Communist Manifesto. Wish I could say I came up with that one, but I think it was Jason K. We had some good times.

That’s it! Until next time — no general but Ludd means the poor any good.