The Future Is Too Easy

Many people have written many words about the Consumer Electronics Show, the grande dame of tech-industry conventions. But I’m not sure many have written about it in a way that so clearly cuts to the heart of the current moment as David Roth does. Accelerationism isn’t just greed disguised as altruism; it’s structured explicitly in defiance of present-day applications, instead promising a future that’s always just around the corner. An unsettlingly great piece of criticism.

These were things, in short, and in this superheated context they were comforting in their legibility. It became more abstract further up the food chain. It is one thing for some concern or other to try to gamify masturbation—the game was called Fappy Bunny, it was “powered by Fluffer,” and I do not want to talk about it—or disrupt the gaming chair space, and quite another to meet investors’ grandiose ambitions. Practical technologies tended to emphasize impractical and fantastical potential uses that scale-obsessed investors might care more about: Wearable accessibility tech that allows people without the use of their arms or legs to use a computer through small facial gestures was talked up as a hands-free retail tool; a home saliva-testing kit that could be of use for trans people doing DIY hormone therapy was instead pitched more or less at that one unsettling rich guy who is trying to age in reverse. The fantasy of growth, on the metastatic scale that investors demand, outstrips every other concern. Even the most miraculous plowshare must have some potential utility as a sword.