There’s one thing I still find perpetually amazing about the person who holds the dual titles of World’s Richest and World’s Most Pathetic Man: the guy can’t seem to go more than 60 seconds without saying one of the most blatantly stupidest things you’ve ever heard.
When I first heard The Youth using “cringe” as an adjective, I immediately went into pedantic old man mode and objected to it. But now, I realize that it was a case of the universe maintaining balance. The physical manifestation of cringe had been brought into the world, but we did not yet have a word to describe it.
I mention that because a) it’s fun, but also b) it’s one of the most obvious cases of journalistic malpractice of the 21st century. This dipshit had well over a decade of journalists — who had met him in person, and actually heard him talk — describing him as a visionary genius. They had so effectively created the image of a “real world Tony Stark” that he even had a winking cameo in one of the Iron Man movies.
So now there’s a burgeoning cottage industry selling stickers for people to put on their Teslas to announce that they’d been duped. “We Bought This Before We Knew He Was an Asshole,” and while I’m very tempted to be sympathetic — I’ve got friends and family members who drive them, after all — I still can’t shake that feeling of skepticism. Really? The sales pitch that automatically deducted imaginary “projected gas savings” from the MSRP, and list that as if it were the actual sale price, didn’t make you suspect something was up?1I’ve seen variants of the stickers, which say “We Can’t Afford To Get a Different Car,” and I appreciate them for being more truthful.
Of course, I’d be a total hypocrite to be too critical, since I heard early press about the hyperloop and thought “Neat, faster trips to southern California,” without thinking about it much further. Even though the concept of “sealed into a windowless capsule going through a vacuum-sealed tube underground at hundreds of miles per hour across the distance of a continent” is so ludicrously absurd that any rational person should’ve dismissed it immediately for the anti-public-infrastructure scam it inevitably turned out to be. That’s a lot more ridiculous than quietly skimming thousands of dollars off the price of an electric car.
It all adds up to a simple fact: in 2026, we are long past the point of being able to shrug and say “let the smart people figure out all the problems.”
There’s a line between trust and gullibility, and we already crossed that line at least ten years ago. And yet we’re still seeing coverage of tech companies and upcoming products written with a lackadaisical, hand-waving approach to the most blatantly obvious concerns.
Because the Google I/O developer conference just wrapped up, we’re now seeing a lot of coverage of their upcoming line of pervert glasses — sorry, “smart glasses.” And as somebody who appreciates advances in technology, I have to marvel at how much they’ve managed to cram into such a small and lightweight product:
- Privacy concerns
- Empowering sex offenders
- Empowering the surveillance state
- Unprecedented access to personal data for customers and the people around them
- Historically-proven track record of selling that personal data
- Ethical concerns about training data used for large AI models
- Environmental concerns about running large AI models
- Inaccurate or outright false information from AI models with no reliable means to verify it
- Psychological issues from over-dependence on AI agents
- Consolidation of public access to public information, by hiding original sources behind a single-company-controlled AI summary
All that, and they finally made it fashionable!
Death-of-Journalism Concerns
While reading coverage of the announcement on BBC’s website, I noticed that they were careful to include a section headed “Privacy concerns,” which eventually ceded an entire paragraph to a brief mention of how people have been filmed without their permission and only finding out when the recordings were posted to the internet.
Don’t worry that that article is too much of a downer, though. That one example of almost-journalism is carefully surrounded by mention of how pervert glasses are so hot right now, and a list of all the other companies and brands in the middle of announcing their competing products. And the section — which is, again, headed “Privacy concerns” — ends with a comment from a venture capital firm: “It’s good for consumers.”
That post also includes a quote from a Google executive: “They are designed to give you all-day help with Gemini that’s spoken into your ear privately rather than shown on a display,” which is an all-new selling point I hadn’t seen emphasized before.
A person, who in a single year makes more than my entire lifetime’s net worth, gave a statement proudly declaring that they’d finally invented a machine that can spend all day whispering lies to you!
I keep thinking that this will be the time that tech companies have taken a step too far into the realm of the ludicrous, and coverage will finally stop and say, “Hold up. What the hell are we even doing?” But instead, they announce a product with so many obvious issues that they might just as well be selling literal red flags, and the only push-back we hear is “are they comfortable, though?” “Will it mess up my hair?” “Will it make me look cool?”
A Job Half-Finished
My first reaction was “even as an AR enthusiast, I can tell this is bullshit.” But it’s actually: “Especially as an AR enthusiast, who still believes in the potential of this tech and wants it to be fully realized, I think this is unacceptable bullshit.”
Because this is yet another example of obscenely rich people pushing products on everyone that they haven’t even bothered to finish.
There’s a mountain of arguments against the proliferation of AI, but I think the most damning one is still the simplest: the shit doesn’t work. Not true! It often works so well that it seems like magic! “Often works” is nothing but a euphemism for “broken.” An essential part of software development is quality assurance, which — if done responsibly — eliminates all bugs except for the ones that are so difficult to reproduce that they’re statistically impossible. Meanwhile, there are abundant examples of AI flat-out incorrectly answering questions with a 100% reproducibility rate, and people act like we’re supposed to be impressed because it acted like it understood the question.
So when these outrageously overvalued companies announce products that have a long list of obvious concerns attached to them, the response from any responsible person should be “okay, when is this going to be ready to announce?” When are you going to actually finish it, by addressing all of the various concerns with it, so that is actually a viable product?
Not publishing what is basically a slightly reworded press release, shrugging, and saying “Let’s all wait and see if they fix the problems! Meanwhile, here’s when and where you can buy it, and how much it costs!”
Until people actually start doing their damn jobs — and yeah, that includes both the tech companies and the people giving them coverage — I want these things to be like the Mark of Cain. I’m talking Cybertruck levels of shameful things to be seen in public with. Booed out of coffee shops. Relentlessly mocked on social media. So shunned that it would require a Robert Scoble-scale lack of self-awareness to even joke about wearing them.
And when this crap does inevitably get released unfinished, call bullshit on any “unboxing” or “first impressions” coverage that doesn’t take the concerns seriously enough to consider them a complete dealbreaker.
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