Why Launching New Tech Products Isn’t Magic Anymore

It’s possible to pinpoint a pinpoint moment for the peak of technology enthusiasm: January 9, 2007, 9:41 a.m. Pacific Time, the moment Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone to the world.

Mobile phones weren’t new—neither were touchscreen phones —but this one was different : so high-tech it seemed impossible, yet so perfectly engineered that its arrival seemed inevitable. And people were thrilled . Not just tech enthusiasts: regular people. The crowd at the 2007 Macworld Conference and Expo erupted in thunderous applause when Jobs demonstrated the iPhone’s multitouch—a standing ovation for a software feature!—because it felt like Jobs was touching a better future.

People said the iPhone was something out of Star Trek . But unlike communicators or tricorders, it was affordable (if you had $500) and signaled a future where technology would finally free us from the drudgery of our lives, allowing us to boldly go anywhere—no matter what.

Fathers of Science Fiction and Modern Technology

Steve Jobs repeatedly cited Star Trek as an inspiration for the iPhone; apparently, the series is quite popular among techies. Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek and, thus, was the spiritual father of the iPhone. He spent the 1960s lounging by a Los Angeles pool and dreaming of a future without shortages, where the wise and brave people of the Federation held off the Romulans, and every M-class planet was home to attractive alien girls. Meanwhile, the true prophet of the future, Philip K. Dick, sat in a dank Oakland apartment, a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, popping amphetamines like mints and feverishly typing dystopian visions of corporate-controlled states and nightmarish technorealities on his Hermes Rocket typewriter.

Roddenberry’s Federation promised that technology would help humanity evolve and overcome its baser instincts. Dick, however, saw technology as an amplification of our worst impulses.

So what happened? How did we move from a Roddenberry-esque future, where every new product seemed like another step toward a collective utopia, to our Dick-esque present, where the first question we ask of any new technology is, “How will this hurt me?”

Where does the hype around technology come from?

Visionary startup leaders love to talk about “paradigm shifts” and “world-changing technology,” but people don’t get excited about technology products that, say, cure cancer. Much of life (at least for pampered Westerners) consists of solving mundane problems, and technology promises a way out. Remember printing out MapQuest directions before leaving the house? It was terribly inconvenient. People were excited about the iPhone because it solved the MapQuest problem and a host of other small, personal problems, like “I can’t instantly send a photo to a friend” or “I’m bored on the bus.” Products that do this thrive, and those that fail are discarded like a juicer .

It’s hard to overstate how great the iPhone was in 2007, solving so many problems. Once you bought it, you no longer had to carry around a notepad, camera, laptop, MP3 player, GPS, flashlight, or alarm clock. It all fit in a single black mirror. But speaking of black mirrors…

Excitement gives way to boredom

“We live in an era of incremental upgrades, not industry-defining breakthrough innovations,” says Heather Sliwinski, founder of Changemaker Communications, a PR agency specializing in technology. “A new iPhone today offers a slightly improved camera, a slightly different size, or AI features that no one needs. These aren’t the kind of upgrades that go viral or justify consumers spending thousands of dollars on a device that’s only marginally better than what they already have.”

In economics, “marginal utility” is the additional satisfaction or benefit a consumer receives from consuming one more unit of a good or service. The difference in marginal utility between the flip phone and the first iPhone was enormous. But economics teaches us that marginal utility diminishes with each additional unit consumed. Each new iPhone provided less and less additional satisfaction compared to what users already had. Slightly faster chips, slightly better cameras, USB-C instead of Lightning, titanium instead of aluminum—what difference did it make?

If we were simply bored by technological products, that would be one thing. But increasingly, the devices we want to use to make our lives easier or more enjoyable end up complicating and making them worse.

Enormous technological challenges

“When you buy a new tech product today, you’re not just buying one physical item. You’re committing to downloading another app, creating another account, and managing another subscription,” says Sliwinski. “Consumers are tired of the endless management that comes with every new device.”

In economics, this is called “diseconomies of scale”: what happens when a business becomes so large that the costs of bureaucracy outweigh the benefits of increased efficiency. Personally, it happens when the time and energy spent syncing, charging, and coordinating your “time-saving” device turns you into a middle manager in your own life.

And then there’s “kipple.” In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?, Philip K. Dick defines “kipple” as useless items that accumulate: “junk mail, matchbooks after you’ve used your last match, gum wrappers, or yesterday’s homeopathic remedies.” That drawer full of discarded power cords and plugs, your broken headphones, extra game controllers, Roku, Chromecast, and old Fitbit—that’s physical kipple, but virtual kipple is even worse. “Personally, I need to download and manage at least four different apps just to live in my apartment complex—the smart lock system, the shared laundry room, rent payments, maintenance requests,” says Sliwinski.

According to Dick, kipple doesn’t just accumulate; it metastasizes, continually expanding until the Star Trek- esque lifestyle you envisioned becomes a Dick-esque swamp of addictions, and the future goes from being a place you want to live to a place you’ll find yourself trapped in.

Corruption of all things

The door didn’t open. She said, “Five cents, please.” He rummaged through his pockets. There were no more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay tomorrow,” he said to the door. — Philip K. Dick, Ubik

“For years, corporations have been trying to create hype around relatively unimportant features rather than truly useful developments, and consumers have learned to recognize this pattern,” says Kaveh Vahdat, founder of RiseOpp, a San Francisco-based company that provides part-time CMO and SEO services.

Nowhere is this consumer apathy more evident than with AI. “Consumers are testing Sora and Grok and all that, but there hasn’t really been a single AI use case or product that I think consumers have been excited about,” says Sliwinski.

This won’t stop tech companies. Even without much hype, artificial intelligence is everywhere in technology, from toothbrushes to strollers (I think Philip K. Dick would find an AI-powered stroller darkly amusing: it’s self-driving , but won’t work if you put a baby in it). “There’s a lot of hype around AI, but what’s missing is the ‘so what?’ question.”

Having overcome indifference, we move towards horror.

Beyond the question “so what?”, consumers have begun asking, “What harm will this do to me?” “Will AI push my child to commit suicide? Will it steal my job ? Will it destroy all that is pure and human ?”

Tech companies seem unwilling to curtail their use of AI or effectively explain its benefits, and judging by the recent past, if they can’t make our lives easier, they’ll instead try to imprison us by hiring psychologists, neuroscientists, and “growth hackers” specifically to create products we can’t refuse. Innovation lies not in new products that make life easier, but in fostering addiction through flexible reward systems , social approval ratings , parasocial relationships , and other dark arts, until we ultimately end up like the half-alive creatures in Ubik —shells in cryopods, living in an artificial reality where we still have to pay for the doors to open. At least, that’s what Philip K. Dick believes.

“Maybe in 10 or 20 years we’ll see another huge leap like the iPhone, which will be able to connect all these different devices or apps that we use, but the technology isn’t there yet,” Sliwinski says.

In Star Trek, humanity doesn’t abandon scarcity. Technology ultimately makes scarcity unbearable, and this is only possible after a planet-wide war. From this perspective, reminiscent of Roddenberry’s ideas, “devaluation” is what happens when old economic systems struggle to survive in a world where technology constantly undermines their justification, and every tiny iteration of “I don’t care” regarding technological products is a small step toward Star Trek’s promised land of holodecks, abundance, and attractive aliens.

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