Last week, I went to Las Vegas to see the future, but mostly to podcast. I was there on assignment for Ed Zitron, host of the Better Offline podcast, and talked with him on several episodes of that pod about what I saw at the Consumer Electronics Show, which I found to be a strange and oddly dispiriting event. I wouldn't say I saw the future there so much as I saw the present lengthening into incomprehensibility in high resolution, one AI assist at a time. This week, Drew and I had Ed on to talk about what we saw there, and what tech's future might look like—after we talked about the NFL for half the podcast.
The football stuff came first. Ed lives in Las Vegas and is a Raiders fan by choice, and while we talked about that diseased and depraved organization's capacity for wrecking pretty much anyone that associates with it, we moved quickly into a conversation about the NFL's coaching marketplace. The Raiders have one of the more accursed job openings out there at this moment, and while Ed expressed his secret hope that Pete Carroll might right that most un-rightable of ships, our discussion mostly wasn't about which coaches might fix their new teams.
These are the Cowboys, Jets, Jaguars, and Bears we're talking about, and so it's less a matter of "fixing" anything than which bad decisions might make those situations worse in amusing ways. To that end, we talked about Mike McCarthy as a type of coach, football teams as workplaces, and the amusing potential disasters—Deion Sanders? Ryan Day?—that the Cowboys will probably eschew in favor of a hire that's much duller and not much less doomed. A bit about the dreaded promise from ownership to "take a more active role" led Drew to say the words "We've gotta get David Tepper going," which has been rattling around in my head all week. We talked about Mike Martz and Mike Vrabel; the Robert Kraft Voice returned, and sounded as unpleasant as ever. Someone listening to this first half of the show would not expect the second half to be about what it was about.
And yet, we hit that pivot after the ad break and didn't look back. What we saw at CES was a very wide spectrum of stuff, and we talked a little bit about the invention-style products, luridly janky gadgetry, remarkably impressive technology from big companies with remarkably unconvincing AI aspects grafted onto it, cutting-edge dildonics, dystopian surveillance tech, and miles of empty hype that we saw there. Drew asked a question about what it might be like if AI actually worked and, as readers of Ed's newsletter will not be surprised to learn, Ed absolutely refused to honor that hypothetical. While neither Ed nor I thought very highly of a technology that doesn't work and is mostly lies at this point, there is still some interesting stuff to talk about where AI is concerned, and we did talk about it.
We also talked about more macro-scale stuff, including tech's ongoing fash turn and the reasons behind it, and the ongoing deterioration of what Ed has described as the Rot Economy, which aims not so much to serve customers but to idly torment them. Could Facebook actually die as a result of its sprawling dereliction and increasing unworkability? Are big tech companies just going to go on leveraging their incumbency benefits like the damn Pittsburgh Pirates? What are the best practices in the fantasy football trophy space? Only the last of those, a Funbag question, got a truly comprehensive answer. It's asking a lot for a podcast to predict the future. I was just happy to advocate for not adding an additional gaudy trophy to it.
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