Don't Eat Shit

Zach Scott Jaffe

03 Dec 2024 — 10 min read

Think of your favorite dish at an overly-priced but delectable restaurant that you frequent. Envision the plate as it arrives at your table. The satisfying clunk as the waitstaff sets the plate down and invariably warns you that it’s too hot to touch (but still sets it too far away from you, requiring you to touch it anyway). The aromatic sensations flood the pleasure sensors of your brain as you raise your fork and knife, a triumphant epicurean warrior ready to feast like the being of immaculate taste that you are. As you plunge your utensils into the food, ravenous, and take your first bite, ready to savor an expected delight, a realization abruptly dawns on you. Something isn’t right. Either the recipe has undergone a radical transformation, the chef is cooking with his feat, or someone just served you an actual shit sandwich.

Now, shift the context.

Instead of sitting at an East Los Angeles Japanese-Irish-Peruvian fusion restaurant serving family-style plates about to eat a wagyu filet mignon braised in gooseberries, you are unboxing an expensive new product that you pre-ordered and have been anticipating for months. You have been told, and you believe, that this product will “surprise and delight” you - a turn of phrase that has come to embody the product designer ethos across all venture-funded technology companies.

You were convinced to make said purchase by the extravagantly over-produced videos featuring ultra high definition renderings, serious but soft-spoken men and women (but probably men) in black t-shirts and dark denim explaining how the product which you are about to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for is not only the next new thing, it is the product. It is the product that all other products aspire to become in the face of their unfathomable and insurmountable inadequacies and imperfections when compared to this wholly novel manifestation of engineering and technological mastery. And it’s now yours. But as with your shit sandwich, you were sold a false bill of goods. The product is a completely unusable and joyless paperweight that causes not surprise and delight but remorse and anger.

In 2024, we have seen a seemingly endless stream of overhyped shit products and an especially weird amount of AI-oriented overhyped and terrible products. The Rabbit R1. The Humane AI Pin. Apple Intelligence. The Apple Vision Pro. Google Gemini. Tesla “Full Self-Driving.” The new SONOS app. These are just a handful of some of the highest-profile examples.

All of these products were marketed as clear and present values for immediate purchase and/or customer usage, lest ye begin living in the past, you fucking rube. You could have a real-life retro encabulator. What's wrong with you? JUST BUY IT.

Putting aside the fact that we absolutely do not need another device to hang around our necks like a silicon albatross, all of these products were shipped knowingly incomplete at best and knowingly awful at worst, expecting the customer to pay a significant sum of money in order to be a part of what was effectively a beta test, and which they thought was a final product. The Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin, the makers of which raised tens and hundreds of millions of dollars, in particular, both raise important questions.

How do such products even make it to market at all when they are so feature incomplete, half-baked, broken, AND overpriced? Why does any product make it to the market as a dud, especially after receiving such exorbitant funding rounds led by investors in fever dreams of sweaty-palmed ecstatic check-writing?

For years, companies, spurred on by zero-interest rate borrowing and a risk-off environment, have felt confident in their abilities to siphon wastewater from the sewage of their overactive imaginations and feed it to us as a new type of low-calorie de-aging protein smoothie, supported in the media by an army of public relations professionals from West Hollywood and the Valley, all of whom are called Jennifer.

But some products are knowingly bad, or at least knowingly likely to be bad when you buy them.

The duvet you ordered from Amazon from “YUUVEECOCO” may turn out to be a nylon sack filled with microplastic particles and shredded cardboard. But at least it was cheap, and the expectation existed that it very likely would not be the best cancer-causing duvet you have ever owned.

After its first wash, the shirt you purchased from Shein shrunk to a size that even your teacup poodle couldn’t hope to wear, but hey, at least it gave you some drip for a night out with the girls. It was also quite cheap.

your new shirt looks great. so on trend.

These types of consumer goods are their own category because we have all come to believe, through low prices and even lower collective standards of quality for such things, that we are gambling when we buy them. There’s a non-zero chance, and indeed a rather likely probability, that the product will suck, but it’s known and expected.

Other products are expected to be good when you buy them - often correlated with the high cost of the product - but are unable to meet even the standards that the makers of the product themselves have promised. These products promise the moon but, in fact, are mere shadows on the wall in the allegory of the cave, flickering faintly with promised potential greatness in their ideation, if certainly not their execution. Somehow, the actual standard of quality for unconscionably overpriced products is getting lower and lower, more and more often. This is not limited to the tech sector.

Major AAA video games are regularly shipped buggy and unplayable at launch. Sometimes they are scrapped entirely and pulled from the market. Rarely, they get fixed post-launch and become one of the best games of all-time, still racking up sales years after the initially failed launch.
Movies are regularly released with bad special effects that ruin the film. They never “fix it in post.”
Speakers that you already own get bricked by rushed and thoughtless app updates so you can't even control the volume.

While almost no one ever sets out to explicitly make a bad product or a bad piece of art, there is one thing that bad products, flopped major AAA video games, existentially awful movies, and irresponsible app updates all have in common: the pressures of the free market.

Ideas come to the market because they are ideas which inspired someone to take the plunge into the brave act of making that idea into a tangible reality. But the market has its own rhythm, wholly disconnected from the abstract experimentation and revision and revision and revision (and revision) that is more often than not required to make something compelling that is worth the time, attention, and money of the intended audience.

Public markets function under the tyranny of the quarterly report, the short-term need to show ever greater scale, revenue, profit, and monthly active user growth, quarter after quarter, with every three months marking a new beginning, or the invocation of the latent phantom of terminal velocity and entropy. Private companies, especially start-ups, can face equal pressures if they are venture-backed and investors see their financial returns as a binary - an investment is either a 0 or a 1 - the company is either a roaring success or a complete failure. There is no room for middling in today’s evolution of capital. Any founder offering prospective investors small but slow-growing returns for an injection of capital into a sustainable business over a 10 to 15-year time horizon will get laughed out of the room. You will either blow up within 3-5 years, or you will make the investor famous for recognizing you early, garnering them more opportunities for venture investment. It’s that cut and dry.

The never-ending deluge of not great to very bad products and product features is a result of not only enshitification, which I’ve previously written about (God Bless Cory Docotow) but also the result of market forces which demand first mover advantage into that market, and the constant churning of products and content that are needed to feed and sustain the over-accumulation of capital in 2024. The result is the overproduction of incomplete shit products and fallow shit content made with only short-term profits in mind for the next quarter when more incomplete shit products and fallow shit content can be produced and released to the fat little piggies eating their shit at the trough.

Do you have an idea for “the next iPhone?” A unique and novel way to make shit sandwiches without shit, perhaps? A new screenplay based on some public trend or fascination? Better move quickly, or someone else will get there first. Oh, it’s not ready? Well, is it ready enough? It’s not ready enough? Oh, it’s not even remotely ready for public consumption? What if you and your team crunch and work fifteen-hour days, including weekends, for the next three months? It still won’t be ready? Is it possible to release it now and then slowly release more features via over-the-air updates and hotfixes to any bugs we miss? Oh, you don’t want to do that because it takes advantage of your labor by forcing them to do bad work, which saps their motivation and could hurt their future career prospects? Oh, you also don't want to do it because it's dishonest to trick your customers into a perpetual cycle of becoming beta testers for products that suck shit because they weren’t finished?

Get the fuck out of my office, you’re fired.

The only solution we have within our control is to stop consuming based on hype and FOMO. Wait a beat. Think about it. Throw your purchasing mechanism into the ocean, burying it at the bottom of the sea and out of your reach. Check out what some of the few critics who are still willing and able (and hopefully paid) to objectively analyze such things have to say; they might tell you the same.

Will some actual good and non-shit products be potentially harmed if they don’t sell enough units on release? Absolutely.

Will some very bad and total shit products be strangled in their cribs before they can proliferate, which will, in turn, cause the people who made those shit products to take a massive loss and potentially think twice before they treat consumers like lemmings running off the cliffside towards the next shiny object of lizard-brained desire? Hopefully, but I doubt it.

It’s obvious to anyone shopping for anything, or anyone working in a field of production of any kind, that the cost of buying things is high because the costs of production are higher than they have been in some time, at least when it comes to making quality works of technological engineer or art. But good things can be made if the expectations of investment capital and the market are shifted by the consumer doing a D.A.R.E. and “just say(ing) no” to the shit with a bow on top they are being served on Fool’s Gold-plated platters. It doesn’t taste good. Throw it back in their faces.

I promise you don’t need to eat it.

Addendum

As a part of the end of the first real full year of publishing written work, I will be compiling a year-end list of important cultural and technological critics, authors, thinkers, and their published works, who not only inspire me but who are doing the real work to expose bad business practices in technology and media which directly result in the sale of unfinished products and the release of formless, soulless content in the name of profit over all else.

🎧 Free Your Earballs

No music to share this week. I'll have my 10th (!) annual Best Of list coming soon, as well as a new Best Of (Honorable Mention) for all you real sickos out there.

Actually, just go listen to this in the meantime. It's a surprise.

Spotify // Apple Music

📺 Viewing Habits

Arcane (Netflix)

Arcane's second and final season on Netflix is nothing short of an animation miracle. I thought the first season was a masterpiece, as did anyone else who watched it, and the second season is even more mind-blowing. Watch it. I promise it is not a kid's show and contains more compelling ideas than almost everything out there right now. And Fortiche is at the very top of their game.