Cell phones weren’t new—neither were cellphones with touch screens—but this one was different: so high-tech it seemed like it couldn’t be real, but so perfectly designed, it felt inevitable. And people were hyped. Not just tech nerds: normal people. The crowd at the 2007 Macworld Conference & Expo broke into rapturous applause when Jobs showed off the iPhone’s multi-touch—an ovation for a software feature!—because it seemed like Jobs was touching a better future.
Steve Jobs mentioned Star Trek as an inspiration for the iPhone all the time; apparently the show is quite popular among tech people. Gene Roddenberry created Star Trek, and thus was the spiritual father of the iPhone. He spent the 1960s lounging poolside in Los Angeles, dreaming of a post-scarcity tomorrow where the wise, brave men of The Federation kept the Romulans at bay and there were hot alien chicks on every Class-M planet. At the same time, the future’s real prophet, Philip K. Dick, was huddled in a dank Oakland apartment, a stone’s throw from Silicon Valley, popping amphetamines like breath mints and feverishly typing dystopian visions of corporate surveillance states and nightmare techno-realities into his Hermes Rocket typewriter.
So what happened? How did we go from a Roddenberry future where each new product release seemed like another step closer to collective utopia to our Dick-esque present, where the first question we ask of any new technology is “How is this going to hurt me?"
Where does tech excitement come from?
It’s hard to overstate how great the iPhone was back in 2007 in terms of solving annoyances. Buying one meant you no longer had to carry a notepad, camera, laptop, MP3 player, GPS device, flashlight, or alarm clock. It was all crammed into a single black mirror. But speaking of black mirror ...
In economics, "marginal utility" is the additional satisfaction or benefit a consumer gets from consuming one more unit of a good or service. The marginal utility leap between a flip phone and the first iPhone was huge. But economics teaches us that marginal utility diminishes with each additional unit consumed. Each new iPhone release provided progressively less additional satisfaction compared to what users already had. Slightly faster chips, slightly better cameras, USB-C instead of Lightning, titanium instead of aluminum—who cares?
The great technological hassle
“When you buy a new tech product today, you're not just buying one physical product. You're committing to downloading another app, creating another account and managing another subscription," Sliwinski says. "Consumers are exhausted by the endless management that comes with each new device."
Then there’s the kipple. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick defines “kipple” as useless objects that accumulate: ”junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday's homeopape.” That drawer full of orphaned power cords and connectors, your broken earbuds, the extra game controllers, the Roku, Chomecast, and old Fitbit are physical kipple, but the virtual kipple is worse. “Personally, I have at least four different apps that I need to download and manage just to live in my apartment complex—smart lock system, community laundry, rent payments, maintenance requests,” Sliwinski says.
The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. ― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
Nowhere does this consumer indifference seem greater than with AI. "Consumers are testing Sora or testing Grok and all of that, but there’s really not been a single use case or product for AI that I think consumers are excited about," says Sliwinski.
Beyond indifference and toward dread
Beyond "so what?" consumers have started asking "How will this hurt me?" "Is AI going to encourage my child to take their own life? Is it going to steal my job? Is it destroying everything pure about humanity?"
"Maybe 10 to 20 years down the road we will have another huge step change like the iPhone that can condense all these different devices that we’re using or apps that we’re using —but the tech isn’t there yet," Sliwinski says.
In Star Trek, humanity doesn’t abandon scarcity. Technology eventually makes scarcity indefensible, and that's only possible after a planet-wide war. From that Roddenberry-esque perspective, enshittification is what happens when old economic systems try to survive in a world where technology keeps eroding their justification, and each tiny "I don't care" iteration to tech products is a small step closer to Star Trek's promised land of holodecks, abundance, and hot aliens.
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