The 6 worst tech fails in 2023

Let’s get this out of the way right now because not only did the explosion of AI in 2023 prove to be the dominant strain of brain rot among tech news topics, its towering philosophical stupidity ultimately rose to overshadow a lot of otherwise quite pressing tech fails that deserve to be slung into the literary sky and double-barrel obliterated like clay pigeons.

While some lawmakers fumbled with the topic like a freshman fumbling with a bra hook in the backseat, others seemed genuinely interested and informed — seeking to craft a careful set of AI-use regulations with the aid of informed testimony from academics, activists, and industry leaders. Thus, the stage was set this year for Open AI CEO Sam Altman’s Congressional charm offensive. It was a hit. 

That’s nice and all, but nothing much seemed to change. Bills protecting personal data and copyright seemed to go nowhere, a spate of regulatory proposals fizzled and died, and President Joe Biden’s executive order on AI doesn’t seem (yet) to have any real teeth. Meanwhile, some sites are offering “bounties” for people who are wiling to drum up some AI-generated deepfake pornography of women they know. And none of these tech giants seems to care how more and more of these deepfakes are of little girls — or at least not enough to stomp this garbage out with the same tenacity that they stomp out user-posted links to pirated Disney movies. 

When I say that I believe this year in tech radicalized a lot of people, I don’t mean it in an insulting way, nor in a partisan way. This kind of thing should indeed radicalize us toward healthy material action if we have anything of a conscience left. And, if we’re lucky, it might just do it effectively enough to create new cohesion among ideologically diverse groups who are all similarly sick of kids getting sexually targeted and exploited this way. Here’s hoping. 

Maybe I wouldn’t be the first person to describe twin wet baguettes Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk as Faulknerian idiot man-children, but if that old chestnut is still worth using about anyone then surely it’s Silicon Valley’s fortunate sons. 

I’d normally find it unfathomably adorable if a seemingly emotionless nerd spent the whole summer sweating his nips off building a special backyard “No Girls Allowed!” fort for he and his dumber-but-bigger friend so they could have tickle fights in it, and sip dandelion wine while laying on their backs in the still-warm grass at sunset. I’d weep at the simple, heartbreaking beauty of two neighborhood lads on the edge of innocence, basking in the odd miracle of nature’s reckless splendor amid so much human suffering, filling the guileless expanse of boyhood’s waning hour with voice-cracking giggles late into the night over secret crushes and fart jokes — and finally, in tender whispers beneath the fleeting wink of a comet, promising each that no matter what happens they will always be friends. Forever? Yes, reader, always and forever. 

And if there’s anyone whose genitals should never be seen, it’s two grown men who spend all their time on vacation yet so successfully avoid the sun that it’s less accurate to describe them as white dudes, and more accurate to say they look like a fresh pair of shrimp-stuffed Vietnamese spring rolls that learned to walk upright and hire lobbyists. 

Maybe they didn’t actually end up fighting each other, but they fought their way onto this list fair and square. 

What could be more hilarious and rich than Microsoft whining to the US Supreme Court about Google maybe having a monopoly? If you pitched it as fiction, they’d say you were too on the nose. 

The Justice Department and 38 US state attorneys general accused Google of using monopolistic business practices to corner the search-engine market by illegally paying Apple billions of dollars to make Google the default search engine of Apple’s Safari browser. That seems a bit overdue, but fairly tame as far as a joke setup. The punchline, though, is that despite the whole hearing centering on a possible illegal pay-for-play deal between Google and Apple, Microsoft openly told the court that it too was also ready to throw down $15 billion a year if Apple would just choose Bing for its products’ default search engine instead of Google. 

The withering pleas of Microsoft fell on deaf ears among those who watched Microsoft gather into a literal monopoly through the early ’90s, then fight its way through a losing battle in 1998 as the feds sued it for using a 70% market share to further entrench itself with anti-competitive behavior. The Google antitrust case is the biggest since then. 

“Everybody talks about the open web, but there is really the Google web,” Microsoft’s CEO said at the trial. 

It’s difficult to imagine a more delicious scene than that of Microsoft, decades after its backstabbing of Apple, falling to its knees and begging for Apple’s help as Google threatens to crush the once-ruler of the desktop world. Difficult, yes — but not impossible. Just ask any devoted Linux user.