Back in the late 2000s, when 3D movies started making a comeback, the trend did not make much sense to me. It was neat, but not substantially better than the last time we were at this party in the early 1980s.
What made even less sense to me was when, a few years later, everyone was on about 3D televisions. I recall the run-up to one of the big electronics shows (maybe it was CES?) when 3D TVs were all anyone could talk about. As little as I wanted to deal with wearing some stupid 3D glasses for a couple hours in a movie theater to watch stuff pointlessly thrown at the camera, the prospect of doing so at home was even less appealing.
At some point in that era, it become clear to me that what was really going on was an electronics industry desperate to find something new to keep masses of consumers buying new gear. We went from CDs and CD players to DVDs to blu-rays, and then we were all replacing our tube TVs with flat-panels. What was going to be next? There had to be something next, because otherwise how would they keep growing their profits? As with seemingly every industry, it was no longer enough to have consumer periodically replacing aging gear. What the industry needed was constant Next Big Things that generated huge waves of adoption.
Of course, 3D televisions were not the Next Big Thing, because 3D televisions are ridiculous. The industry went instead in a different direction, marketing “smart” TVs so that they could collect data and sell advertising.
The reason I relate all of this is that 3D televisions are now what come immediately to my mind whenever the tech industry and its flag-wavers start pushing some big new innovations. Phones with foldable displays, AR headsets, Clubhouse, Bitcoin, blockchain, large language models… these are all attempts by tech companies and Silicon Valley evangelists to keep the go-go years going, to keep alive the myths of infinite growth and the wonders of the free market.
Sure, every now and then some real innovation comes along that does have a huge impact but these are the exception, not the rule. And contrary to what a million consultants and pundits want us to believe, we can’t build a sustainable economy or society on the assumption that this sort of thing is going to keep happening.