The 12th Anniversary Spectacular

Jonathan looks back on some of the biggest tech stories since TechStuff first launched.

Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to text Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio.
He there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host,
Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio
and I love all things tech. And it is the
end of June twenty twenty, which means we have crossed

(00:26):
another anniversary for tech Stuff. This show began publishing back
in June two thousand eight. I've been working for a
company called how Stuff Works dot com for about a
year then really about a year and a half before
we launched this show. And originally I had a co
host named Chris Palette, and Chris was also my editor

(00:48):
for all the articles I wrote for how stuff Works
dot com. And together we would tackle tech topics and
Chris would make a lot of puns, like a lot
a lot of them. Mean seriously, you guys seem to
think that I do a lot of puns, but honestly,
Chris went above and beyond. Now, over the years, this
show has changed. Chris left to pursue a career he

(01:11):
had wanted for years. That we occasionally paying each other
to check in, but we haven't really been in the
same room for more than a few years now. But
after Chris Lauren Vogelbaum joined the show as a co host,
and she stayed on for a while, but she really
wanted to develop her own shows, which makes total sense,
and so she came into Tech Stuff to help me out.

(01:32):
But she had her own goals and couldn't really pursue
those while also doing Tech Stuff. She's kicking butt on
several shows now, including Saver, an incredible podcast all about food.
If you haven't listened to the Saver podcast s a
v O R. I highly recommend it. It's very informative,
it's awesome, and you're gonna want to eat after every episode. Now,

(01:53):
I had a few other guest co hosts who kind
of jumped on for an episode or two after that,
but for the most part, Tech Stuff kind of settled
into what it is now, a solo host show about
tech and its role in society. And of course, most
recently the show has changed again because we are now
in the era of COVID nineteen. I'm pretty sure you

(02:16):
guys are aware of that. So I'm recording my episodes
from my home and I have been doing that since March.
That means that not even super producer Tari is present
when I record, it's just me sitting at my desk
speaking into my microphone and recording it on my computer. Now,

(02:37):
I'm going to be real with you guys, this gets
hard for me. I'm mostly an extrovert, and I really
benefit from being around other people and bouncing ideas off
of them, or taking short breaks when I'm doing my
research so I can have a chat and that kind
of re energizes me and lets me refocus. But at home,

(02:57):
I don't really have at So it's been really challenging
to research right and record these shows. Not that I
don't like doing it. I still love Tech Stuff, It's
just harder now. And my hope is that this hasn't
affected the quality of the show at all, apart from
obviously a dip in audio quality since I'm in my

(03:19):
home and not in an honest to goodness recording studio.
But through all these changes, the show has continued to
look at tech and its place in our world. So
today I thought we would look back on one or
two big stories from each year of tech Stuffs existence,
starting with two thousand eight. And I hope this goes
well because I thought of it at the last minute

(03:41):
and then scrambled to do it. So two thousand eight,
the first episode of tech Stuff was about how the
Google Apple Cloud computer will work, which I admit in
retrospect may have been a tad off. But as for
the story that really was dominating the news in two
thousand and eight, would probably the announcement that Microsoft was

(04:02):
making a bid for Yahoo. Now that actually happened in February.
It took place before tech stuff was really a thing.
But whatever, I'm going by calendar year here, not month
to month, because I don't want to go crazy. Microsoft,
of course, is the software company famous for the Windows
operating system and the Microsoft Office Suite, among many other

(04:26):
things like the Xbox game consoles, and Yahoo was frequently
referred to as a search engine, but really was more
of a web portal that aggregated content and later actually
generated content, and it also did search. Microsoft's move was
to make an offer of thirty one dollars per share

(04:47):
of Yahoo's stock, So if you took all the Yahoo
stock and you multiplied it by thirty one dollars, it
meant that this would even out to about forty four
and a half billion with a b dollar. Nine days later,
Yahoo's board of directors responded with yeah, now, we're good.
Thanks anyway, Actually it was a little less firm of

(05:08):
a know than that, because their board said that the
four billion dollar deal actually undervalued Yahoo, and they countered
that offer and they suggested that, you know, we really
think that forty dollars per share is more fair. But
that went nowhere. Microsoft would not agree to that, and
Yahoo would put a little more pressure on Microsoft. They

(05:30):
made a deal with Google so that Google would actually
power Yahoo's search engine, and this story kind of fizzled
out as a result. It never really went anywhere. And
of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we could say
that maybe that was good for Microsoft, considering how Yahoo
kind of languished in the years since. Or you might

(05:53):
argue that maybe if Microsoft had been able to go
through with that deal, maybe they would have made something
out of Yahoo that would be a bigger success. Looking
at Microsoft and its history, that's a that's kind of
a coin flip situation in my my point of view. Now.
Honorable mentions for stories from two thousand eight that I
didn't really do a deep dive into include Apple announcing

(06:15):
that it was leaving Macworld behind. It would actually continue
to have a presence in two thousand nine, but that
was going to be the last year that Apple would
attend Macworld. Macworld, by the way, was an annual industry
conference that really centered on Apple products. Uh the conference
itself would last until two thousand and fourteen, when it
was kind of put on hold indefinitely. Windows seven was

(06:39):
also announced in two thousand eight, and Google would launch
the Chrome browser as well as the Android smartphone in
two thousand eight. But let's move on to two thousand nine.
This was another year of really big moves in the
tech industry. Google announced the Chrome operating System. They had
already launched the browser back in two thousand and eight,

(07:02):
but the Chrome OS would become a really light operating system,
and it emphasized cloud services rather than native applications running
on the computer itself. So this was at a time
when cloud computing wasn't really a common term outside of
you know, a few companies in the computer industry. The
Chrome operating System wouldn't stand as a major threat to

(07:25):
either Microsoft or the Mac operating systems, but it did
pave the way for lower priced laptops that didn't need
the horsepower of other machines. Of the time, and that's
because really all you needed was a good connection to
the Internet in order to access the apps and services
you wanted to run. While I don't think the Chrome

(07:46):
operating system really changed the world, it definitely helped set
the stage for the era, as short lived as it was,
of the netbook. Netbooks were super lightweight computers that probably
would have uck around a bit longer if it were
not for the fact that some of them were just
too small and they had such crappy keyboards that it

(08:07):
would legit hurt to work on them if you were
doing so for a long time. Perhaps more importantly for
the long run was that Google's push for web based
services moved us closer to adopting the cloud computing strategy
more wholeheartedly. Between Google's emphasis on internet based applications and
Apple saying the stage for smartphone apps the year before,

(08:28):
there was a new focus on what the web could
do beyond provide a place to browse for shoes, or
look at kitten videos or watch hamsters dance. Today, it's
not unusual at all to rely heavily on web based programs.
Even video game consoles have embraced this approach. Now, I
wouldn't lay all of that at the feet of Google

(08:49):
and say that the Chrome operating system is the reason
why cloud computing became a huge thing. But I do
think Google's influence helped move things along at a faster pace.
Another big thing to happened in two thousand nine was
that Steve Jobs would leave and then come back to Apple.
He had to take a medical leave of absence, and
originally the reason they reported for his absence was given

(09:11):
as as a hormonal imbalance, but in actuality, he was
recovering from a liver transplant. Early in two thousand nine,
Steve Jobs went on leave and he skipped Macworld. You know,
Apple was still attending it, but it was the last
time Apple would be at the conference. That had to
be a double punch to the Macworld attendees, because not
only was the last time Apple would be there, but

(09:32):
Steve Jobs himself would not be there, which meant that
two thousand and eight was the last time they would
see Steve Jobs present at Macworld. Now, on the one hand,
it seems pretty crass to dig into someone's personal life
and medical history and then to publish that as news.
But on the other hand, Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple. Moreover,

(09:54):
you could argue that no other tech brand identified as
closely with a foul under than Apple did with Steve Jobs.
When the company held big press events, it was Steve
Jobs who had stunned the crowd with revelations of new products.
He was part leader, parts salesman, parts celebrity, and so
Steve jobs health could also be viewed as an extension

(10:17):
of the company's health. The danger of having such a
centralized figure is that there's a perception that forms that
without that figure, the company is going to be in
choppy waters, and when we get a bit further on,
will revisit this. Honorable mentions for big stories in two
thousand nine include the scuttle butt that eBay was preparing

(10:38):
to sell off Skype, and that would mean it would
exit what had widely been viewed as one of the
worst acquisitions in tech history. Microsoft and Yahoo were able
to patch things up from the year before, and they
agreed that Microsoft would supply Yahoo's search tool in an
effort to compete against Google. The two thousand eight elections
in the United States gave rise to more people you

(11:00):
using online social networks to push political philosophies and agenda
and to market campaigns online, and we can definitely see
that that is an even bigger trend today. Windows seven
got a much better reception than the previous Microsoft operating system,
Windows Vista, and now it's time to move to twenty ten.

(11:24):
This was a big year, a tumultuous year. Wiki Leaks
made world headlines after receiving and then publishing an enormous
number of documents that revealed tons of previously unknown or
unacknowledged moves by various governments and government agents around the world,
including and primarily those who call the United States home.

(11:46):
This included documents about deliberate efforts to deceive the American
public about various operations around the world. It had some
really heavy stuff in it, including information about how US
government was working hard to protect a merror Rican officials
and agents who had established practices around the world that
could easily fall under the general category of torture, which

(12:08):
I don't think I have to mention is truly awful.
Other reports were equally disturbing and included incidents in which
American forces had done stuff like firing upon journalists or
civilians and then tried to cover it up. A lot
of information about other nations and leaders were also part
of this information dump, including messages that revealed how various

(12:30):
ambassadors or officials viewed other world leaders and that caused
a lot of embarrassment in official channels around the world.
Wiki Leaks continues to play a big part in world politics,
though in recent years there's been a lot more scrutiny
and more accusations that the organization has its own agenda
that goes beyond revealing the truth, that the truth plays

(12:53):
a part in it, but it's a selective use of
the truth in order to direct things down a particular path.
Honorable mentions go to Gizmoto essentially stealing a prototype iPhone
three gs then publishing a story about it, including a
breakdown of the internal components. That story gained Gizmoto a

(13:13):
lot of heat in the tech journalism world for the
ethically questionable decision to lift the phone and then run
a story on it. Apple was put in the unusual
position of having to defend a product as people found
it really hard to get a signal and to make
calls on the new iPhone. This would later fall into
a whole story that was referred to as antenna GIT,

(13:36):
the idea that the placement of the antenna was creating
a challenge to get and maintain a good signal, and
of course one of the famous things in that is
Steve Jobs claiming that the whole reason why there are
problem was that people were just holding it wrong. In
the US, Apple emerged from its exclusivity deal with a
T and T and prepared to release the iPhone on

(13:58):
other cellular carriers. Plus, the company released the iPad, which
was initially ridiculed for its name upon launch, and in September,
the BP oil drilling rig called deep Water Horizon caused
what became the largest marine oil spill ever, a colossal

(14:19):
and catastrophic event, and the the consequences of that are
something that's going to be felt for a really long time. Okay,
it's time for us to cover two thousand eleven and
then we're gonna take a short break now. I don't
think there's another story I could cover that had as
big an impact on headlines in the United States as

(14:41):
the death of Steve Jobs. He had retired as CEO earlier,
in handing the company over to Tim Cook on October five,
two thousand eleven he passed away, we saw people actually
grieve for him in public. People left notes and flowers
in tribute outside of Apple stores, and this sort of

(15:02):
response is pretty much unheard of in the business world.
And again, it really pointed at jobs celebrity status, right
that he was more than a business leader. He was
a celebrity, a figurehead, and there was a lot of
worry that Apple the company would falter. And even to
this day you will occasionally hear people say something like

(15:24):
that's not how Steve would have done it, though you
don't hear it as frequently as you used to. However,
despite the undeniable impact his death had on business, Apple
the company has continued to do quite well in the
following years. Now, I would argue that as monumental as
that story was, it should take a back seat to

(15:44):
the events that were occurring in the Middle East through
much of twenty eleven. While protests and demonstrations had begun
late in two and various countries, we really saw an
increase in twenty eleven as people in numerous countries in
the Middle East leveraged apps and social media in order
to stage protests against various governments. We called it the

(16:06):
Arab Spring, and this sort of use of social media
would also serve as a building block for how great
movements like Black Lives Matter use social media, as well
as how hate groups take advantage of those same tools,
both to organize and two so discord. Honorable mentions for
two thousand eleven include the rise of the amorphous hacktivist

(16:30):
group Anonymous, thus bringing the guy Fox mask back into fashion,
the launch of the Google Plus social network that, despite
a fairly enthusiastic reception when it was in beta, never
managed to get much traction against Facebook, and IBM. S
Watson defeated two former Jeopardy champions in a special Jeopardy exhibition.

(16:52):
When we come back, we will pick up with twenty twelve,
but first let's take a quick break. Early in in
the United States, two pieces of proposed legislation grabbed world headlines.

(17:12):
They were the Stop Online Piracy Act for A SOAPA,
and the Protect Intellectual Property Act or PIPPA. These proposals
emerged due to the entertainment industries pushed to find ways
to prevent and crack down upon piracy online, and a
lot of what the pieces were based upon was conjecture

(17:34):
and faulty reasoning. For example, the entertainment industry would claim
enormous losses due to piracy. But the problem is you
can't prove that because you can't prove that the people
who downloaded something illegally would have otherwise purchased it legally.
And if they would have never purchased it, let's say
that they didn't pirate it, nor did they purchase it,

(17:57):
then you can't call that a loss. That just wasn't
a sale. So it was based on faulty logic to
begin with, and the implications meant that if these proposals
were put into law, we would really see a fractured
Internet where people in the United States wouldn't be able
to even see that some sites exist because of effectively

(18:19):
digital blockades. It would have been difficult to implement, it
would have been hard to enforce, and if it did work,
it would essentially break parts of the Internet. Lots of
sites held a simulated Internet blackout to raise awareness of
the issues, and advocates for free exchange of ideas protested
the proposals and the idea of regulating the Internet, and

(18:42):
ultimately the United States government let the two pieces just
die rather than risk a fallout with pushing it through
into law. Another big story was that Facebook colossally mishandled
its initial public offering or i p O. Then, yeah,
I'm butchering language, but man, this was such an enormous mistake.

(19:04):
So this is the process that a private company has
to go through in order to become a publicly traded company,
or typically it's the way a privately held company becomes
publicly traded. And this process ends with one where you've
got this publicly traded company where anyone with cash can
buy stocks in that company. The process of an i
p O is really complicated, and it involves a lot

(19:27):
of analysts who have to look at a company. They
have to assess its value in an effort to come
up with a proposed opening stock price. So essentially these
are people who say, yeah, you know, based on what
we know about how much the company makes, its assets,
its debts, all that kind of stuff, we figure that
it would cost X number of dollars per share, assuming

(19:50):
that there are why number of shares available. A company's
value is essentially the share price multiplied by the number
of shares before going public, The estimated value of Facebook
was one hundred four million dollars. The stock was to
debut at nearly forty dollars per share, but there were
technical glitches, including the fact that too many shares were issued.

(20:13):
There were other issues just with Nasdaq, the stock exchange
where this was happening, that had nothing directly to do
with Facebook. UH. There were also problems with Morgan Stanley
that was the company that was acting as an underwriter
for the I p O. They were accused of using
some price influencing UH mathematics, so there were some shady

(20:35):
things going on there. The stock price would ultimately take
a huge hit over the course of twenty twelve. You know,
it came out just under forty dollars. It fell to
a low of seventeen dollars and fifty five cents per share,
so less than half of what debuted at UH and
it meant that Facebook would have some ground to make up.
But honorable mentions for two thousand twelve stories include the

(20:58):
raid upon Mega Upload founder Kim dot Com in New Zealand,
and Nintendo made a pretty big misstep with the launch
of the Wii U, which never really took off, but
Felix Baumgartner definitely took off. He wrote a balloon up
to the edge of space and then jumped for the
longest refall ever and eventually parachuted to safety many many

(21:22):
minutes after jumping out of the balloon. Also, Marrissa Meyer
would leave Google to become the new CEO of Yahoo Time. Hey,
remember when I talked about that Wiki leaks dump and
how it disrupted stuff, Well, that definitely set the stage
for an even bigger story in the United States, and
Edward Snowden, who was a contract worker for the n

(21:45):
s A that stands for National Security Agency, leaked documents
showing that the n s A had been instituting processes
and policies and technologies that were at best gross violations
of privacy. The n s AS focus is monitoring, collecting,
and processing communications, all in an effort to further the
interests of national security for the United States. So when

(22:08):
it comes down to it, it's a spy agency and
it really tries to suss out what everyone is talking
about all the time across all different communication media. Snowdon
revealed that the n s A had put in some
listening devices and had agreements with these various communications companies.
All of these agreements were classified. The companies were not

(22:30):
allowed to disclose them. There was all this kind of
dark veil of secrecy over everything and a lot of
threats of repercussions if anyone broke that. And the whole
idea was that it was scooping up information wholesale. It
didn't matter if that information had anything to do with
national security or not, didn't matter if the n s

(22:50):
A suspected someone or didn't suspect them. They were just
essentially pulling all data in through a funnel, and that
the agency had ways to search through all that information.
His actions made snowed In a target and he fled
the United States. But while the government condemned the leaks
as being against the interests of the United States, a
lot of citizens like me began to ask, Hey, um,

(23:14):
what are you actually defining as the United States? Because
I live here and this, sure as heck doesn't sound
like it's in my interests. So it didn't help that
there were reports of folks who are working for the
n s A who had made use of the agency's
tools for their own purposes, such as to snoop on
former lovers and stuff. Yeah, this was a huge, ugly story,

(23:37):
but it wasn't the only ugly story of that year,
not by a long shot. This was also the year
of the Boston Marathon bombing, a truly awful event, and
it also served as a harsh classroom where we all
learned what happens when you have the rapid dissemination and
analysis of information. Within a very short time, data about

(24:00):
the bombing was flying across the Internet, and you had
a ton of armchair detectives who were all trying to
figure out who perpetrated the bombing. This led to some
hasty and poorly formed hypotheses that were totally on the
wrong track. People were brought under suspicion who had nothing
to do with anything. So in short, the events following
the bombing illustrated how dangerous misinformation and faulty assumptions can be.

(24:23):
Honorable mentions for big tech stories of go to the
embarrassing failure of the healthcare dot gov site in the
United States. This was the online entry point for people
looking to access the services created through the Affordable Care Act,
and the site was a shambles. It collapsed under even
moderate traffic, and it created terrible bottlenecks and obstacles for

(24:44):
people who are just trying to secure medical insurance. That
was bad. Was also when Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon,
bought the Washington Post newspaper, setting the stage for a
rivalry with a future US president. Netflix began to roll
original content and started its transition from online video store
into a movie and television studio. The Pebble smartwatch, which

(25:09):
was a big Kickstarter success story, debuted, though sadly Pebble
would have a fairly meteoric rise and fall. Sony and
Microsoft released the PS four and Xbox One game consoles respectively,
and Elon Musk said, Hey, wouldn't it be neat if
we had really fast trains and introduced the hyper loop concept.
That is a concept we're still trying to get our

(25:31):
heads around and make a reality to this day. Okay,
time for two thousand fourteen, and I really hate this one,
but I think we really have to tackle it gamer Gate.
Gamer Gate was a huge story in and it was
one that I think taught us a lot of lessons,
or at least presented lessons to us. I don't know

(25:54):
that we actually learned that much because I'm seeing the
same sort of stuff play out today. So let's talk
about what game or gate was supposedly about and what
it was really about. So, on the surface level, gamer
gate was supposedly about how certain video game reviewers and
developers and journalists were all in cahoots. That the journalists

(26:16):
and reviewers were publishing biased reviews and articles because of
the relationships they had with video game developers. So some
of these accusations range from reviewers wanting to remain in
good standing for fear that they might otherwise not get,
you know, review copies, to even worse allegations that maybe
some form of compensation was going on in return for

(26:39):
writing a positive story or a positive review. But what
gamer gate really was about was about targeting people in
the video game industry, whether in journalism or in development
or whatever, and taking a no holds barred approach to
attacking those people online. And the vast majority of those
targets were women. So it really was like a concentrated

(27:02):
campaign against women in the video game industry, and there
was an undeniable misogynistic streak in these attacks. The participants
kept falling back to that surface level justification for what
they were doing. They're saying, no, this is about ethics
and journalism, but their methods and their links that they
went to belied their true motivations. They would try to

(27:25):
pressure companies to fire people that they were targeting. They
would publish private information about those targets. It's called doxing,
where you reveal someone's you know, address, or the address
of their families, and you're essentially calling for a campaign
of harassment and worse stuff followed. Now, I'm not going
to budge on this one, folks. You can argue at

(27:46):
me until you are blue in the face that gamer
Gate was really about ethics and journalism and that the
extreme actions were the output of a minority. But that's
just not true. And it's the same sort of garbage
that we see today when people will cling to any
justification that lets them pursue what they want, even if
they know deep down that it's wrong or unethical. So,

(28:10):
as another example, people who protest that their individual liberties
are being infringed upon because there's a stay at home
order are clinging to an interpretation of liberty because they
don't want to sacrifice some of their personal comfort in
an effort to curtail the spread of COVID nineteen. They
consider their personal comfort more important than the overall safety

(28:31):
of the community. We can see similar tactics for people
who oppose the Black Lives Matter movement, or for those
who think that Confederate memorials should be displayed in public,
or people who oppose the LGBTQ community, and so on.
But as always I say, we have to use critical
thinking and compassion, and we strip away the layers of

(28:52):
bs to see the truth underneath, and then we address
it in a fourth right way. Honorable mentions for two
thousand fourteen stories are many. There were a slew of
hacks that targeted both companies and celebrities, pulling out sensitive
information and media and then just dumping it across the Internet.
That was really gross. I saw Ya Nadela would take

(29:13):
on the job of Microsoft CEO. In two thousand fourteen,
a web server software bug called heart bleed prompted security
experts to issue some really big warnings, including the recommendation
that people stay offline until more companies address this and
patched their servers, because even changing passwords wouldn't be helpful
because the bug would allow bad actors to actually see

(29:35):
the new log in credentials anyway, so it doesn't matter
if you change the locks if copies of the keys
are getting out to all the bad guys, right. Oh,
and also Apple announced the Apple Watch, So there's our
little bit of positive news. I guess sure. Two thousand
fifteen all right, I hope I find some happy stories soon.
I guess one thing I can talk about with two

(29:57):
thousand fifteen is that it was the year that Microsoft
launched Windows ten. Now, I skipped over talking about Windows
eight when I covered the previous years, and there's a
reason for that, because Windows eight kind of stunk. It
was obvious that the goal that Microsoft was pursuing was
to create an operating system experience that could live on
top of a suite of different hardware, from computers to

(30:20):
tablets to smartphones. But Microsoft played a distant third place
to Google and Apple in the smartphone category. It was
clear they weren't going to make up the room, and
lots of people hated the layout of Windows eight on
their computers, so it became a big pain in the neck.
Windows ten saw Microsoft returned to a more familiar user
interface for its computer operating system. Just as Windows seven

(30:43):
proved to be a correction from Vista, ten was a
correction from eight, and yeah, it was a little confusing
that the company just plane skipped over nine. But then
we'd see Apple do the same thing a little bit later,
so maybe nine is just a bad number for tech
in general. Another day view that came out around in
was the Amazon Echo. The Echo was one of the

(31:06):
earliest examples of a smart speaker with a digital assistant.
ECHOES version is named Alexa. While there had been other
examples of voice activated assistance, I think you could make
a case that Amazon helped bring this concept to the
mainstream public. Millions of people would go on to purchase
smart speakers, whether they were made by Amazon or Google

(31:29):
or some other company, and we started to see a
lot more development in the virtual personal assistant space, including
a place where developers could create apps specifically to interoperate
with smart speaker devices and other gadgets that allow for
interaction with a virtual personal assistant. Honorable mentions include Google
creating a new umbrella company called Alphabet, under which various

(31:53):
Google properties, including Google dot Com, can exist, but they
can remain related but separate entity, so you can have
separate companies run by different heads and they can all
really focus on what they need to do. The scandal
known as Diesel Gate also broke that year that revealed
that Volkswagen had been installing devices in their diesel fueled

(32:14):
vehicles that were meant to help trick a mission testing
procedures because the cars were not performing up to code,
so they were trying to kind of cheat on the
exam and then they got caught. The electric car company
Tesla unleashed autopilot on the world, which has been a
real controversy since there have been some terrible accidents that

(32:34):
have happened while people were admittedly misusing autopilot. But part
of this, I think comes from the hubris of Elon
Musk and the way he presents information. Oh and also
that was the year that some hoverboards which aren't really
hoverboards but whatever, made the news because a few of
them had really bad lithium batteries and they had a

(32:55):
tendency to catch on fire and perhaps even explode, which
is not good. And when we come back, we're gonna
move on to ten and y'all, I might not be
ready for these next few years, and I already done
lived them, but we're gonna try anyway. Let's all kind
of steal ourselves after this quick break, alright, so it's

(33:24):
another tumultuous year, an election year in the United States.
In fact, really I think at this point they're all
tumultuous years from this moment forward. But this really marked
the beginning of some serious scrutiny on social media platforms,
primarily places like Facebook, but also sites like YouTube and Twitter,
and the role that these sites play when it comes

(33:46):
to spreading misleading information a k. This is the beginning
of a serious look at the so called quote unquote
fake news. Now. I tend to shy away from using
terminology like fake news, not because I think the news
isn't ache I think it frequently is, but rather because
a lot of people just use fake news to describe

(34:06):
any sort of messaging that opposes their own beliefs. If
it doesn't align with what they personally hold to be true,
it has to be fake. And I don't put myself
above this. By the way, I know that when I
encounter information that contradicts some belief that I hold, my
first reaction is to reject that information. But it really

(34:26):
is important for all of us to resist that urge
and to really examine claims more closely, because sometimes we
might find that what we were about to reject is
in fact true, and we have to come to terms
with that, even if we don't like it. I would argue,
especially if we don't like it, because that means we
have the opportunity to change it anyway. The conversation about

(34:50):
fake news really exploded in ten and has been a
frequent hot topic ever since. It became clear that a
site like Facebook benefits from people spending more time on it,
and so from that perspective, it benefits the company to
promote posts that drive more engagement and keep people on

(35:11):
Facebook longer. The actual value or validity of that content
doesn't matter. What matters is keeping people active on Facebook
so that they see more ads. So it's really not
in the company's financial interests to crack down on misinformation
if that misinformation is actually keeping people tied to the platform,

(35:32):
why would you bite the hand that feeds you. Now,
this wasn't exactly new in but the whole conversation really
boiled up in that year and it hasn't gone away since.
We're still watching Facebook try to avoid taking a more
active role in cracking down on the spread of misinformation
today because again, the company benefits from it financially Another

(35:56):
explosive story pun intended in the Samsung Galaxy Note seven.
This smartphone was supposed to make a big splash. It
had this sexy curvy design and had a really high
resolution display. It was supposed to be the smartphone of sixteen,
but battery failures that led to things like fires and

(36:19):
explosions became an early big story. Samsung was forced to
recall the handsets twice and reportedly fixed them, but more
reports of fires would follow and the company ultimately had
no choice but to discontinue this phone that represents an
enormous financial loss. Meanwhile, you know you had companies like

(36:42):
airlines around the world that we're placing bands on those
phone saying you're not allowed to bring that in here
because of the potential risk. So this was a huge
blow to Samsung, both financially and from a pr perspective.
Honorable mentions go to Apple facing off against the f
b I in a case where Apple refused to unlock

(37:03):
an iPhone that had been owned by a terrorist. Tim
Cook said this would set a terrible precedent that would
undermine consumer confidence and it would compromise on expectations of privacy.
Vine the short form video service officially shut down that
year and set the stage for the rise of TikTok.
A little later on, and the medical tech company Pharaos

(37:26):
infamously fell to pieces that year. We're still waiting to
see what happens in some legal proceedings regarding the Farness story.
Four years later, in ten, we would see a continuation
of the fake news controversies, particularly with Facebook in the US.
It became clear that foreign parties, largely from Russia, were

(37:46):
flooding Facebook with misinformation in an attempt to subvert the
US democratic process. Also in the US, we saw a
move to undermine the concept of net neutrality. Now, during
the administration of Barack Obama, the government had begun to
reframe internet access as a utility and created regulations that
would prevent internet service providers from creating a fractured experience

(38:10):
across networks and devices. With a new administration in control
at the US, we saw a dismantling of those regulations.
But one of the biggest stories of the year centered
around something that wasn't confined just to technology, and this
was the hashtag me too movement. Women were stepping forward

(38:31):
to confront unfair and sexist practices across numerous industries, and
tech was front and center. Social media would play an
intrinsic role as women shared their stories and a movement
built up around this, and one of the companies that
was really singled out in this was Uber and the

(38:51):
revelations of Susan Fowler, who was a former employee at Uber,
it became clear that sexism and misogyny and harass then
were all elements that were woven into the very culture
of Uber. Over the course of seen, story after story
came out that highlighted a twisted and ugly corporate culture

(39:12):
and a general policy that saw offenders get little to
no reprimand if they were a high performer then they
kind of had a free license to act in reprehensible ways.
The company saw several executives resign over the course of
the year, including the founder and CEO, Travis Kalnik, although
his resignation wasn't necessarily something he wanted to do. The

(39:35):
company was also weathering a heavy storm brought by Google
around allegations that Uber was making use of stolen proprietary
information when it comes to self driving cars. So by
the end of seventeen, there had been a full investigation
of Uber's corporate culture, and that that concluded that the
company needed massive fundamental changes. It was very critical of

(39:59):
the company. There was a massive change in leadership at
the company, and there was a public commitment to a
new corporate culture that was going to emerge from Uber. Now.
I wish I could say that the company has since
been a model of ethical practices, but that's not really true,
and it honestly is a story for another time. Honorable

(40:21):
mentions for two thousand seventeen include a rash of data
breaches that exposed the information of millions of people to hackers.
Apple launched the iPhone ten. They skipped nine, but this
was the tenth anniversary in the original iPhone, so you
could at least argue for that. And TV companies quietly
put the kai bosh on some three D televisions. They

(40:42):
had been trying to market three D TV for years
and years and years, but by seen the general consensus
was that this was a non starter, and you started
to see it kind of fade away from the features
in various televisions that we're going on the market. At
that point, all right, two thousand eighteen, let's get going.
This was the year when a little game called Fortnite

(41:05):
saw incredible growth. Now the game had seen some modest
success in its original format, but then the developers included
a new Battle Royal style of play. Now that's a
kind of game where a bunch of video game players
have their characters all dumped onto a map, and then
they all have to battle it out until only one

(41:25):
person or team remains. This game really took off at
that point, and you started seeing tons of dancing memes
that were unleashed upon an unwitting public. We've never been
the same since. Now, the Battle Royal style game wasn't
invented by Fortnite. In fact, another game, player Unknowns Battlegrounds
had previously been one of the most popular online games,

(41:47):
and it was also a Battle Royal style game. There
was no shortage of accusations that Fortnite was essentially copying
pub g as we call it, But the games have
a very different look and feel to them. They also
have very different physics and gameplay mechanics. So while that
basic idea was the same, I don't know that it's

(42:08):
fair to say that one copied the other. After all,
there are other game modes that are standard in video
games like you know, Last Man Standing or King of
the Hill or um kill the Man with the ball.
They're all these different variations that are kind of found
throughout video games. I don't know that you can lay
claim to a particular style. This was also the year

(42:32):
that we started hearing more about plans for five G.
That's the family of wireless data technologies that are going
to deliver information and incredibly fast speeds. It's not one tech, really,
it's a whole bunch of different types of tech that
work in slightly different ways, but all to get the
same result, that is that super fast data transfer speed.

(42:54):
And it might have been a little early to start
hyping up five G because we're now in twenty twenty
and that infrastructure still has a long way to go
to provide real coverage of five G technology. Plus now
we have some people believing that somehow that tech is
causing or spreading COVID nineteen in a news flash, it

(43:14):
is not. And we also got the massive Cambridge Analytica
scandal making headlines in ten Now, the actual events that
precipitated those headlines would stretch back a few years earlier.
It just became public and I've done episodes about this scandal,
so it's it's a complicated story, but essentially, uh, an

(43:36):
app developer was able to use a loophole in Facebook's
ap I to gather an enormous amount of information about
Facebook users without their consent or knowledge, and on top
of that were efforts to use that information to manipulate
public discourse about political matters, which is gross but honorable.
Mentions go to the rise of the electric scooter and

(43:57):
the various companies that created a sort of rideshare a
eletric scooter business that all started to really kick off
in Apple became the first company to reach a trillion
dollars invaluation, though it would lose some ground before the
end of the year and dip down below trillion by
the end of and oh yeah, Movie Pass kind of

(44:17):
imploded that year too. Okay, so we're up to twenty nineteen,
and since is not yet over, though it feels like
it's lasted an eternity, and also because this episode is
going to start running long, this is gonna be the
last full year we look at. So twenty nineteen was
when we saw TikTok gain explosive growth, and as I

(44:38):
mentioned earlier. The fall of Vine really set the stage,
and TikTok was able to capitalize. The company has since
come under scrutiny, both from privacy advocates and officials who
worry that the Chinese company that owns the service might
be collecting data on behalf of the Chinese government. That's
a story that still is unfolding today. We also saw
the debut of Disney Plus in twenty nineteen, along with

(45:02):
the announcement of about a zillion other new media streaming services,
all of which are vying for our subscriptions and our attention.
I think I might have to do a full rundown
on all the major streaming players out there and how
they're all trying to compete for that, you know, limited
number of assets. It's getting awfully crowded and a little frustrating. Um.

(45:24):
You know, we used to think we wanted cable a
la cart where you could just order the specific channels
that you've wanted, and everything else you would just ignore,
you wouldn't get because you never watched them anyway. And
we thought for a while that streaming services we're going
to kind of do that. And now streaming has sort
of become its own monstrous thing that is at least

(45:46):
as frustrating as cable was. In twenty nineteen, we also
saw a lot of calls from various parties to make
serious steps into dismantling and breaking up big, big tech companies,
tech companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook. And the
argument is that these companies have grown so large and
so powerful that not only are they largely monopolistic for

(46:08):
their various you know, industries, they also stand as a
legit threat to things like democracy. The companies are pursuing
the interests of their shareholders, which really means that they're
looking to boost the value of the company, and sometimes
or maybe even oftentimes, that means they operate in a
way that might not be in the best interest of

(46:30):
you know, everybody else. So there's been some pushback against
these big companies. But then a little thing called the
coronavirus sort of threw a monkey wrench in that whole process.
As for the coronavirus definitely has dominated most of the
early part of the year, it continues to be an
enormous part of the current conversations. The Black Lives Matter

(46:51):
movement has also become a huge talking point, and tech
plays an important role in that discussion to everything from
the tools that people used to help organize and spread messages,
to the misinformation campaigns that have been spread to try
and undermine the movement, to a real problem that exists
with tech companies with a lack of diversity and inclusivity,

(47:15):
which results not just in unfair practices from a corporate level,
but it means that the stuff those companies are producing,
they're not really serving their customers that well. And we've
got a lot more coming in twenty including you know,
there's some fun stuff, not just the heavy, heavy stuff
I'm talking about right here. We've got some fun stuff
like the release of new video game consoles from Sony

(47:37):
and from Microsoft. However, there's no doubt that there's going
to be other really big, important and difficult stories that
will unfold in the coming months, and our challenge is
not to shy away from that, but to really tackle
it and to say what does this mean? What can
we do about it? How can we make things better?
Those are questions we should always be asking ourselves, and

(47:58):
sometimes the answer might be I don't know what to do,
and the important thing is to try and look for
people who can help. But really, if we can do
something we absolutely should, we shouldn't just, you know, shoulder
that burden onto somebody else. As for tech Stuff, we're
set to keep on keeping on. I have some plans

(48:19):
for how I want this show to evolve, but those
are going to take some time to really take shape. However,
I really hope to see this show continue to grow
and become more than what it already is, and I'm
really excited to have you guys along for the journey.
In the meantime, if you have suggestions for future topics
we should cover on tech Stuff, reach out to me.

(48:39):
You can get in touch on Twitter. The handle is
text Stuff hs W and I'll talk to you again
really soon. Text Stuff is an I Heart Radio production.
For more podcasts from my Heart Radio, visit the i
Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts wherever you listen to your

(49:01):
favorite shows.