Inventions are lol
MEDIA: "The Sharks Taste Grasshopper Chips!"
EVENT: Four billionaires eat bugs on television, causing one to invest in the idea that we’ll all eat bugs in the future.
Analysis: Emilie and I tend to have a few default TV shows we put on and let play, almost as semi-background noise that we can check in on if we get bored with our work/books/whatever. For a while it was Bar Rescue, but Bar Rescue can kind of be a drag once you internalize John Taffer’s formula and also make a habit of googling whether the bars that Taffer has Rescued are still around (the show first aired like a decade ago, and many of the bar owners featured on it are clearly functioning alcoholics, so the answer’s usually “lol nope”). Our main background show, meanwhile, is, was, and shall remain Shark Tank.
There is something magical about watching dumb rich people receive investment pitches from an array of humanity as wide-ranging as the population of a crowded subway platform. I am mystified why the Sharks like the things they like, and millions of other people must be as well, but the understanding is that they are wealthy and we are not, so there’s definitely a reason they wanted to invest in chips made out of crickets but turned their noses up at a face yoga instructor to the stars. That the main benefit of being on the show, even more than accepting $250,000 from Mark Cuban in exchange for giving him the right to call you multiple times a day until you die, is the fact that your product was on Shark Tank, a TV show that millions of people watch, has, to my knowledge, never been addressed, which is absolutely perfect.
For the most part, the plucky entrepreneurs on Shark Tank aren’t trying to change the world. They’ve just made a thing, and the thing is novel in some way, and if a Shark gives them more money, then they will probably be able to get more people to buy the thing. According to Investopedia, which was my first Google result for “most successful shark tank inventions,” the most successful company ever on Shark Tank is the sock company Bombas, whose socks are fine I guess? My mom gave me a pair for Christmas one year and I can’t really tell the difference between them and the socks I buy on Amazon. But the second- and third-most Shark Tank inventions are extremely tight in an abstract way: Scrub Daddy, which is a sponge in the shape of a smiley face that’s somehow better than a regular sponge, and Squatty Potty, the stool that helps you poop more good.
I love the idea of both of these items: each is an inexpensive, quotidian-ass thing that makes your life slightly better. My partner and I love coming up with ideas for stuff like this. In the past week, we’ve talked about inventing the “cat spatula” (a spatula that gets your stubborn cat off the couch in a manner that is safe for all involved parties; also called the “Catula”), the “bed sidecar” (a place for your dog to sleep on the bed where they don’t take up all of your leg room, and “a better dog leash” (we haven’t figured this one out yet, but if you can’t tell most of our fake inventions have to do with our pets).
The modern conception of “inventions” as single-service products would, ideally, be the rare positive side-effect of the End of History mindset. Like, we’ve already got lightbulbs and the internet and air conditioning and stuff — beyond medical breakthroughs, which are mostly done on the publicly funded and/or rich-people funded university level, most “moonshot” style things are probably going to make life worse. Drones are kind of funny to see in the sky as long as they’re being piloted by a dad, but also they’re also a byproduct of the so-called war on terror; electric cars seem like a good idea in principle, but it’s an open question to me whether or not they’re worth it given we charge them through a coal-powered grid and put people (and the earth) through horrifying shit to get the rare-earth minerals that are key parts of their batteries; commercial space flight will not affect me or you in any meaningful way, etc. If we’re being honest, it’s basically impossible for a single person in their garage to come up with a thing that will have more of an impact on human life than whoever came up with, like, the toilet.
And yet something like this, Time’s list of the best inventions of 2022, is mainly full of things that offer the possibility of solving some sort of big-picture problem or drastically alter the world but probably won’t. AI car inspections this, AR job training that, quantum cloud servers mini nuclear reactors robot fry cooks automated green on-chain green waste clean-up gig work app all swirling together in a McWordSalad Shaker machine etc. All of this stuff seems like it won’t actually work that well, and that their best-case scenarios involve doing a shitty job of a thing that a now-unemployed human could have been doing with much more skill. But in all likelihood, even this moonshot to mediocrity scenario won’t come to pass. Like, remember the ten minutes when it seemed like AI art was going to displace commercial artists, and then we all realized it was simply a semi-fun novelty or a thing you might use to make some art for you if you couldn’t afford a commercial artist, didn’t have a Getty account, and couldn’t find something good on Creative Commons?
A good actual invention, meanwhile, doesn’t “scale.” I mean, the Squatty Potty is a massive success, but it’s extremely rip-offable and you only need one per bathroom, max. It’s not tied to an app subscription, it can’t be sold institutionally, and also, it’s a stool to put your feet on while you poop. Nobody asked for it to exist, but it being out there isn’t exactly going to move the needle on the doom clock or whatever.
