The Tech Press is Sad So Everything is Terrible

The Tech Press is Sad So Everything is Terrible

[lead dropcap="yes"]The tech pundits are sad and it shows in their reporting.[/lead]

It’s fairly evident that most tech pundits writing for the big blogs and publications and making podcasts and videos lean left in their politics. Most of them are based either in the Northeast or on the West Coast where the liberal bubble is the strongest. If you have read The Verge or Engadget over the past couple of months, for instance, their disdain for Donald Trump and Republicans have been quite clear. (Heck, even non-tech blogs, like Food52 and TheKitchn food blogs, have engaged in the misery-making.)

And so, ever since the election on November 8, much of the tech press has sounded like a bunch of emo teens whose future prospects include unemployment, student loans, and their parents’ basement. Everything sucks.

The new Apple MacBook Pros suck. Amazon’s Echo sucks. New videos games aren’t very good. Smartwatches are done. There are no more good gadgets being developed. Fitbit buying Pebble is the end of the scrappy Kickstarter success stories. Samsung’s phones are exploding (okay, that one is true.) It’s an unrelieved pottage of doom and gloom.

Plus, these supposedly tech-focused publications seem to veer off into pure politics an awful lot, editorializing on US national politics that have nothing to do with tech, perhaps in an attempt to make themselves feel better.

This is connected to the now-tired meme that 2016 is the worst year ever because, I guess, Donald Trump is president instead of Hilary (and less often now, Bernie Sanders) and because a bunch of famous people died. Not that famous people didn’t die in other years, but these are famous people important to Generation X and we have now replaced Baby Boomers as the most self-important generation.

Sometimes I want to just shake them all and tell them to snap out of it. I’ve already taken a break from several podcasts, like MacBreak Weekly, which has descended into a purgatory of “Apple is doomed” rhetoric, where all of the hosts spend their time taking about which non-Apple gear they’re switching to. Instead, I’m spending my time on podcasts like Mac Geek Gab and Mac Power Users, where I can actually learn something about how to use my gear to be more productive and make my life better.

I get being disappointed after an election, but a whole industry going into a funk over it? That’s a bad sign of an industry that may be a little too monolithic in its composition.

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  • sad: Graphicstock | Copyright by owner. Used with permission.
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