It’s been a tough year for tech. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed both our utter dependence on it as well as the many seams and holes in the systems. Economic crises drove more scams and bad behavior than normal. The industry worked to lean into this new socially distanced world, but some of the usual suspects screwed up in new and different ways. Here’s our rundown of the biggest disasters we saw in the digital world this year.
Bots Buying Everything
If you’ve been trying to buy a new game console or a GPU this last year, you might feel like you’re on a particularly cruel game show. Retailers seem to sell out in seconds, and suppliers just can’t keep up. But the real culprit here is scalpers, who are using automated bots to clean stores out and flip their purchases on eBay at big markups. These bots are now big business—we rented one to see how they worked and found they have complex techniques to defeat CAPTCHAs, skip queues and avoid detection. They can even run through proxies to go faster. If retailers don’t find a fix, the process of purchasing high-value goods is going to be unsustainable.
Meta
The timing of Facebook announcing a name change, almost immediately after whistleblower Frances Haugen dropped a trove of documents exposing the company’s lax enforcement on misinformation and obsession with growth, was already cursed. But trying to rebrand themselves as a “metaverse company” through a deeply awkward, fake-looking Second Life imitation wasn’t helpful. The jury’s still out on whether people want to hold work meetings in a purely digital space, but the technology to make it look anything like what Zuckerberg and crew are advertising sure isn’t there yet.
AWS Failing the Internet
One of the many reasons our government argues against monopolies is that when they fail, things can be disastrous. A full 33% of Internet traffic now runs through Amazon Web Services, the cloud computing division that has become one of Bezos’s biggest money-makers. So when something goes awry, it hits hard. An AWS outage in December brought down a huge swath of the networked world—Netflix was unavailable. So was Disney+. Customers couldn’t check out from Ticketmaster, and trading stopped on Robinhood. They got the issue fixed after a few hours, only for another outage to wreak havoc a few days later. Having that much of our digital life dependent on one party is a recipe for disaster.
FaZe Clan Crypto Scam
You’re going to see a few cryptocurrency-related entries on this list, but this one might be the biggest. One of the most popular techniques for pumping up a coin’s value is to partner with influencers to hype it. When “SaveTheKids,” a purported charity-based cryptocurrency that said they donated a portion of profits to children’s causes, announced they were working with mega-popular gaming group FaZe Clan, the coin’s price rocketed up just in time for initial investors to sell out. They turned a profit, FaZe fans were left holding valueless tokens. When the story came out, the group expelled member Kay and suspended several others over their involvement in the pump-and-dump scam.
Squid Game Token
The blockchain has become an irresistible marketplace for people pulling classic “pump and dump” scams, where a security is artificially overvalued and then sold off at the peak, leaving new investors holding the bag. One of the most insane examples happened in early November with the launch of a Squid GameSquid Game token, named after the Korean drama that was a huge hit on Netflix. Created by a group that pitched it as a “play-to-earn” cryptocurrency, the unit price soared to $2,856 before plummeting to nearly nothing. It’s believed that the people behind it made off with around $3.4 million in the scam.
NFT Mania
Innovation is a powerful force. And we’re never going to pooh-pooh the blockchain entirely—there are still interesting applications to distributed technology that have yet to be discovered. But the flood of NFT “artwork”—where the only “value” that owning one has you is an index on a blockchain—has inundated the tech world in the second half of the year. Buoyed by the success of outliers like Pixel Punks and Bored Ape Yacht Club, marketplaces such as Opensea are flooded with cut-and-paste offerings, each one uglier than the last. That’s when the illustrations aren’t just swiped wholesale from DeviantArt, a problem so rife the site has built customized software tools to let artists know their work is being used without their permission. It’s an obvious bubble, and when it pops it’s going to be pretty rough.
Tesla Bot
The cult of personality around Elon Musk is pretty terrifying at times—sure, he’s done a lot to popularize electric vehicles, but he’s also prone to embarrassing memes, flights of fancy, and worse. 2021 saw a particularly cringe presentation in August when Tesla announced “Optimus,” a humanoid robot that the company claims will be prototyped by next year and controlled by the same artificial intelligence that powers their self-driving cars. The announcement, which was accompanied by a clearly uncomfortable man in a robot costume, was awkward and met with derision from people who actually make robots.
5G Is Still Useless
Wireless networks have been all about 5G in the last few years. Billed as the next big thing, it purports to deliver data at breakneck speeds to all of our devices. The only problem is, it doesn’t really do a lot right now. In practice, 5G on both AT&T and Verizon feels just like 4G. Sure, there are pockets of super-fast mmWave 5G, but it’s really hard to find. So people upgrading their phones based on high-speed promises are feeling a little ripped off. Next year may bring better performance, but isn’t that always the case?
Activision Blizzard’s Culture Crisis
The video game industry has long been viewed as a boy’s club where behavior standards are a little lax, but when whistleblowers came forth about the toxic culture at Activision Blizzard, things got real bad, real fast. The first blow came in July, with the filing of a lawsuit by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Activision Blizzard chief compliance officer Fran Townsend made things worse with a company-wide email downplaying the accusations, leading to a mass employee walkout. It was then revealed that Townsend didn’t write the email—CEO Bobby Kotick had under her name, even though he had publicly criticized the message as “tone deaf” after press backlash. More and more information is leaking out about how terrible a workplace the company is, and the lawsuit could spur real change in the industry.
Texas Blizzard Pricing
One of the things that critics of algorithmic pricing and AI business often bring up is that the market can’t be thought of as a dependable actor. The case of Texas’s utility grid struggling to cope with the blizzard of 2021 was a brutal illustration of that. A service called Griddy offered users the chance to buy electricity at wholesale prices, rather than a set rate. When freak storms blew through the state, customers that were signed up with Griddy found that they were being charged $9,000 per megawatt-hour. For reference, the seasonal average is $50. There was a massive public outcry as people saw bank accounts overdrawn. When they complained, Griddy told them their best option was to switch to another provider. The company was then sued by the state and filed for bankruptcy.
Grand Theft Auto Definitive Edition
Taking old games and making them work on modern consoles is a time-tested way for studios to leverage beloved intellectual property and make some quick cash. But when Rockstar dropped the “definitive edition” of Grand Theft Auto 3 and its two sequels, things seemed more than a little off. Gamers were expecting modernized graphics with increased realism, but what they got was a bizarre fusion of high-gloss textures and awkward, ugly character models. Throw in a staggering number of bugs and glitches and you’ve got a product so disappointing that Rockstar was forced to not only publicly apologize but also put the original, non-remastered versions back up for sale.
Zillow Algorithms
Trust in algorithms is a mantra of the tech industry right now, but they don’t always work as planned. When real estate listing site Zillow decided to pivot into actually buying and selling property with a business unit called iBuyer, they made decisions based on AI and machine learning. The intent was to identify undervalued properties and flip them easily. But with a market as volatile and complex as housing, especially with purchase prices high, errors in valuation had massive ripple effects throughout the company. At the end of the year, Zillow announced they would be laying off nearly a quarter of its workforce on a $560 million valuation loss.
The Saygus Scam Collapses
Sometimes fraud takes a long time to boil over. Wanna-be phone magnate Chad Sayers first visited the PCMag offices in 2009 to talk Saygus, his device that packed a proprietary Android video codec that allowed for two-way video calling over 3G networks. In the present day we take that sort of thing for granted, but a decade and change ago this would have been a serious game-changer. Sayers spent the next seven years touting a series of prototypes at trade shows and conventions, bringing in $10 million in investment funds. In August, the U.S. Attorney for Utah finally charged him with fraud, alleging that he never intended to create a product at all.
Freedom Phone
They say there’s a sucker born every minute, and with one side of the political aisle convinced that Big Tech was out to censor them at every turn, it was ripe for an unscrupulous guy to cash in. July saw the announcement of the “Freedom Phone,” a device from self-proclaimed Bitcoin millionaire Erik Finman. Endorsed by dozens of the right-wing’s most notable talking heads, each of whom had their own promotional code for buyers to use, the $500 device was discovered to be a rebranded Android phone from Chinese company Umidgi that retailed for less than a quarter of that price.
Trump’s Social Network
The former President had a way with social media, drawing attention with absurd pronouncements until being systematically banned for undermining the fabric of democracy. It was only a matter of time before the legion of hucksters baying at his heels launched their own alternative. Or at least tried to. Trump tested the waters in May with a blog page that shut down in less than a month, but “Truth Social,” as the new venture will be called, is more ambitious. Hackers quickly penetrated the system and created fake accounts for Trump and Steve Bannon.
