The Bacon Bonanza: Pointless Technology and the Illusion of Progress

A few weeks ago, I saw an infomercial for the Bacon Bonanza Copper Cooker: a contraption that lifts bacon away from grease during the cooking process to lower its fat content. For $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) I’m told I can revolutionize the way I eat bacon.

Initially, the Bacon Bonanza impressed me. It seemed so cool that someone concocted this idea and actually had the determination to make it real. But as the infomercial progressed and the comically enthusiastic salesman rambled, I had second thoughts:

What exactly was the problem that the Bacon Bonanza aimed to solve?

The best answer I came up with was that it solved the problem of patting the grease off my bacon with a paper towel. But this begs the question: Do we have such a widespread bacon grease epidemic that it warrants the time and effort to design, manufacture, and market a contraption that reduces it? Most people, including myself, are not opposed to bacon grease. They’re actually quite fond of it.

Needless to say, I didn’t order the Bacon Bonanza.

We live in an age of innovation stagnation. We produce an abundance of new apps, gadgets, and services every day, but make little to no progress in terms of improving the aspects of life that truly need attentin. Our quantity of innovations overshadows their quality, or lack thereof.

“Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20^th century, the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live,” says Harvard Business Review editor Justin Fox.

Consider how the standard of human life changed between 1850 and 1950. For the first time ever, people had vaccinations, mass communication, electricity, sanitation, public education, household appliances, cross-country transportation, the list goes on. These advances laid the foundation for a safer, more secure life. In the 21^st century, however, our inventions rarely aim to improve our quality of life or solve serious problems.

Apple’s Face ID solves the problem of typing a four-digit password. Visa’s payWave solves the problem of swiping a card through a machine. The Bacon Bonanza solves the problem of having grease on your bacon.

The benefits of innovations like these are unclear and certainly not as transformative as those of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. They put us, as Peter Thiel says, in a technological desert where we are becoming increasingly creative, but channeling that creativity in ways that are virtually meaningless. Automation, efficiency, and speed give us the illusion that we’re progressing when we’re really just spinning our wheels in the mud.

Take, for example, this statement by Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai:

“Computing mainly automates things for you, but when we connect all these things, you can truly start assisting people in a more meaningful way…If I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that’s appropriate for them.”

It’s hard to imagine Thomas Edison, who gave us the light bulb and the movie camera, getting excited about some mom’s minivan knowing when to switch from NPR to Selena Gomez when little Suzy hops in the back seat. In fact, I think he’d be disappointed that we waste our time and talent automating things that nobody asked to be automated.

“Missing from [Pichai’s] view is any consideration of the pleasures and responsibilities of everyday life,” says Nicholas Carr in his book Utopia is Creepy. “Pichai doesn’t seem to have entertained the possibility that much of the joy of parenting lies in the little, inconsequential gestures that parents make on behalf of their kids, like picking out a song to play in the car.”

Is it unreasonable to ask what would happen if, just for one year, Apple, Microsoft, and Google pooled their creativity, intelligence, and trillions of dollars to combat hunger or human trafficking instead of finding another way to keep us glued to our phones? We’ll likely never know.

Maybe the Silicon Valley groupies are right. Maybe we are progressing toward some radical paradigm shift that will improve everyone’s lives. But from the looks of it now, we’ve hit a wall.

If you’re still convinced that we’re better off with Face ID and the Bacon Bonanza, consider the following question: are we collectively happier than people were 100 years ago when such things didn’t even exist in the imagination?

If you equate happiness with excitement, then yes. But what about fulfillment and purpose? The fact that 1 in 5 adults will take a prescription medication for depression or anxiety today would indicate that our innovations are not leading us to paradise. If anything, they’re making us miserable.

Tomorrow’s headlines will assure us that we are one step closer to utopia. But what is utopia? If it’s an orgy of technological sedation where life is on autopilot, I’m not interested.

And I’ll keep my bacon grease while I’m at it.

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