Andrew Orlowski

Steve Jobs would have sacked everyone involved in Apple’s awful iPad advert

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 13 May 2024 11:02:00 +0000

With just two bad jokes at the Royal Albert Hall in 1991, Gerald Ratner destroyed his company’s reputation. Last week Apple had a go, but on a much bigger budget.

In a TV advertisement by the company, a wide variety of musical instruments, creative tools and materials and games are all annihilated by a giant black slab. Even a vintage Space Invaders-style arcade console is flattened.

The ad revels in their destruction and nothing is left at the end … Read More

ID cards are a civil servant’s dream – and the public’s worst nightmare

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 14 Nov 2022 11:00:00 +0000

The beaches of Dover are awash with abandoned plastic left by the dinghy migrants, but Stephen Kinnock has proposed adding some more – the Shadow Minister for Immigration has floated the idea of introducing ID cards.

Surely, Kinnock mused, we could introduce a basic national card, while protecting civil liberties? He was quickly slapped down by Yvette Cooper, the Shadow Home Secretary.

Cooper evidently remembers how Labour’s National Identity Card scheme dogged five successive Home Secretaries, before it was … Read More

Self-driving cars are going nowhere

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 15 Aug 2022 11:02:21 +0000

In this column at the Daily Telegraph, I explain why so little progress has been made in autonomous driving, and ask – why did we ever think this was a good idea? There’s no evidence that consumers ever wanted them.

Demand for Autonomous Vehicles has come from people who talk about technology for a living, rather than do it: public officials, and future-gazers, largely. It’s an exercise only made possible by cheap money and a disconnect between engineering and public … Read More

Predicting the future from the social media swamp

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 16 May 2022 11:20:00 +0000

About 20 years ago my techno-utopian friends in California began to have a strange glint in their eye. It’s the sort of glint people acquire after joining a religious cult, and they were obsessed with a new idea. What they believed was that with so many people now communicating via the internet, what they called a “Hive Mind” was beginning to emerge. And from this we could derive people’s thoughts and intentions.

Some even hoped it would help replace today’s … Read More

The Cult of the Business Guru, and the pop psychology anecdotalists that business doesn’t need

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 25 Apr 2022 11:00:00 +0000

“Some people can only think in anecdotes, it appears, and are deft at using them as a social currency. In recent years, it is this group that has been in the ascendancy in many organisations.”

How Malcolm Gladwell created the template for modern business fads. Read more at The Daily Telegraph. … Read More

Like kicking dead whales down a beach: understanding the Great Hydrogen Delusion

Andrew Orlowski — Sat, 16 Apr 2022 06:05:00 +0000

Engineers will rarely tell you something is impossible, even when your proposal is a very bad idea. Computer scientists at Stanford and MIT in the 1970s came up with a wonderful expression for this, an assignment that was technically feasible, but highly undesirable. They called it “kicking a dead whale down a beach”. The folklore compendium The Hacker’s Dictionary defines this as a “slow, difficult, and disgusting process”.

Yes, you can do it like that. But you really don’t want … Read More

Electric cars have a very dirty secret

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 28 Mar 2022 11:00:00 +0000

A new restaurant has opened in town. Only the portions are small, the food is cold and tasteless, and the service is grumpy and indifferent. The owners appeal to the Government, who promptly ban all rival restaurants in a 25-mile radius.

If this sounds madly improbable, it shouldn’t. The principle is alive and well in the UK, and beginning to define how we live and work. Lobbyists have discovered that the only way to advance their deeply flawed and inferior … Read More

Let them eat bugs: on meat and the English class system

Andrew Orlowski — Thu, 30 Dec 2021 19:28:00 +0000

Meat has never been so popular, nor as demonised by high status opinion. Here I examine the dubious claims that giving up meat helps the planet, and the elites fetish for synthetic meat and even insects. A long read, at Spiked.… Read More

The unquenchable greed of Wikipedia

Andrew Orlowski — Mon, 20 Dec 2021 06:00:00 +0000

At Christmas, charities launch their most emotive appeals. After almost two years of seeing their fundraising crippled by lockdowns and social distancing, they are more needy than ever. But I would think carefully before responding to one particularly aggressive annual solicitation.

Throughout December, Wikipedia is demanding a donation from visitors to the site. “Please don’t scroll past this,” my iPhone begs me. This is apparently needed “to protect Wikipedia’s independence”. The banner ads pose an existential issue: the website that … Read More

Facebook’s metaverse megalomania reflects a revulsion for humanity

Andrew Orlowski — Sun, 24 Oct 2021 14:00:00 +0000

“Divine task! Immortal mission!” enthused one excited American politician in 1846.

William Gilpin was promoting a doctrine that became known as Manifest Destiny – the idea that Americans were both divinely chosen and uniquely equipped to conquer new territory, and should do so without delay.

Urged on by exhortations “to animate the many hundred millions of its people, and to cheer them upward”, this would rapidly turn a collection of bickering coastal settlements into a continental empire.

Now Silicon Valley … Read More