[Update]: So, I feel a little vindicated that Gizmodo chose to agree with my reading of their actions But reading the responses to Gizmodo’s post, I’d also like to point out that this is a reading of how this prank plays out as an idea – I’m trying to not judge Gizmodo’s actions in relation to ‘professionalism’ or ‘the tech field’.

Yes, it was dumb and juvenile. But was there more to it than a simple prank?

So, it seems that reigning tech-comedians Gizmodo are in all kinds of trouble since their CES throwing stick stunt boomeranged on them – sorry, I mean, their ‘turning TVs off prank‘ – and attracted the attention of Techmeme. If you haven’t heard yet, they carried around quasi-legal remotes and turned off TVs during company presentations. Calcanis and others seem enraged, while local tech guru (and all-around great guy) Mathew Ingram doesn’t see what the big deal is. The argument here is whether or not this was completely unprofessional behaviour or, like so many other acts of juvenile rebellion, an ill-thought-out idea rooted in some sincere dissatisfaction

It’s funny that this happened now, particularly since Gizmodo themselves wrote a takedown piece on CES
essentially condemning the inanity and pointlessness of the convention. And I have been thinking about this problem lately: of how we critique the very things we both love and are bound up in. For me personally, I am, on one hand, a tech blogger and do so because of a general fascination with both technology and its broader cultural ramifications. On the other, I am ‘Marxist’ grad student at a generally left-wing grad school – a place that has given me many tools for seeing the broader and darker side of the consumer goods industry, from the problems with its labour practices to the ideological context that sustains CE.

But one way to look at this is that Gizmodo’s prank was in fact the result of their takedown piece. Upon first read, Gizmodo’s critique of CES seems hypocritical. After all, the idiocy of corporate presentations and the idiocy of tech blogging are inherently linked. To actually use some o’ that Marxist terminology, the former is the material base, the latter the ideological superstructure. Okay fine, I don’t mean that literally, but you get the idea – there is a symbiotic relationship between those who produce tech and those who fetishise it. You cannot have a culture that is mad for everything tech – see the Wii or iPhone for examples – without an ideological context that sustains the desire for and perceived value of technology. You could argue that if Gizmodo really wanted to resist something like CES, they would resist the entire idea of techno-fetishism which, let’s face it, isn’t going to happen.

Instead, what they seem to be saying is “Yes, we are techno-fetishists! Now can you stop treating us like fucking idiots please?” – which, all things told, isn’t so bad really. My point here is that a broad critique of the consumer electronics industry would require the positing of an alternative to the entire industry – something neither I nor Gizmodo can do. One could argue that Gizmodo’s prank was a case of ‘changing the game from within’ – a sort of youthful rejection of the stupidity that dominates marketing-speak and the consumer goods industry in general. Naturally, I can’t get carried away too far: Gizmodo will continue to be a major player in sustaining the consumerist underpinnings of North America’s technology economy – to make no mention of their completely retarded perspective on feminism – all the while keeping in mind that this was just a stupid prank. Still, it’s interesting to see what could be read as a kind of disobedience here where new media is at least forcing established industries to respond to some of the issues at play in a nightmare like CES.