a tour of the year’s worst new tech

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To hear this and more, listen to Selective Ignorance with Mandy B from the Black Effect Podcast Network on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1969, Malcolm and Martin are gone. America is in crisis. At a Morehouse College, The students make their move. These students, including a young Samuel L. Jackson, locked up the members of the Board of Trustees, including Martin Luther King Sr. It's the true story of protest and rebellion in Black American history that you'll never forget. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. Listen to The A-Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner, Charlie Fitzgerald, had his own rules. Segregation in the day, integration at night. It was like stepping on another world. Was he a businessman? A criminal? A hero? Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. Charlie's Place, from Atlas Obscura, and visit Myrtle Beach. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So the overall winner of Worst in Show this year was the Samsung Bespoke AI Refrigerator. Liz Chamberlain is director of sustainability at iFixit, which is an organization that publishes free online repair guides for consumer electronics. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Just I don't think I'd heard anybody say the word bespoke AI refrigerator before. There's something about reading it and then hearing it is somehow it's different. I know what you mean. It's a lot of words together that don't feel like they should go together. Liz also runs something called Worst in Show, which is a very particular kind of award show. The Worst in Show is a set of anti-awards that we give at the Consumer Electronics Show, CES. And we point out the least secure, the least private, the least repairable, the most inshittified products that we see on the show floor. They're awards that nobody should want to get. So, you know how you can look at the Oscars for any year and you can kind of see trends? For example, you could look back at 1978 and see, oh, OK, this is what society was into back then. Well, I think you can also do that with tech awards, especially with the worst in show. But there's also a bigger picture. The goal is to shame the big tech companies for the things that everybody is annoyed by. But too many people are just talking about how cool and new all this stuff is and not shaming them for stuff that really does make the world worse. So today we're going to do a recap of the winners of The Worst in Show 2026 with Liz Chamberlain. I'm afraid. From Kaleidoscope and iHeart Podcasts, this is Killswitch. I'm Dexter Thomas. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Goodbye. The Worst in Show Awards started in 2021, and they're organized by Repair.org, which is a nonprofit that advocates for the right to repair, which means that they fight for independent repair shops and consumers like me and you to be able to repair our own stuff. So each category in the awards is judged and presented by an organization that works in that field. And the products are judged based on five criteria. First, how bad is this product? Second, are the problems with this gadget innovatively bad? Third, what is the global impact if this technology was to be widely adopted? Fourth, how much worse is this than previous iterations of similar technology? And five, how much do the negatives outweigh the positives? And this year we saw winners in eight different categories. So let's get into it. So I want to go through this year's winners of the worst in show at CES in the privacy category. Who y'all got? So the privacy category is awarded by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is a group of lawyers that fights for electronic rights. And they're really focused on stuff that makes it easier for governments or companies or people you don't want to surveil you, to look in your home and find out who you are and what you're doing and where you're going and what you're writing about and what you're voting and, you know, all of these things. And they gave the award this year to the expanded features of Ring AI. So Ring is the video doorbell, video camera system run by Amazon, been a huge player in the video doorbell security market for a long time. But what they announced this year was this huge overarching AI system that connects all of their video cameras and security cameras and so on. And so they were advertising dog search party, for instance. This is Milo. Pets are family. But every year, 10 million go missing. And the way we look for them hasn't changed in years. Until now. One post of a dog's photo in the Ring app starts outdoor cameras looking for a match. Search party from Ring uses AI to help families find lost dogs. Your camera already recognizes your dog's face. And now if your dog runs away, you can alert all of your neighbors' ring doorbells to look for your dog. Cool. Okay, yeah. But that also tells me that my neighbor's cameras know who I am and can recognize me and see me leaving the house, see where I'm going and what I'm doing. If they showed off, you can search in your video history for green hat and pull up all the videos of somebody with a green hat. it suggests that they've got some really, really intense capacity to understand what's happening in the video and connect videos across cameras. They've got cameras deployed in parking lots across the country. It's scary for a world in which we know our governments are, you know, asking major tech companies for that data and using that data to surveil us. So I'm going to play the, I don't know whose advocate I am here, but I'm going to give you a common response that I hear often when I talk about privacy, right? Okay. Amazon's got this new ring AI thing. I'm not a bad person. I'm not a criminal. I don't have anything to hide. If it knows that I'm out working in the garden every day at 12 or 5 PM, what's the harm? Yeah, I mean, as long as you're only doing things that your government agrees with, then sure, it's not a problem for now. Even for people that are not afraid of the government knowing that they're outside in the garden at 12.05 p.m., they might not want to be surveilled in grocery stores, for instance. watch the whole time they're walking around and looking at products. People are very aware of how algorithms target you based on how long you linger on a video or what you're doing as you're scrolling through Instagram or whatever. Same kinds of things are happening in AI camera systems, in stores, AI camera systems outside of stores, that data can be used not just for government surveillance purposes, but also for pretty invasive advertising practices that are becoming really, really common. In the past, what sorts of things have won in the privacy category? So last year, the winner of the privacy category was a WeThings urinalysis device. That is urine analysis. It was a little puck that sat in your toilet that would do some basic monitoring of things and send data to your phone about what's in your pee. Again, one of these things where I can certainly see some cool potential uses of it. Please tell me these cool potential uses of it because I'm not aware of these. You can measure blood sugars if you're diabetic. Okay. It can tell you if you're dehydrated, I guess, if you're not attentive to your pee color enough. But Cindy Cohn, the director of VEAP, pointed out that it included measurements of pregnancy hormone. And it theoretically could be used to track women who are pregnant and then try to seek abortion care out of state or something. That was the really sort of scary use case she pointed out. Because post-Roe v. Wade, the government could, specifically law enforcement, could go to that company and say, give me your data. Exactly. Which sounds very Orwellian, whatever you want to call it, but this is the world that we're living in now. Exactly. So historically, the privacy category awards the product whose features and data collection could be used for surveillance and tracking, like the one that we just talked about, the urine analysis tool. Bad privacy is products that keep too much of your data in. But then there's bad security, which is products that do a bad job of keeping people out, like, say, hackers. And this brings us to the worst in shows security war. The winner was Merak treadmill. It's a smart treadmill thing that Merak, which is a relatively small Chinese home fitness company, announced. But what was unusual about this is in their privacy policy said that they cannot guarantee the privacy of customers' data. Which, you know... Hold on, I appreciate that. That's real. You know like on the one hand yes it true that they can guarantee it Nobody can guarantee it Right But just saying that shouldn be the majority of your privacy policy Right. You should have more to offer your customers about how you're protecting their data than that. The problem with this treadmill's privacy policy was that it actually said verbatim, we cannot guarantee the security of your personal information. End quote. For me, the only reasonable way to read that is that they don't want to be held legally liable if your data was hacked, which naturally makes you wonder, all right, are y'all just not hiring anybody to handle security? Are you expecting to be hacked or something? Now, to be fair, after this award was handed out, Merrick has updated their security policy. They deleted that line, and now there's a new line encouraging you to use strong passwords, which, yo, I agree with that. That's actually a pretty good outcome. So we might now have an example of the worst in show having a positive impact on the industry. What is it that this treadmill is even offering? There's some kind of AI trainer that watches your biometrics and gives you feedback as you're working through the program. Maybe you're sensing a theme here. This year's worst in show featured a lot of AI. And look, AI features can be cool, but these features are also showing what happens when you're forcing a feature because of the hype and not because it's actually going to make your product better. Which brings us to the winner of the next category. It's called the Who Asked for This Award. Who Asked for This? We gave this year to the Bosch 800 series coffee maker with Alexa Plus. Bosch has had this series of coffee makers for a long time. their really popular countertop all-in-one kind of thing. You push a button and it makes you a latte or a mocha or whatever. And they have had an Alexa feature on this thing for a while. You can walk into your kitchen and tell it to make you a mocha and it'll do it. They announced that they were adding in Alexa Plus this year. The machine isn't out yet with Alexa Plus, but when it is, it should be theoretically the same thing. You walk in, you asked for a Mocha. But the plus adds in a large language model between you and the execution of that command. And what people who have tested the Alexa plus feature on this coffee maker have said is that they don't always get the response they're expecting. They give the coffee maker a command and it doesn't do what they asked or it has follow-up questions. It wants to have a conversation. Follow-up questions. You're so right to want a latte. Can I tell you about the history of lattes? Exactly. Exactly. I don't know about you, but I do not need a coffee maker to make me a latte by voice command, let alone trying to have a full-blown conversation with me when I still haven't had any coffee yet. So yeah, this makes a lot of sense to me as a winner in the who asked for it category. But apparently the company itself really disagrees with that. This year, I got a long email from a Bosch marketing rep, and the marketing rep said he was confused by that award because it is apparently their most requested product. I don't know what people are asking for exactly. Nevertheless, I really doubt that anyone was asking for the shift that we highlighted from Alexa-powered coffee machine where you can walk into your room and ask for a cup of coffee to an LLM Alexa-powered coffee machine, which sometimes gets it wrong. It just introduces this layer of non-deterministic question mark between you and getting a cup of coffee. Okay, fair enough. Maybe someone did ask for this feature. It's not for me, but hey, that's okay. Spend your money how you want. But the funny thing about a lot of these products that win these awards is that it kind of feels like some of them could have won any of the categories. Like the winner of the worst environmental impact award, I also think is a pretty good contender for the who asked for this award. The environmental impact winner this year was Lollipop Star, which is a lollipop that plays music when you put it in your mouth. We'll get into that one after the break. I'll see you next week. Call 844-844-IHEART to get started. That's 844-844-IHEART. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Rioting and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's Almormata, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in Black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. and it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's Place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents, I lied to police, I lied to everybody. There were years right where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of bitches. Come around here and my wife. Boom. Boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Okay, quick recap. So far, the winners of this year's awards have been products with features that you could mostly understand. So, like, the ring camera watching your every move is weird, but on the other hand, I mean, it could help you track down a lost dog. That's kind of cool. I get it. And the maker of that treadmill straight up telling you that we aren't responsible if we get hacked. That's not good. But maybe some people don't mind it if the tradeoff is that your treadmill gives you workout tips or encourages you or something. I don't know. And the talking coffee maker, still weird for me. But I can see why somebody might want it. But I genuinely cannot think of any reason why you would want to buy the winner of the worst environmental impact, the lollipop star. It plays sound via bone conduction, so you bite down on it and it sends sound waves through your teeth directly to your ear bones. This concept isn't brand new. There was a product called SoundBytes back in the 90s that did this. Hey, there are six new SoundBytes. Each one is an amazing new experience. They make your head a In case you don't remember these, the SoundBytes was basically a plastic handle into which you would insert a normal lollipop on top. And you could press buttons on that plastic handle and it would play generic rock guitar sound effects and it would vibrate through your teeth. Another company had a product called Tooth Tunes, which were toothbrushes that did a similar thing. So in defense of Tooth Tunes, which is a sentence that I cannot believe that I'm starting. But in defense of Tooth Tunes, at least that product was made to get kids to brush their teeth. So now imagine that there was a product that revived that form factor, but was somehow actually worse than the 90s version. Soundbites, you could replace the battery on. And Lollipop Star has two embedded batteries, no replaceable battery. On the packaging, it says up to 60 minutes runtime. You use it for 60 minutes and then throw it away. That's what they want you to do. That's what they expect you to do. First off, can you choose the music you're listening to? No, I mean, they've got a couple different artists that they've worked with. And I think you can choose by buying a different lollipop star. I'm not a big lollipop connoisseur. And I'm kind of also thinking, you know, Tootsie Roll, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop? Right. Like, I don't really know how long it takes me to get through a lollipop. I don't know if I want to listen to Akon for that long. like stream directly into my bones. That doesn't sound like a good time for me. I hadn't considered that part of it, but you're right. That is, you know, you got to commit. And the product requires it to be really quiet for you to be able to hear what's going on. You know, you can't, you can't really hear if there's any noise around you. And the show floor was way too loud for people to hear. And so they were handing out with the lollipop, they were handing out earplugs to everybody and telling you, you got to plug your ears to be able to listen to it. So I need to like go into the privacy of my own home, insert a lollipop into my mouth so I can listen to Akon. Yeah. This is like the worst combination of everything that I can think of. Like Apple Music exists, Spotify exists, Bandcamp exists. Like if I want to listen to Akon, I shouldn't have to put some on my mouth. Yeah, you got a lot of options that aren't a disposable lollipop. Not to mention the fact that this disposable lollipop costs $9. for a lollipop Someone really said all right yo what if we brought back the Tooth tunes and the sound bites but removed all the redeeming qualities of both of those and charged for it But here why the Lollipop Star got the worst environmental impact award Lollipop Star is a single-use device, and the batteries inside of it cannot be removed. We are always looking for products with embedded batteries to give Horst and Schill awards to because they're everywhere and they're a huge problem. Even if, you know, best case scenario, product goes into a landfill, just rots in a landfill. They've got toxic chemicals that can leach into groundwater, leach into the soil. That's not good for the planet. But also what can happen is a lot of waste processing facilities includes some amount of moving stuff around, banging it around, passing it through shredders, passing it through devices that separate stuff out. And in that process, batteries can cause fires. And there are battery fires in trash trucks. In most municipalities, the rate of like one a week. I know my little town of 47,000 people has like one trash fire a week, and it's usually batteries. And that's a huge problem for waste processing. So once again, in summary, 60 minutes of Akon vibrating through your teeth and a non-zero chance that you could start a literal garbage fire. Did I mention that it was $9? I'm really not sure what else I can say here. So let's move on to the next category in the worst in show awards, in shitification, which is a word coined by Dr. Cory Doctorow about how as tech companies value profit and extraction over any user experience, their services get inshittified. Inshittification is basically how internet things tend to get worse over time. Because when they start out, they're just looking for users. They're looking for people to sign on and do the thing. But over time, they need to make money. And so they find ways to reduce the services that they're offering and make more money out of you. Squeeze more blood from your stone. And so the Inchidification Award winner this year was the Bosch eBike app. The Bosch eBike Flow app pairs to your eBike and you can use it as a digital lock. You can track your bike if it gets stolen and you can record your rides with pretty detailed stats. It also links the bike's major components, like the motor, the battery, and the display, together digitally. Each part is registered to your bike and your account so that the system knows what hardware belongs to whom. This is called parts pairing. Parts pairing is basically, there's a little computer on the part, there's a little computer on your bigger device. They talk to each other, they have a little handshake agreement. and parts pairing limits what the part can do or what kinds of repairs you can do or what its capabilities are or how it's being tracked. It really became a huge issue with smartphones. We tracked between 2018 and 2024, Apple products that came out had more and more and more parts paired to the motherboard and would limit repair in some way for independent repair technicians who weren't under the Apple ecosystem. So if you wanted to replace an iPhone battery, sure, if you're not part of Apple, you might be able to buy a battery from iFixit or somewhere and put it in yourself. But then there would be warnings that you couldn't dismiss or there would be some features that you wouldn't have, like battery health metrics, for instance, they would just shut off. So what this would mean is the little computer on your motor has an agreement with your bike. It recognizes like, all right, this is Dexter's bike. He bought it on this day. And then let's say your bike gets stolen and you mark your bike as stolen. Bosch then links that part. Let's say the person who steals your bike separates out the motor, sells out the motor to somebody. When that motor gets connected to the system again, it gets flagged as the stolen part and it can't be used again. It gets sort of locked out and Bosch gets notified. You get notified where your stolen part is. Okay. So on paper, sounds like a pretty good thing. Why is that a bad thing? That piece of it? Not really a bad thing. The fear and the reason it won the Ancient Vacation Award is that this capability allows Bosch to do lots of other things. It allows them to turn off your bike subscription entirely if you don't pay the monthly fee. It allows them to shut down your motor if they want to. It allows them to make it so that only a Bosch repair tech can replace that motor. and you can't do it yourself or you can't take it to the bike shop down the street. You know, you're just locked into that system. And the more and more of our things get tied into electronic systems that can be shut off whenever a manufacturer wants or whenever they go out of business, the worse our stuff gets. And so my straight up manual bicycle is never going to lose features because, you know, Schwinn is done supporting my line of bicycles, right? Bosch hasn't done these things yet. to be clear, right now it's mostly upside. But that's the point of the Enshittification Award, is to point to things where right now, mostly upside. But there's the potential here for some real nastiness that's built into the way this thing is framed. All right, now that we're almost through all the winners, let's get back to that Samsung AI fridge, which is a two-time winner this year. It not only won the worst overall, but it also won specifically in the repairability category. The Samsung bespoke AI fridge with the voice activated door, the food recognition, the ads on your screen, the recommendations to buy blueberries because it knows you're a blueberry lover and you're running out of blueberries. It represents more points of potential failure in a high failure product from a company that has not been consistently good about repair. Samsung has a pretty bad reputation when it comes to repairability. iFixit has continually criticized them for charging prices for parts that just don't seem justified, if those parts are even made available. And then there's the pricing for repair manuals. I don't have any repair technicians for Samsung in my town because Samsung charges repair techs like $1,000 a year to have access to their repair documentation. And so a lot of appliance techs just don't do it because it's so expensive. Wait, it charges them $1,000 a year to be able to have a manual? Yeah, yeah. Basically, the online app diagnostic thing. There's a subscription fee and there's a special dongle you need to connect to the fridge. And so a lot of people just don't do it. a dongle and a subscription to fix the box that keeps your food cold. Okay. All right. So that's why it won the Repairability Award. It won overall worst in show because not only does it have all these potential repair problems, it also has the inshittification potential of ads showing up on your screen. Samsung has just done this with their $1,800 refrigerators. They started putting ads on people's screens in their homes, even though you've already paid almost $2,000 for your fridge. But now it's showing you ads, too. And the privacy problem of having a bunch of information about you and your habits and what you're eating. And, you know, could your health insurance company charge you higher premiums because you've got too much frozen pizza in your fridge? I have so much frozen pizza in my fridge right now. Like, I'm not even kidding. They're coming for you, Dexter. I'm not even playing with you. I have I legitimately have like six frozen pizzas in my freezer right now. Hey, you know, when the deal is good, you got to buy in bulk. That's it was a good deal. One thing that I noticed is there's some interesting features. You can say open Sesame and the door opens like you can voice command open the door. How do we feel about that? The image that they keep showing of this is somebody with their hands full, got a big casserole, trying to put it in fridge. You say open sesame, the door opens. Okay. When the judges got together, we talked about the chance that maybe you're in a wheelchair. You want to be able to open the door that way. I recognize that some of the time this might be a useful feature, but it just introduces so many more points of failure. There's now the automatic door opening that's built into the hinge of the door mechanism that is yet another complicated part that you can only get a Samsung repair tech to the service. And it, again, adds an LLM between you and opening your fridge. And they were showing it off on the show floor and it was so noisy in there that the people demoing it had to get really close to the door and sort of shout it into the microphone of the fridge. And I'm imagining it at a party or something, you know, the music's playing loud. People are talking, like shouting at the fridge to get it to open. Or you got kids yelling in the background and you're trying to like, yo, I'm trying to get to the fridge. I need a drink. Like, what are we doing? Also, does this thing have handles? I'm looking at a picture of this. It doesn't have a handle on the front like normal. You can't open it manually from underneath, but it worsens the normal handle experience. And just to be real here for a second. Voice command to open a fridge on paper sounds like it could be really helpful for someone who's disabled and needs help opening the fridge door sometimes. But if something goes wrong and they need to fix the door, now you're looking at a really expensive repair. But if you live in a rural area without one of those Samsung certified technicians, then what, you just can't open the fridge door at all? What are you supposed to do? Moving on though, there's one more winner from this year that we didn't get to. The LaPro AI Soulmate, which was the winner of this year's People's Choice. So it's advertised as, quote, you're always on 3D AI Soulmate. Basically, it's an anime girl and a cylindrical tube with the camera on it. And essentially, people were unsettled by a camera that's marketed as being always on. I get it. I don't know. Anime girl and a cylindrical tube. I've seen that almost a decade ago in Japan. Doesn't really move the needle from me, but I get it. So those are this year's losers, winners. And remember what I was saying earlier about award shows telling us about what people like or where society is at a certain point in time. That's where I think the worst in show is a little bit different in that it's actually self-aware of that. But on top of that, it also can maybe give some hints on how we as just regular people can push back against stuff that we don't like. We'll get into that after the break. streaming radio and podcasting Let us show you at iHeartAdvertising That's iHeartAdvertising.com. Welcome to the A-Building. I'm Hans Charles. I'm Menelik Lumumba. It's 1969. Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. have both been assassinated. And Black America is at a breaking point. Writing and protests broke out on an unprecedented scale. In Atlanta, Georgia, at Martin's alma mater, Morehouse College, the students had their own protest. It featured two prominent figures in black history, Martin Luther King Sr. and a young student, Samuel L. Jackson. To be in what we really thought was a revolution, I mean, people were dying. 1968, the murder of Dr. King, which traumatized everyone. The FBI had a role in the murder of a Black Panther leader in Chicago. This story is about protest. It echoes in today's world far more than it should. And it will blow your mind. Listen to The A Building on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Segregation in the day, integration at night. When segregation was the law, one mysterious Black club owner had his own rules. We didn't worry about what went on outside. It was like stepping in another world. Inside Charlie's place, Black and white people danced together. But not everyone was happy about it. You saw the KKK? Yeah, they were dressed up in their uniform. The KKK set out to raid Charlie, take him away from here. Charlie was an example of power. They had to crush him. From Atlas Obscura, Rococo Punch, and Visit Myrtle Beach comes Charlie's Place, a story that was nearly lost to time. Until now. Listen to Charlie's Place on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Ryder Strong, and I have a new podcast called The Red Weather. It was many and many a year ago in a kingdom by the sea. In 1995, my neighbor, Anna Trainor, disappeared from a commune. It was hard to wrap your head around. It was nature and trees and praying and drugs. No, I am not your guru. And back then, I lied to my parents. I lied to police. I lied to everybody. There were years, writer, where I could not say your name. I've decided to go back to my hometown in Northern California, interview my friends, family, talk to police, journalists, whomever I can to try to find out what actually happened. Isn't it a little bit weird that they obsess over hippies in the woods and not the obvious boyfriend? They have had this case for 30 years. I'll teach you sons of a** to come around here and my wife. Boom, boom. This is The Red Weather. Listen to The Red Weather on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. weird and everybody else does want it or like what's happening here i mean yeah they are making it because it sells right they wouldn't make it if it didn't sell so i think that's part of it i think there's a lot of ai being introduced in places where it doesn't need to be but i think what we give up in a lot of that introduction is that now all of our stuff has microphones on it and cameras on it. And there's all this always on data that's being collected about us in every room of our home. You know, if you've got the Bosch coffee maker that's listening to you all the time and your refrigerator is watching you and watching your food and your doorbell out front is watching all the neighbors, it's kind of mind boggling how dramatic the increase in surveillance of us and our stuff and our habits has been in technology in the last couple of years. And we'll only know over time what that means for our independence and our freedoms. But there are other trends that are happening in the opposite direction. That is, trends coming from us, the consumers. I see two things that make me hopeful. And one of those things is that there is this rising public pushback against this kind of new every year thing. And I see the growth of the refurbishing marketplace back market. They're growing hugely. They're getting bigger and bigger. And I think a lot of people are saying, you know, I don't really need the brand new phone. I'm fine with last year's model or the year before that. And why don't I buy it used? I can save some money and help out the planet a little bit. There is a cultural swell of pushback against why does all tech have to be new and new every year? And that makes me hopeful. And then there's also globally some legislation that is helping. The sealed in batteries thing. I think in January, 2027, I am expecting there to be a major difference at CES because in 2027, the EU replaceable batteries legislation goes into force. So this is a law that's passed in the European Union that says that by 2027, all portable products sold in the EU must have user replaceable batteries. User replaceable. So anybody can pop in batteries to replace it. Exactly. Really? Okay. You should be able to change your phone, batter yourself, change your laptop, batter yourself. There are some exceptions. Battery-powered toothbrushes, for instance, anything that's supposed to be used in a quote-unquote wet environment isn't covered. But something like smart rings, they're going to have to figure out an answer or stop selling in the EU. And that's a huge market. Wow. Okay. I'm looking forward to that. Shoot. Me too. Well, what do you think the awards will look like next year then? You know, I would love to have a Worstens show where we don't give a sealed-in battery award. I would love for there to be so few things on the market that it's not worth pointing to. If we're to take one thing from this year's worst in show awards or the worst in show awards in general, what do you think it would be? I would like people to be less bought into the hype cycle. I would like people to, when something breaks, think about whether they can fix it, not, well, oh, it's time for me to upgrade anyway. I think if people recognize that upgrade is brainwashing by manufacturers to some extent. Manufacturers have trained us all to look for next year's model, look for what are the new features out on the market today. And for those of us that love technology, it's really effective brainwashing. Yeah, it works on me. I work in repair. I work for a repair company. I say this stuff every day. And I still have that thought at first when something breaks, like, oh, well, I should just get a new one. But I think it takes all of us sort of pushing back against that subroutine in our own heads, you know? And that's it. There we have it. So I'd actually be curious to see what you thought about this year's Worst in Show Awards. Did you agree with the results? I mean, me personally, I'm not really sure how an AI companion beat out the Lollipop star for people's choice. But you know what? That's what award shows are for, seeing the results and then vehemently disagreeing with them in the comment section online. So if you got your own take, you know what to do, and I'd love to see what you think. Thank you one more time to Liz, to Prepare.org, and to everyone who participated in the Worst in Show Awards. And thank you so much for listening to Killswitch. You can email us if you want at killswitch at kaleidoscope.nyc, or on Instagram, we're at KillswitchPod. And if you like the show, hopefully you do, you know, think about leaving us a review. It helps other people find the show, which helps us keep doing our thing. And once you've done that, did you know that Killswitch is on YouTube? So if you want to see video of any of the weird products that we talked about today, you can check us out at youtube.com slash Killswitch underscore pod, or you can find the link for that in the show notes. Killswitch is hosted by me, Dexter Thomas. It's produced by Sheena Ozaki, Darla Potts, and Julian Nutter. Our theme song is by me and Kyle Murdoch, and Kyle also makes us a show. 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