It's Juicero's World, We're Just Living in It

On March 31, 2016, a tech company promised a groundbreaking new path. In a video uploaded to YouTube, Juicero had promised a brand new and innovative way to consume juice. By squeezing it.

For those who may have missed it, the company behind the Juicero (also named Juicero) had added a Silicon Valley hype cycle to the idea of a machine pressing juice out of a bag. It initially cost $699 when it launched in March of 2016. January of 2017, it dropped down to $399. Purchasing the machine was a prerequisite if you wanted the packs of juice. Packs that you could easily squeeze yourself.

Mockery was relentless. It reached the point where Juicero's CEO Jeff Dunn wrote a Medium post defending the product. In it, Dunn framed hand-squeezing the juice bags as "hacking consumer products." He then said that their press was good because it had three advantages. First a "closed loop food safety system that allows us to remotely disable Produce Packs" which is silly on it's face. Second, "consistent pressing of our Produce Packs," which every food processing facility has. Third, "connected data" of juice.

Unsurprisingly, this corporate-speak blog post pretending a $400 juice machine was the second coming of smoothie Jesus did not go over well. After 16 months, Juicero announced it was shutting down. It offered refunds of machines for customers then quietly slunk into the background.

Everyone had a fun time laughing at Silicon Valley's patently absurd campaign to promote a functionally useless juicer. Before its demise, Doug Evans, the company founder, compared himself to Steve Jobs. The company raised $120 million from venture capital firms like Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Google Ventures. It received a profile in the New York Times. On paper, it all seemed like a safe bet. If you didn't actually look at the product it was selling. The entire debacle, and indeed the word Juicero, has become synonymous with Silicon Valley's stupidity.

Juicero may have been a failure, but truthfully, the model was ahead of its time. It simply needed to wait a few years, add a slight marketing shift, and it would have been making millions, or even billions, of dollars.

The TikTok ban has been one of the most powerfully stupid sagas in US politics.

Initially, the ban was thought up by Trump near the end of his first term, but the Biden administration picked up the football and ran with it. After passing a bipartisan committee vote unanimously, it passed overwhelmingly in the House, signed by Biden. Bytedance, TikTok's parent company, was to sell to a US company or shut down its service. Biden then said he wouldn't enforce the law, leaving Trump to promise Tiktok's continuation. All in all, the app was offline in the US for approximately 14 hours.

It was a completely and utterly inept move by the Democrats on every level. Hoping that TikTok be sold to a US company to the last minute, they didn't account for the fact that maybe, just maybe, Bytedance wasn't interested in doing so. As a result, 170 million Americans were told that President Trump saved the app they love. Olympic Gold levels of fucking up.

In a self-assured manner, Democrats and their supporters have been doing their best to blame Trump, or TikTok itself, for this clusterfuck. These voices are somehow unaware that a company would look out for its self-interest. Ah, but an ace up the sleeve! Those who are aware that Trump was the initial force behind the ban have been touting this fact as if it's some sort of policy win. It isn't.

To be blunt: no one gives a shit. Most people are not politically engaged. They know what President was in charge when the ban passed, and they know what President was thanked in their app restoring service. Massive advertising handed to Trump for free, courtesy of Democrat dipshittery. It was obviously stupid. It also didn't matter.

The TikTok ban and Trump's easy political victory in avoiding it is perhaps the clearest example of the phenomenon at play here. It is patently stupid on its face, but that's immaterial. Reality doesn't matter at all anymore.

Take a look at Meta's Mark Zuckerberg. Zuckerberg and his company rebranded to the new moniker to specifically tout its Metaverse, a failure which it spent $46 billion on. Once AI-hype was the tool of the day, Meta let AI-generated shit go viral repeatedly on its platforms before announcing, fuck it, we'll just make these profiles ourselves.

Elon Musk, the world's richest pathetic loser, has tanked the value of Twitter (now X) by billions of dollars. Tesla's Cybertruck performed poorly in sales, alongside much of the rest of the company's car sales. SpaceX test flights keep exploding fantastically. Who gives a fuck? Not investors. Musk's reward for leading such dismal results? Clout with Trump and billions upon billions of dollars.

These examples are coupled with hitherto unseen levels of bitching. Zuckerberg complained that there was a lack of "masculine energy." Musk is feuding with people who play video games about his performance in Diablo and Path of Exile 2.

It doesn't matter if you can squeeze the juice yourself.

There is no reason in pointing out the absurdity anymore. Trump launched a meme coin. What else is there to be said?

Trump and his billionaire capitalist allies and sycophants have finally ended truth. Biden's administration, and his funding of Israel's genocide in Gaza, directly assisted in digging this grave. Over a year has passed of officials denying the very reality set in front of us. Financial speculation rests only on perceived proximity to power and nothing else. Juicero won.

There's nothing more representative of the political moment we live in than an overpriced, overfunded, overengineered pile of shit that promised to revolutionize our lives. This is our lives now. In the US, in Canada, anywhere that has ties to the US either politically or culturally.

If Dunn and his company had waited a little bit longer and painted their critics as too woke to understand, they would be rolling in the money. So here's your requiem, Juicero. You were far ahead of your time, we just couldn't see it yet.