Being excited about tech: the Steam Machine

What it's like when tech doesn't automatically make me angry

It had been so long, I’d almost forgotten what it feels like to be excited about technology. I’ve always been into tech, have always aligned most closely with the school social group of The Nerd, ever since I first tapped at the rubber keys on a ZX Spectrum sometime in the mid-1980s.

The last decade has been a disaster for tech. Taken over by sociopathic weirdoes, we’ve had one over-hyped dead end after another. Blockchain. Crypto. NFTs. Metaverse. AI. All potentially interesting technology, utterly ruined by the horrendous people evangelising them.

Wrapping all of those hype cycles up is social media in general, which presents the platonic ideal of enshittification. What began as an easy way to keep in touch with friends and family has mutated into something awful that has wholly broken the brains of adults and children. Journalists and politicians especially.

It’s not a surprise, given the goons running the mega-companies. We have an odd charisma vacuum running the world’s biggest social platforms. Not only does Zuckerberg not understand how ‘socialising’ works, turns out he also doesn’t understand how games work, or VR, or anything else. He got lucky with one product, bought his way into everything else, and every new thing he’s tried since has been an embarrassing disaster.

We have a radicalised extremist buying Twitter and declaring it the global ‘town square’, despite him clearly not understanding how towns work, or how society works in general. Again, there’s the pattern of getting lucky with one thing and buying success subsequently.

Machine learning has been quietly doing cool things for decades, but generative AI is being run by a buffoon who doesn’t understand art or culture, yet seemingly wants to take control of both. His faulty technology is plugged into everything whether it makes sense or not, pushed into our lives by weird executive-level acolytes who seem to hate interacting with actual humans. While his product encourages teenagers to kill themselves, breaks software, deletes databases and just makes shit up, investors continue to plough so much cash into the circular AI industry that it will most likely annihilate the global economy when it goes pop.

I rather like this from James Archer over at Rock, Paper, Shotgun:

“I’d like to propose the usage of “AI Brain” to describe the phenomena of ostensibly intelligent technologists instantly abandoning any sense of responsibility, creativity, good product design, and in many cases, basic human decency the minute they have artificial intelligence in front of their face.”

James Archer, RPS

from The Centre for Computing History

I’ve always loved computers. The ZX Spectrum, the Acorn Archimedes A3000 and Risc PC. The Amiga 500, which I never owned but still stared at lovingly in magazines. I read entire walkthroughs for The Secret of Monkey Island when I was 11 years old, and didn’t get to actually play the game until I was in my early 20s. I’ve built every PC I’ve owned since 2001. I’ve always been into this stuff.

Part of the reason I’m so irritated by the Zuckerberg/Musk/Altman idiocy is that it feels like one of my hobbies has been stolen away. I can’t be enthusiastic about tech, because it’s been hijacked by mad tech bros who want to break the world so that it fits into their own dysfunctions.

And yet. There remains hope.

Back in 2022, Valve released the Steam Deck. A PC crammed into a handheld, it was a remarkable gadget. Imagine the Nintendo Switch but vastly more powerful and with a library of games stretching back decades, plus the ability to use it as an actual desktop PC if you wanted. It was an exciting bit of tech! No weird gimmicks: just a well-executed product that did what it set out to do. It’s probably the best gadget I’ve ever owned.

Fast forward to earlier this month, when Valve announced three new hardware products: the Steam Machine, the Steam Frame and the Steam Controller. Again, all three are neatly designed gadgets designed for specific purposes. No random veneer of meaningless AI buzzwords. No icky data harvesting or weird advertising.

A controller, a gaming PC and a VR headset. Ta-da. See, that wasn’t hard, was it, tech industry?

Valve and Steam aren’t perfect, of course. They have issues around community moderation, DRM and legacy OS support. They exert enormous force over PC gaming, which is problematic even if they have earned it by being good at what they do. But on the whole, they are doing a much better job of being custodians of PC gaming than Microsoft.

Much is still unknown. These devices haven’t been properly tested and benchmarked. Most annoyingly, prices have yet to be announced, which makes my enthusiasm rather temporary and theoretical. There’s a price range in which all three products are hugely exciting, and there’s a price range where they are largely irrelevant curiosities. We’ll see where they end up.

For now, though, they exist as cool bits of tech. Cool tech! Remember that? Uncompromised, unenshittified. It’s refreshing to be able to enthuse about something I’ve always loved: gaming, hardware, tech design. Being Valve, they don’t mind what you do with their tech: experimentation is encouraged.

Which brings me back to the point of this newsletter, and working through my Infinite Backlog. The Steam Deck helped with my gaming backlog, enabling me to grab 10 minutes here and there, rather than being chained to the PC in my office. When I was on the train back from London last week I fired up Ghost of Tsushima and time zipped by.

I mostly play indie and older games. The big AAA releases from Ubisoft and EA don’t tend to be of much interest, so it should all work rather nicely through the Steam Machine.

Anybody else keeping an eye on what Valve are up to?