Okay so I know I went quiet for like two and a half weeks there, and I'd like to say it's because I was doing something interesting, but mostly I was just tired and the first ten days of January were genuinely boring. New Year's resolutions, gym is crowded, everyone's still hungover from the holidays, that kind of dead air. I actually drafted a post on January 3rd that just said "not much going on, here's hoping 2012 picks up" and then never published it because it was too depressing to read back.
Then CES happened and, well. It picked up.
I didn't go (still haven't managed to talk my way into a press badge for that show, someday), but I followed it obsessively from my couch the way I do every year, three browser tabs open and a bag of pretzels I definitely didn't need. The big story wasn't really any single product, it was "ultrabook" becoming the word of the week. Every laptop maker at that show had some thin, MacBook Air-shaped machine with an Intel sticker on the palm rest, and Intel was clearly writing checks to make sure the word got repeated in every single headline. I get why, thin and light sells, the Air's been embarrassing the rest of the industry for a couple years now, but by day two of the show I never wanted to hear the word "ultrabook" again and I still kind of feel that way three weeks later.
The other thing about this CES, and it didn't feel huge in the moment but it's stuck with me since, is that it was Microsoft's last keynote there. They announced they're stepping back from doing the big CES keynote going forward. I've watched a few of those keynotes over the years (well, watched clips, I'm not made of that kind of free time) and there's something a little end-of-an-era about it. CES has been this weird sprawling everything-show for so long, and Microsoft bowing out of the marquee spot feels like one of those quiet hinge-point moments you don't really clock until later.
And then, a week after CES wrapped, the internet actually got interesting for a couple of days in a row.
January 18th was the SOPA/PIPA blackout, and I have to say, watching it unfold in real time was something else. I hit Wikipedia around 9am to look something up for work (can't even remember what now) and just got the black screen with the "imagine a world without free knowledge" thing instead. Reddit went dark. Google didn't go fully dark but they put that black censor bar over the logo, which honestly might have been the most effective piece of activist design I saw all month, just a simple black rectangle doing more work than a thousand op-eds. I ended up calling my congressman's office that day, which I have never done before in my life, and the poor intern who answered sounded like she'd fielded four hundred of the exact same call already. Good. That's the point.
Then literally the next day, the DOJ shut down Megaupload and arrested Kim Dotcom in New Zealand in this raid that honestly sounds like it belongs in a movie, helicopters, safe rooms, the works. The timing was almost too perfect, like the universe decided to hand SOPA opponents and SOPA supporters both a talking point on back-to-back days. Anonymous responded within hours by knocking DOJ.gov, FBI.gov, the MPAA and RIAA sites, and Universal's site offline, which was its own kind of statement even if I'm not sure DDoSing a government website actually changes anyone's mind about copyright law.
Somewhere in the middle of all that whiplash, Apple quietly reported the best quarter any consumer electronics company has maybe ever had, something like 37 million iPhones sold, record profit, the whole thing. It got a fraction of the coverage it probably would've gotten any other week, just because the news cycle had already spent its outrage budget on Megaupload and SOPA. Funny how that works.
So yeah. Slow start, wild finish. If someone had told me on January 3rd that this month would end up being one of the biggest tech news months I can remember, I'd have laughed at them, mostly because I was staring at a half-written post about how nothing was happening. Anyway, back to normal posting now, I hope. We'll see.