America polishes its turds. It is our way. Now, MSCHF—the net arty drop factory behind blood sneakers and a cookies giveaway plugin—has created an online monument to shit with a gift shop of souvenirs from a generation of IoT and trash robots. The objects that inspired them passed on without so much as a boop, for we never appreciated such items as Juicero, the wifi-enabled juice Keurig that barely yielded liquid from juice packets and yet raised $120 million in funding. Does she bring us joy now, memorialized as a miniature totem? I’ll buy that. Arguably, it’s far more functional than the original.
MSCHF’s new Dead Startup toy store contains tributes to such concepts, two of which yielded law enforcement investigations. Namely, Elizabeth Holmes’s fake home blood test device that led to an exhilarating fraud indictment. Reflect upon the speaker-enabled blender/cooler that raised over $13 million on Kickstarter and never shipped; then consider a lower-tech cooler with four taps that function only when connected to kegs.
We can also now own a tiny affordable memorial to that $900 21st-century twerking Wall-E adaptation Jibo, cut down in his prime by the considerably cheaper and more versatile Alexa. (Consumer tech reporter Victoria Song suspects he needed to twerk more.) And perhaps we should thank the One Laptop Per Child project for somewhat achieving its aims of expanding children’s knowledge with a crash course on defective junk. Each drop comes with a little obituary with lifespans and funding.
In sum, MSCHF’s selection asked us, What’s next? An exercise bike for children? Smart doorbells for police surveillance? A hairbrush that listens to your hair? Is this postmodernism or late capitalism, or are we just not thinking about that because YOLO?
Maybe you’re wondering what becomes of these little PVC souvenirs, too. Before your mind wanders to the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, know that the toys weigh about as much as an apple—small enough to glue on the dashboard of a cybertruck whenever they finally hit the road. Apropos of nothing, check out these Space Jam NFTs.