A work-in-progress, “Look What I Made For You” is a video montage of eight pivotal technology demonstrations from 1968 to 2025, from Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos,” which introduced the mouse and hypertext, through the Macintosh, Windows 95, the iPhone, Google Lens, the Cybertruck, GPT-4o, and Meta’s AI Glasses.
The Demo as Form
Each is an act of imagining the future on behalf of society. Engelbart imagines the office of tomorrow. Jobs imagines a phone that knows your hand. Meta imagines glasses that make being present less hard work. This future is performed through role play: the scripted phone call, the rehearsed click, a casual jog with Superstar DJ Diplo. The presenter’s hands become your hands.
This is the path we have made for you.
In software design, the happy path is the default route through a product where everything works as intended. No errors, no edge cases. It just works. Apple’s engineers refined this further for the iPhone demo. The prototype was unstable: it dropped calls, froze, crashed. Through trial and error, the team developed a golden path: a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific order, that made the phone appear to work. A methodology famously described by a fellow engineer as “Creative Selection.”
The golden path does not end when the demo does. It continues into the device: the sliding hand, the pinch, the endless scroll. These gestures, first rehearsed on a stage, become the gestures of billions. They allow us to see more, access more, consume more, but always in a single direction, along a route designed for us.
Method
I have applied this idea to my own work: cutting, reordering, glitching, and remixing these carefully choreographed showcases to expose the structure through repetition: the walk on, the hands, the voice, the audience, the applause, the miraculous revelation of the new, decade after decade.
Myth-Making
Flusser argued that the apparatus disappears behind its output. Barthes described mythology as the process by which things built and designed for us are made to appear as though they could not have been otherwise. The tech demo is where both happen at once: the apparatus vanishes, the interface is naturalised, and contingency is converted into destiny. Before the keynote, the iPhone is an unstable engineering project. After it, the iPhone is the future.
The Gift
Increasingly, the tech demo arrives as a livestreamed spectacle that shifts culture and markets instantaneously. Share prices move during the keynote. Pre-orders open before the presenter leaves the stage. The demonstration is simultaneously a performance and a financial instrument.
The tech demo uses the edifice of scientific revelation while enclosing collectively produced knowledge, using the applauding audience as proof of universal acceptance. All presented as a gift.
You did not commission the smartphone. You did not vote for the platform economy. But the gift reshapes the world around you until refusing it becomes a form of exile. You cannot apply for a job without the internet. You cannot access your bank, your medical records, your children’s school without a device. You cannot pay for parking, order a prescription, file your taxes, prove your identity, or contact your council without a screen. You cannot navigate most cities without an app. You cannot maintain relationships across distance without the platforms that monetise them.
The montage does to the tech demo what the tech demo does to the technology: it chooses a path through the material and asks you to follow it.
Written and made by Liz Tobin.