What We've Got Here is a Failure to Communicate: 1X’s Dar Sleeper vs. WIRED

I’d like to add yet another log to the internet discourse fire around the 1X NEO Robot WIRED story—and more specifically, 1X’s VP of Product and Design Dar Sleeper’s reaction to it. 

I can understand why an executive who has spent years building a technology he believes could change the world would be frustrated by a WIRED story that doesn’t match his enthusiasm or vision for the product. And if Sleeper’s decision to publish his note to the reporter on Twitter was a calculated attempt to extend the news cycle and add to the hoopla, job well done.

But if Sleeper’s note to the reporter (not to mention the decision to post it to social media) was a sincere reaction to the framing of the article, I think there’s something important getting lost in the commotion about sensationalized headlines, clickbait journalism, difficult executives, and snarky journalists. 

Sleeper described the 1X NEO robot as “one of the most important technological developments in the history of mankind.” If we’re pointing fingers at who is responsible for the angle of this story and Sleeper’s disappointment, we need to start here. 

Because not only is that an extraordinary claim, it creates an extraordinary burden of truth.

Tech reporters love to cover groundbreaking, epoch-defining, world-changing technologies.  Those stories can make careers, influence investment, shape public understanding, and change the trajectory of an industry. Tech reporters also hear about groundbreaking, epoch-defining, most-important-in-the-history-of-mankind technologies every day—from the people who produce those technologies. Reporters have heard enough of these claims to know that enthusiasm isn’t evidence.

So the issue here isn’t that a reporter chose to focus on an “inflammatory” angle rather than the “saving the world” angle for clicks or for the hell of it. A reporter sitting down with a company like 1X has any number of possible stories in front of them—it’s the company’s job to make the case for their story. If 1X truly believes NEO is our generation’s printing press, it’s on them to communicate what makes that true with enough specificity, evidence, and real-world consequence to beat a reporter’s natural skepticism.

Maybe that’s what happened, and the reporter chose another angle anyway. Maybe 1X missed the mark on communicating the importance of NEO. Or maybe the tech isn’t actually as revolutionary as Sleeper thinks it is, and the reporter could spot that.

The ironic thing is that maybe there’s a great story here if 1X had communicated the significance of the technology better—a great story that, in fact, the WIRED piece is pointing to directly: If these robotic hands could eventually help people do things their bodies currently prevent them from doing, that’s not just a story about impressive hardware. It’s a story about autonomy: about enabling people to move through this world the way they want to—including in their sex lives.

I don’t know whether 1X’s technology can actually do any of that. And that’s actually the point. I don’t know. Sleeper is the one claiming that these hands represent one of the most important technological developments in human history. If there is a compelling answer to what they will allow people to do that they could not do before, it was 1X’s job to communicate it.

Instead, the reporter found his own answer to the question of what these hands might be used for. Sleeper just didn’t like it. In this case, that doesn’t necessarily mean the reporter missed the story. It could mean 1X failed to tell the better one.