It’s a little bleak that every non-tech company now seems convinced the only way to stay relevant, both culturally and to an increasingly nonsensical stock market, is to bolt some kind of gadget onto their product. Even pasta sauce isn’t safe. Prego, the jar you probably outgrew sometime after childhood, is now in the tech biz, partnering with a nonprofit called StoryCorps to sell a device that records your family dinners.
Hot on the heels of shoe company Allbirds radically pivoting to AI in a sad, desperate effort to maintain solvency while simultaneously conning a bunch of sad, desperate Wall Street bros, Prego and StoryCorps have partnered to create The Connection Keeper, a small puck with two microphones designed to discreetly sit at the center of a dining table. At the press of a button, it records up to eight hours of conversation to a microSD card.
Thankfully, there’s no AI nonsense, and it doesn’t have any other obnoxious modern tech buzzwords crammed into it. It’s just a recording device, which in itself is unsettling enough, but a godsend for anyone who’s been hoping to record eight straight hours of noodle slurps.
Prego Is Selling a Device That Records Dinner Table Conversations. This Is Where We Are Now.
You can do whatever you want with the audio on the SD card, including sending it to StoryCorps’ archive, where it could end up preserved in the Library of Congress. That way, your noodle slurps and idle chitchat about that one foul b—h at your office can sit alongside the Gettysburg address and the collected marches of John Philip Sousa.
It’s being romantically pitched as a way to keep phones away from the dinner table and instead rally around a nondescript little thingy that preserves the stuff in life that matters more than anything: bickering about how the noodles are undercooked. I mean, I’ve heard of al dente, but this is ridiculous. If I wanted crunchy noodles, I would’ve just chomped through an uncooked brick of ramen.
Millions of hours of conversations just like that could one day sit beside Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and the actual, literal Declaration of Independence.
It doesn’t automatically record. Sadly, I breathed a sigh of relief after reading that, because I guess the modern world has made me so cynical that I just assumed a third-rate jarred pasta brand would default to weaponizing nostalgia to convince people to surveil themselves 24 hours a day without their permission. Glad to see we aren’t that dystopian… yet.
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