Christopher Mims voices the prevailing sentiment here:

All in, 2013 was an embarrassment for the entire tech industry and the engine that powers it—Silicon Valley. Innovation was replaced by financial engineering, mergers and acquisitions, and evasion of regulations. Not a single breakthrough product was unveiled—and for reasons outlined below, Google Glass doesn’t count.

He continues to point out the poor performance of high-profile product launches, the abysmal behavior of the industry’s “ruling class”– venture capitalists and leading executives– and the fallout from revelations like the NSA’s Prism program. Yes, 2013 brought forth a general miasma of bad faith, shitty ideas, and creepy, neoreactionary bubble zeitgeists: Uber’s exploitative airline-style pricing and BitTulip mania are just two prominent examples.

He didn’t cover everything; presumably for space, he gave no coverage to Sean Parker’s environmental catastrophe of a wedding (and the 10,000-word rant he penned while off his meds) and its continuing environmental effects. Nor did he cover the growing social unrest in California, culminating in the blockades against “Google buses”. Nor did he mention the rash of unqualified founders and mediocre companies like Summly, Snapchat, Knewton, and Clinkle and all the bizarre work (behind the scenes, by the increasingly country-club-like cadre of leading VCs) that went into engineering successes for these otherwise nonviable firms. In Mims’s tear-down of technology for its sins, he didn’t even scratch the surface, and even with the slight coverage given, 2013 in tech looks terrible.

So, was 2013 just a toilet of a year, utterly devoid of value? Should we be ashamed to have lived through it?