Ask Lemmy

The dentist's drill.

Cars, and all the resulting infrastructure.

Ruined city structures and, to an extent, local communities. Small corner stores and tight-knit communities have vanished in favour of giant shopping malls meant to serve everyone in a huge radius.

The concept of proprietary parts.

If your product is so shitty that your plan to make money is to be the only supplier of parts when it breaks theb just fuck off into the sea.

Derivatives and other complex financial instruments.

Tools for cheating others out of money, obfuscating transactions or skirting legal restrictions.

Those k-cups, and disposable vapes... You know what? Anything that has disposable in their name.

Yes even baby and feminine products.
Disposable cutlery, disposable bags, FAST fashion, the freaking packaging, the non returnable glass/plastic bottles.

AI/LLM, pretty much ruining and causing everything thats wrong right now.

Not quite technology, unless you factor in the development of cable TV, but 24 hour news networks. That was the start of news as entertainment, as they didn’t have enough to fill 24 hours and had to do whatever they could to get and retain viewers.

2 stroke engines as means of transport for teenage boys.

What? No, of course that gathering of mopeds 150m from my apartment building isn't affecting my unbiased opinion on this.

Private health insurance

LLMs. Their actual usefulness is so much less than the cost and effort it takes to make the modes. Probably not an unpopular take, especially on this platform.

Dress shoes

Rich people wanted to pretend they always ride horses, so they always wore slim shoes. This became the standard for all shoes, and everyone has been suffering since

AI, and Nukes.

Fire. If we couldn't get more calories out of food our calorie hungry brains couldn't develop more and maybe we wouldn't be living in this hellacape

All things plastic disposable.

Airplanes.

I shall not elaborate.

~~Translation: I'm just a little hater~~

Surveillance cameras. I get it's a hot topic right now but I've hated them for a long time particularly in work environments. The crimes they prevent have never overcame the abusive relationship I perceive in them

Generatige AI and Surveillance Systems

Nuclear bombs.

I'm still annoyed at that first fish that thought "I wonder if I could live on the land"

Generative AI. Useless slop.

Plastic

Generally just over engineering. Cars used to be serviceable but here we are, thousands of small decisions later, decisions that led to things being standardized as far more complicated. Good luck working on a new car.

Same trend is everywhere in society. Websites used to be 20 KB of specially formatted text and maybe 500 KB of images. Now they're literally megs of images and JavaScript and to build one in a modern setting, you're expected to use and install gigs of dependencies. And beyond that we're being asked to burn down rainforests for a half genius/half moron machine to "help" us with the process. This is "more efficient" after all.

The personal automobile. Hands down the worst thing to happen to humanity until we kill ourselves with nuclear winter later this year.

Digital currency to 'replace' physical currency.

Gone are the days of storing physical coins that could increase their value in the future. Instead, we have digital coins with a dog on it and can be lost via hard drives dying.

This also includes items like credit/debit cards, gift cards, and pre-paid cards. A single piece of plastic should hold less value than natural metals like copper and nickel.

Something with actual mass should hold more value than something without mass (data).

Pop-up ads

plastics and commercials

Capitalism

Agriculture was probably the beginning of the end. And while not necessarily a 'technology', the concept of land ownership was a bad idea as well.

Landfills I guess? If the idea of just... disposing of something was never normalized, we might be more conscientious about what we make and what becomes of it when we don't need it any more.