Me: Cars
Agriculture.
We could have stayed in a world where we lived in harmony with nature instead of trying to control it.
Religion
[Gestures broadly to Thomas Midgley Jr.] [Link]
Customer service. People have normalized that positions of power can be used to abuse others.
Shareholders.
Advertising.
Some level of advertising is surely okay, right?
If I open a bakery and put a sign out front that says “Baked good for sale!” I don’t think anyone would complain but that IS advertising.
This begs the question: What level of advertising is okay?
A level that does’t require selling people’s data
I can’t specify a threshold, but it really comes down to the level of invasiveness.
I miss the days of requesting big thick catalogues be sent to you in the mail from companies you’d want to do business with. They’d send you a catalogue once or twice a year and then stop if you don’t buy anything for a while. I think that was a good method, the same way I don’t mind seeing other things available on websites I’m buying from.
I also don’t mind stuff like local coupon/advert mailers that come once a month or whatever, but those tend to all just be big companies advertising “sales” that always run these days, rather than anyone I’d want to try to support. But I like the idea of packaging up all the ads they want to send out and delivering them in one go. Maybe with an opt-out. All other junk mail, stuff you didn’t request, should be banned.
And I think signage on store windows and stuff is fine, as long as it’s not an eyesore, but billboards and rooftop signage should definitely be banned. Protruding signs like that hang off the side of buildings should also go.
Meatspace advertisements are the worst imo, because there’s very little you can do to avoid them.
This begs the question
Nope. It just raises the question.
The only correct answer in this thread.
It’s the biggest industry in the world by a very large margin and the most destructive one on a global scale.
Even advertising isn’t necessarily bad, having people telling you about things you might like used to be a good thing.
I personally think it’s people like Edward Bernays who had the idea of, I guess, ‘Malicious Advertising’. They really solidified the idea of applying propaganda techniques to advertising strategies and that just kind of become expected and the norm.
More people need to know about Bernays. Literally wrote the book, Propaganda in 1928. Went on to found the industry of Public Relations. He is the reason advertisers target your subconscious, make you feel bad, an use their products as a salve for the pain they inflict.
Adam Curtis covers the effects well in The Century of the Self. Watch out, it clocks in at just under 4 hours.
Cars are too prevalent in most countries, but they are undeniably very useful when used correctly. I would probably say the social media does more harm than cars, but idk if it’s the worst invention. Lots of candidates.
What about the idea of burning oil products in general? Sure, that made powerful and light engines possible, and they have transformed economies, logistics, trade, and entire countries. However, if we hadn’t invented that, progress would have been a lot slower.
Nevertheless, I would argue that the past 200 years of industrial progress weren’t worth the climate crisis.
I’ve been alive long enough to have become an adult before social media happened.
Social media is the correct answer.
I’ve never witnessed something have a more detrimental effect on society.
As an American, our discourse, especially political, went absolutely apeshit at the same time social media and smart phones started becoming a household thing. We absolutely would not be in the situation we currently find ourselves if not for social media.
There are simply too many ignorant humans for social media to be anything other than a total disaster.
Social Media is too prevalent in most countries, but it is undeniably very useful when used correctly.
Completely disagree because social media has done little to nothing to advance society.
Cars can at least be linked to more people able to travel further distances. Social media? “But I can still talk to my friend in another country”. I could too in the late 80s.
It’s called a telephone.
I think social media apps like youtube, email, and zoom have been very useful for society. The pandemic would have killed a lot more people if not for social media.
Social media spread propaganda and politicized Covid getting people who were vaccinated for other preventable diseases avoid the Covid vaccine and die.
I’d argue more people died to the pandemic because of social media and the ease of spreading fear and disinformation.
Social media allowed teams around the world to rapidly coordinate on the invention and distribution of the vaccines. COVID had fewer deaths than the 1918 influenza pandemic despite the massive increase in population since then, in part because of social media.
You need to define “social media” because earlier you named “email” and “zoom” as examples of social media, which sounds entirely wrong. Is talking to people face to face social media too? Have you just conflated “social media” with “communication”?
And then you say social helped researchers communicate when working on cures? You want to posit that Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat were vital pathways of communication for virologists collaborating on vaccines?
Social media are new media technologies that facilitate the creation, sharing and aggregation of content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongst virtual communities and networks.[1][2]
Wikipedia.
The earliest forms of social media appeared almost as soon as technology could support them. E-mail and chat programs debuted in the early 1970s, but persistent communities did not surface until the creation of the discussion group network USENET in 1979.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
websites and computer programs that allow people to communicate and share information, opinions, pictures, videos, etc. on the internet, especially social networking websites
Cambridge Dictionary.
Meta
It’s likely LLMs in their current corporate circular funding form and cryptocurrency.
Religion. So many of today’s issues stem from the magical thinking inherent in religion.
It’s easily disprovable, but even in the face of countless arguments against it, people still willingly throw themselves into it by the millions. They’re too fearful of the unknown, they’re fearful of belonging somewhere when we die and religion is the prime example of how easily controllable people are when they’re fearful.
Amen
I think it has to be something that poses an existential threat to human life on this planet, so cars (and other inventions dependent on fossil fuels) is a pretty good pick for the top of the list, IMO. I saw someone in the comments pick animal agriculture, and that, too, contributes to the existential threat of a warming planet; so that, too, feels like a good pick for the top of the list.
For me, though, nuclear weapons has to be the worst thing we’ve ever invented. No other invention is capable of ending human life on this planet so quickly and so thoroughly.
Theoretically, perhaps. Statistically, not even close. Mines have likely injured and killed more, both civilian and armed-forces.
Theoretically, we can argue that nuclear/atomic weapons have saved lives, due to conflicts that haven’t happenned.
Social media year over year shows it was a mistake.
Humans
Either leaded gasoline or pfas
Leaded gasoline is an Amazing answer. Fuck. Take my UpDoot.
Capitalism.
