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.
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.
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
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.
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.
I'm in mixed mind about them because you're right, they're too destructive, but for the time being their existence has prevented conflicts from breaking out, and since wars are typically only waged with the promise of financing it afterwards via looting or expansion, nobody is really willing to render land unusable in the process of conquering it.
It will inevitably happen. One day a dumb enough ruler will use it.
But what happens next? Do we just stop there, apologize and go back to our normal lives?
And you’re probably right, the next bomb would destroy that ruler, but only if the receiver has nukes as well. If he doesn’t, who’s going to do anything to defend/avange him? No one wants to enter an nuclear war.
The reciever doesn't need nukes. I live in Canada and we don't have any. But the threat of retaliation from our allies that do protect us from that threat.
That comment is the first time you've considered MAD? I mean, congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000, but I'm surprised you didn't learn about it in school.
When it's presented in school, it is presented as thing of the past and localised to how Russia and America treated/still treat one another, rather than threading the needle by explaining that it still applies today. I'm pretty sure I only picked up on it after reading online explanations/justifications of nukes.
Or in other words people focus on the panic of it so much that they don't stop to think of it as a good thing
TBF I think even without Nukes we wouldn't have war between big countries. Because the UN would discourage it. Ukraine being a big exception to that
Except the part where we have exhaustive evidence that nukes do not always render land unusable.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima are entirely fine. The radiation levels were back at safe levels in days. Yes, we definitely fucked up a lot of land with nuclear testing and power plant overloads, but the actual nukes humans have dropped on other humans? They're most effective when used in an air burst, and they clear up within days.
The power generation and medical applications of nuclear science cannot be overlooked based on warmongering, especially when the part youre concerned about isnt even an issue in that application of the field.
Interesting fact, the same man, Thomas Midgely Jr, invented both tetraethyl-lead as a fuel additive and CFCs, almost killing everyone on earth twice over.
Karma got him in the end after he got tangled in one of his contraptions after he became bedridden with polio and died of strangulation.
Net negative pushing us toward unavoidable global ecosystem collapse: it produces nothing but the unfulfilled promise of eventually replacing human workers, which it has never shown the capability to do and according to the researchers who founded the AI companies will never do due to "AI Scaling Laws". It has increased power consumption and costs by over 30% in some US States.
News used to just be the news when there was a half hour of local, half hour of national twice per night with a morning show for fluff, weather, and brief news updates. 24 hour news needed to fill the whole 24 hours and also pay for itself by getting eyeballs on advertisers. That’s when all of the sensationalist stuff started taking over.
Never actually did anything and never actually claimed to. Most people assumed it was a headache relief but the company never said that. They just said to put the shit on your forehead
That was actually a great invention, considering it replaced the unlimited hour work week (60-96 hours being normal in Victorian times). I agree that we should go further though.
Leaf blowers. They solve nothing permanently, it just moves around the leaves, meaning the blowers will be back again tomorrow morning, waking me up...
The biggest problem with leaf blowers is that blowing leaves is the least useful thing they can do. It is amazing for cleaning your house. Get the leaf blower out and just keep going until all the kitchen crumbs are out the back door.
Amazing, you're totally right! My cat was being messy, tracking litter everywhere, so I tried a leaf blower. Completely solved the problem, blew her right off the balcony!
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.
The reform of (many/most?) of Western public education systems.
It has turned what was among the best tool to prepare young people to become adults and citizens into a sad joke, into many wasted years during which those kids don't learn much, if anything. Reading (books), writing and even doing simple math are quickly vanishing skills. Let's not talk about history, sciences, the art of listening to and even to have an articulated dialogue, not insults or hatred, with anyone one doesn't agree with.
I feel devastated realizing how badly theses reforms have screwed up so many of the younger generations. What worse is that those reforms don't show much sign of being phased out, quite the contrary.
Being illegible is the point. Doctors just write 'his shit is fucked up, give him drugs or whatever idk' in Latin and if people understood that they would freak out
Made of rare earth metals and chemically reborn silicates ripped out of the rocks which we cling to every day to escape the incomprehensible void that otherwise dominates our reality, utterly.
There is no aspect of existence that can be viewed without the lense of destruction caused by our species.
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?
Wikipedia.
Encyclopedia Britannica.
Cambridge Dictionary.
Advertising.
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.
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?
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.
Nope. It just raises the question.
I can't specify a threshold, but it really comes down to the level of invasiveness.
A level that does't require selling people's data
Religion. So many of today's issues stem from the magical thinking inherent in religion.
Amen
nuclear weapons, too feckin dangerous to have
I'm in mixed mind about them because you're right, they're too destructive, but for the time being their existence has prevented conflicts from breaking out, and since wars are typically only waged with the promise of financing it afterwards via looting or expansion, nobody is really willing to render land unusable in the process of conquering it.
The problem is that it only takes one ruler insane enough to use them to wipe out most of humanity.
You're right. But if that ruler does decide to nuke a city or something, the next bomb to drop will probably be where said ruler is.
It will inevitably happen. One day a dumb enough ruler will use it.
But what happens next? Do we just stop there, apologize and go back to our normal lives?
And you’re probably right, the next bomb would destroy that ruler, but only if the receiver has nukes as well. If he doesn’t, who’s going to do anything to defend/avange him? No one wants to enter an nuclear war.
The reciever doesn't need nukes. I live in Canada and we don't have any. But the threat of retaliation from our allies that do protect us from that threat.
If Trump decides to launch a nuke at Vancouver, which of your allies are bold enough to send one his way?
The US probably since they'll also be nuking part of their own country if they did that. The fallout would 100% affect Washington.
Well, none. He can do whatever he wants.
His government is slightly smarter than him so for now we’re safe, however no one’s going to stop a dictator.
This is a good point I never considered before.
That comment is the first time you've considered MAD? I mean, congrats on being one of today's lucky 10,000, but I'm surprised you didn't learn about it in school.
When it's presented in school, it is presented as thing of the past and localised to how Russia and America treated/still treat one another, rather than threading the needle by explaining that it still applies today. I'm pretty sure I only picked up on it after reading online explanations/justifications of nukes.
Or in other words people focus on the panic of it so much that they don't stop to think of it as a good thing
TBF I think even without Nukes we wouldn't have war between big countries. Because the UN would discourage it. Ukraine being a big exception to that
Except the part where we have exhaustive evidence that nukes do not always render land unusable.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima are entirely fine. The radiation levels were back at safe levels in days. Yes, we definitely fucked up a lot of land with nuclear testing and power plant overloads, but the actual nukes humans have dropped on other humans? They're most effective when used in an air burst, and they clear up within days.
The power generation and medical applications of nuclear science cannot be overlooked based on warmongering, especially when the part youre concerned about isnt even an issue in that application of the field.
So far crypto currencies. So far they seem to expend a huge amount of electricity and used mostly for speculation.
A financial system that breeds billionaires
It's a three way tie between:
Leaded Gas
Aerosols
Nuclear bombs
Interesting fact, the same man, Thomas Midgely Jr, invented both tetraethyl-lead as a fuel additive and CFCs, almost killing everyone on earth twice over.
Karma got him in the end after he got tangled in one of his contraptions after he became bedridden with polio and died of strangulation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Midgley_Jr.
I first read of him in Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything (fantastic book). It really shows how awful this man was.
I also love this quote from the wiki article on his legacy -
He "had more adverse impact on the atmosphere than any other single organism in Earth's history".
Easy question:
AI
Net negative pushing us toward unavoidable global ecosystem collapse: it produces nothing but the unfulfilled promise of eventually replacing human workers, which it has never shown the capability to do and according to the researchers who founded the AI companies will never do due to "AI Scaling Laws". It has increased power consumption and costs by over 30% in some US States.
24 hour news networks.
News used to just be the news when there was a half hour of local, half hour of national twice per night with a morning show for fluff, weather, and brief news updates. 24 hour news needed to fill the whole 24 hours and also pay for itself by getting eyeballs on advertisers. That’s when all of the sensationalist stuff started taking over.
Slavery. Even after banning it pretty much everywhere, people still find ways to treat others as disposable property.
Shareholders.
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead
https://youtu.be/Is3icfcbmbs
Never actually did anything and never actually claimed to. Most people assumed it was a headache relief but the company never said that. They just said to put the shit on your forehead
Religion
It's likely LLMs in their current corporate circular funding form and cryptocurrency.
Disposable vapes come to mind, although the real answer is probably some extremely depraved torture device.
The wheel. Everything went downhill from there.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
What, you expected gravity to take it uphill?
Well, gravity wasn't discovered until much later...
The 40+ hour work week.
That was actually a great invention, considering it replaced the unlimited hour work week (60-96 hours being normal in Victorian times). I agree that we should go further though.
Always room for improvement, but to think the 40 work week was a bad idea shows how little history they know.
Yes 40 hours is better, but people still end up with very few hours to themselves when all chores are done.
Edit: Speaking as one that is looking at 25-30 more years on the grindstone 😔
Notice I wrote 40+ that means 60-96 work weeks are included.
And I am fully aware that workers have fought hard for the current 5 day work week, and we are working on 4 days even if it's slow progress.
Social media year over year shows it was a mistake.
Either leaded gasoline or pfas
Leaded gasoline is an Amazing answer. Fuck. Take my UpDoot.
Weapon of mass destruction
Weapons of mass destruction, obviously.
Teflon
PFAS
Asbestos
Lead pipes.
Lead pipes are fine. Step 1: Install. Step 2: ignore one generation of aggressive residents. Step 3: never touch the pipes again
Leaded gasoline has to be worse.
Leaf blowers. They solve nothing permanently, it just moves around the leaves, meaning the blowers will be back again tomorrow morning, waking me up...
The biggest problem with leaf blowers is that blowing leaves is the least useful thing they can do. It is amazing for cleaning your house. Get the leaf blower out and just keep going until all the kitchen crumbs are out the back door.
Amazing, you're totally right! My cat was being messy, tracking litter everywhere, so I tried a leaf blower. Completely solved the problem, blew her right off the balcony!
They're reasonable for getting leaves off roofs
industrialization.
it's caused unfathomable damage to us, our planet, and the organisms we share our world with.
it's also saved just as many as it's harmed, but there is an upper limit when our planet dies and we all die with it.
Leaded Gasoline comes to mind...
Meta
JavaScript
Expresscode for aftereffects
[Gestures broadly to Thomas Midgley Jr.] [Link]
Money
Property ownership
Plastic.
Coffee pods. Just when we were getting close to maybe reduce or reliance and dependency on plastics BOOM! coffee pods everywhere, by the trillions.
Money.
Nukes.
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.
Market speculation or quarterly profits.
Greed
Greed isn't an invention, it's a personality defect
The corporation.
Me.
Marketing
Waepons!
loans! They simply jack up the prices and help separate the haves from the have nots
Cars probably.
Roads
Chemical weapons
Profit.
Customer service. People have normalized that positions of power can be used to abuse others.
I know this will seem trendy, or whatever, but AI and social media have been the worst inventions since religion.
Agriculture.
We could have stayed in a world where we lived in harmony with nature instead of trying to control it.
Funny how few mention inventions that serve no other purpose than to kill people
Some of the other inventions are what build support in populations for inventing, building, and using those weapons
The reform of (many/most?) of Western public education systems.
It has turned what was among the best tool to prepare young people to become adults and citizens into a sad joke, into many wasted years during which those kids don't learn much, if anything. Reading (books), writing and even doing simple math are quickly vanishing skills. Let's not talk about history, sciences, the art of listening to and even to have an articulated dialogue, not insults or hatred, with anyone one doesn't agree with.
I feel devastated realizing how badly theses reforms have screwed up so many of the younger generations. What worse is that those reforms don't show much sign of being phased out, quite the contrary.
The military industrial complex.
Though maybe that's #2 after nuclear weapons.
Guns and other weapons
Sentience
Humans
Animal agriculture.
Interest, especially compound interest
car alarms
Mindcontrol
Farming
Cursive handwriting. Sorry, everything you wrote is useless because nobody, not even you, can read it.
Being illegible is the point. Doctors just write 'his shit is fucked up, give him drugs or whatever idk' in Latin and if people understood that they would freak out
I work in a museum, the amount of data lost due to illegible cursive handwriting is staggering.
It's very sensitive to sloppiness too, I think, like if you write quickly or mindlessly it loses form and legibility very easily.
Civilization is pretty catastrophic from every perspective besides humans and their parasocial relationships.
Reject culture. Return to nature.
You're typing this on a small computer.
Made of rare earth metals and chemically reborn silicates ripped out of the rocks which we cling to every day to escape the incomprehensible void that otherwise dominates our reality, utterly.
There is no aspect of existence that can be viewed without the lense of destruction caused by our species.
Order is in the eye of the beholder. One man's catastrophe is another man's miracle I guess....