Let me tell you about my smartphone.
Nah, not the cyber-coffin that I’m currently shackled to, — I mean the one I had in 2015. You know, back when apps still crashed with dignity and your camera couldn’t yet look with intellect into the soul of my messy work. It took okay photos, loaded Wikipedia fast enough to fake intelligence on dates, and let me text my friends without screaming at predictive text like my dad trying to command Alexa.
When that phone finally died – may it rest peacefully in a landfill full of its brethren – I “upgraded” to a model that did the same stuff… just marginally better. Like, wow, the blur in my drunk selfies was now 30% crisper. Technological enlightenment, here we come.
And that’s been the rhythm of “innovation” for the last ten years: marginally shinier turds polished and packaged as revolution.
Ten years ago, we were also promised flying cars, AI soulmates, and a utopia of post-work creativity, but what we got was fifteen food delivery apps, an AI that emails your boss passive-aggressively for you, and also. . . subscription-based mindfulness apps (though we’re not meditating, you’re beta testing, but that aside).
And no, I’m not foaming at the mouth about tech again.
Not today, Satan.
This post isn’t a tantrum, nor a plea to go back to ye olde days.
I wanted to serv you a slow, controlled, emotionally dead assessment of how we’re funneling the world’s collective genius into building slightly better crap, while the basics of human happiness rot like an avocado under a ring light.
More rants after the commercial brake:
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The innovation treadmill
A bit short of a hundred years ago, in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes, bless his blissfully naive little heart, predicted that by 2030, we would only be working 15 hours a week, sipping absinthe while composing limericks about abundance.
Technology, he thought, would free us from soul-sucking labor.
But it didn’t liberate us.
Instead, we got Slack.
And Jira.
And Microsoft Copilot bots that whisper, “You could be doing more”.
Instead of art, we have created an economy where work has metastasized into every corner of life.
Yes, you read it right.
Productivity tools now double as surveillance mechanisms, and any “efficiency gain” gets sucked into a capitalist black hole that spits out new jobs making, marketing, and managing more fucking stuff.
Streaming?
Oh, you mean the modern Tower of Babel?
We had only Netflix for a while.
Then the corporate hydra sprouted new heads: Disney+, Apple TV+, Max, Paramount+, Peacock, you know, a constellation of content silos that need constant feeding.
Did anyone of us actually ask for this?
No.
We didn’t need more streaming services.
Corporations did.
New profit centers.
More glimmering Stuff™ to shill.
And yet another thing for you to forget the password to.
Marginally better, fundamentally dumb as shit
The “new tech = solution” pitch is always the same. New thing X will fix problem Y, or revolutionize your Z experience. Then you zoom out and realize that Y wasn’t even a problem until X showed up in the first place.
Complex logic, right?
But not for you my friend!
I know you !
A friend of mine (not me for a change) bought a “smart” fridge from Samsung, you know, the kind with a screen that talks to your phone and maybe judges you silently when you eat ice cream at 2 AM. It cost almost five grand. Now it glitches mid-defrost like it’s trying to join the AI Singularity early, and the compressor makes a noise like a smoker exhaling their final breath.
Meanwhile, my parent’s dumb-as-bricks fridge is still chilling.
No drama at all.
Not even firmware updates.
No identity crisis.
Modern cars, oh no, don’t get me about those gnarly thangs. They have got more sensors than the Mars Rover. They beep when you drift, brake when you sneeze, and ping your phone if you think about looking at it, but somehow, getting from A to B is still a soul-imploding nightmare. All that tech? Mostly compensating for problems created by…cars. Like being too huge to park or so distractingly “smart” that we need tech to keep us from smashing into stuff while using it.
If aliens came down and audited us, they would assume our only mission was to create gadgets until the planet begged for sweet, molten release.
And they wouldn’t be wrong.
The consumption treadmill is sprinting to nowhere
Here’s the cycle of life, until the day we die (and a few days after as well):
“Work more, buy more shit, shit breaks faster, repeat”.
We are hamsters on a platinum wheel, eating digital feed while Bozo the Benevolent, Skum, Zucky and Pitch-AI films us from space.
Planned obsolescence is no longer a conspiracy theory, it has become a design principle. Your phone dies a slow, laggy death after two years.
Your printer “forgets” it’s connected.
Your TV suddenly can’t speak Netflix.
All of this is intentional, baby.
It’s not a bug. It is a recurring revenue feature.
Americans now hoard twice the junk they did in the ’70s.
Are you guys happier?
Didn’t think so.
Statistically, we have become more sad, lonelier, and more medicated. But hey, they’ve got air fryers with Wi-Fi now!
As Vance Packard (the patron saint of “WTF is wrong with consumer culture”, before it was cool) nailed back in 1960: we are buying crap that we don’t need, with money we don’t have, to impress people we actively loathe.
Humanity peaked with that line.
We should’ve stopped innovating then.
The lightbulb that refused to die
If you want a shining, literal example of how broken the system is, let me introduce you to the one true immortal in America, no, not Abraham Lincoln’s ghost, I’m talking about a lightbulb.
A real one.
Still glowing, but not metaphorically.
In a fire station in Livermore, California, a bulb has been burning since 1901.
That’s not a typo.
That’s one hundred and twenty-plus years of uninterrupted light.
Marriages collapsed, governments fell, and fridges required logins, but this 4-watt glass relic just keeps going, like the Methuselah of tech.
It’s called the Centennial Light, and it’s the kind of engineering miracle that today would be laughed out of an R&D meeting for being “too efficient”.
It was built by Shelby Electric, back when companies still pretended to give a shit.
No software.
No firmware.
No “smart” anything. Just a thick carbon filament, low voltage, and the audacity to keep working. Meanwhile, your latest $300 LED bulb gasps its last breath before your cat even notices it.
And that, right there, is the problem.
You see, in the 1920s, some corporate goblins gathered and formed the Phoebus Cartel (founded by General Electric), and that’s a real-world lightbulb mafia that made sure bulbs didn’t last too long.
Yes, they literally conspired to reduce the lifespan of bulbs to 1,000 hours.
Why?
Because long-lasting bulbs are bad for business.
The cartel engineered failure to increase sales. The modern lightbulb isn’t a product, but a subscription to disappointment.
We could have had bulbs that lasted decades.
We did have them.
But selling you one bulb every 30 years doesn’t move enough yachts. So now, instead of products, we get products that break on schedule.
Your devices are built to die.
Your smart fridge has the life expectancy of a mayfly.
Your earbuds are disposable. Your LED strip lights are mood lighting for late-stage capitalism.
This is what “innovation” looks like when it’s weaponized by greed,l not brighter futures, just shorter lifespans.
The planet is dying so you can bluetooth your shoes
Consumer goods are responsible for about 60% of global greenhouse emissions. But sure, let’s focus on reusable straws and pretend that it’s your fault.
Every shiny new gadget contains minerals torn from the Earth under apocalyptic conditions. Your smartphone is a blood diamond with emojis.
Your e-waste is piling up like guilt in a Catholic confessional.
Most of it doesn’t get recycled.
It never did.
They just exported it. They send our toxic techno-carcasses to places already screwed by climate colonialism.
Out of sight, out of conscience.
The Pacific Garbage Patch is now bigger than some countries.
Microplastics are in our blood.
We are literally becoming synthetic.
And still, yet still, the machines churn, and are pumping out more crap you will toss after one iOS update.
Innovation for the 1%
Who does all this whiz-bang bullshit really help?
Good question!
Not the kid drinking brown water.
Not the nurse sleeping in her car.
No, it’s actually the startup bro who needs his burrito delivered by drone to his Peloton. Apps that get oat milk to yuppies in under 9 minutes get millions.
And life saving tech that might actually help people not starve go unfunded, because they are unsexy, unprofitable, and therefore, unmade.
As Allen Ginsberg (the Boomer Twitter thread of the ‘50s) once screamed. . . “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…” Except now the madness is building Rabbit R1s while the planet cooks.
The poor don’t need smart mirrors.
They need roofs.
But roofs aren’t trending on ProductHunt.
Progress today means a marginally improved camera and a fivefold increase in the chance your device gets hacked, bricked, or sold back to you through a subscription.
And what about cryptocurrency?
Oh please.
The great “revolution” in finance turned out to be a pyramid scheme with Bored Apes and tax fraud. It’s Las Vegas for dudes who failed ethics class and math.
Even mindfulness got eaten by the machine.
Now you need a $12.99/month app to remember how to breathe.
We’re all stuck in the great upgrade scam
You can try to opt out. Keep your old phone. Avoid fast fashion. But eventually, the machine drags you back.
Your apps won’t run.
Your clothes disintegrate.
Your moral high ground turns into a tech support nightmare.
It’s not a glitch.
It’s the design, and obsolescence is the business model.
Capitalism doesn’t want you free. It wants you tired, addicted, broke, and confused, but with a wearable sleep tracker telling you to get more rest.
And so we circle the drain, hypnotized by “better” stuff that doesn’t solve a single goddamn problem. Each cycle more wasteful, more exhausting, more hilariously tragic.
The tragedy isn’t just the mountain of pointless crap.
It’s what we didn’t build instead.
All those brilliant minds, wasting their lives connecting a juicer to your Instagram, could have reinvented public transit, decarbonized cities, or, hell, just made some affordable housing that doesn’t look like a dystopian nightmare.
Instead, every real innovation gets co-opted, solar panels become bougie status symbols, AI gets weaponized for ad targeting, and your therapist is now a chatbot with banner ads.
This isn’t innovation.
It’s inflated product churn.
More junk, more hype, more “disruption” that never disrupts anything except your bank account and your will to live.
And so, the future… is just more fucking stuff
That’s it.
That’s the punchline of this post.
I could have just said that in the TL;DR and be done with it, but instead I decided to bore you to death with anecdotes and cynical rants.
We are stuck in a never-ending cascade of tech “solutions” to problems we didn’t have, sold as salvation, swallowed like holy wafers by a population desperate for relief from the very system shoving shiny new chains down their throats.
So I said it !
We are not building a better world.
We are assembling a prettier chaotic mess.
But hey, at least your fridge can now tell you you’re out of almond milk.
Signing off from my only hope of salvation, which is a factory reset. Not for my phone, but for my soul. But don’t worry, they’ll sell you the firmware update. $9.99 a month. Includes ads.
Marco
Oh? Did I ask you to take the survey?
I build AI by day and warn about it by night. I call it job security. Let’s keep smashing delusions with truth. We are the chaos. We are the firewall. We are Big Tech’s PR nightmare.
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To keep you doomscrolling 👇
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- AIs dirty little secret. The human cost of ‘automated’ systems | LinkedIn
- Open-Source AI. How ‘open’ became a four-letter word | LinkedIn
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- The Paris AI Action summit. 500 billion just for “ethical AI” | LinkedIn
- People are building Tarpits to trap and trick AI scrapers | LinkedIn
- The first written warning about AI doom dates back to 1863 | LinkedIn
- How I quit chasing every AI trend (and finally got my sh** together) | LinkedIn
- The dark visitors lurking in your digital shadows | LinkedIn
- Understanding AI hallucinations | LinkedIn
- Sam’s glow-in-the-dark ambition | LinkedIn
- The $95 million apology for Siri’s secret recordings | LinkedIn
- Prediction: OpenAI will go public, and here comes the greedy shitshow | LinkedIn
- Devin the first “AI software engineer” is useless. | LinkedIn
- Self-replicating AI signals a dangerous new era | LinkedIn
- Bill says: only three jobs will survive | LinkedIn
- The AI forged in darkness | LinkedIn
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