For me, I would choose computer viruses.
Social media recommendation algorithms. They are too good at showing people what they want to see. They are largely at fault for causing social media to devolve into echo chambers and radicalizing people.
I’m not overly keen on the 15 seconds micro-content that sites like TikTok and YouTube (shorts) are pulling. It creates the most densely packed, quickly paced content I’ve seen and it feels like people are now addicted to quick bursts of info.
It feels like that type of content is doing to reduce people’s already awful attention span, I’ve already had mates who can’t read threads, articles and comments because it’s too slow, terrible
I have to say, Vine was on to something with 6 seconds. Too short for anything nefarious so it was mostly creative new memes and humor.
Meth and other drugs designed to keep you awake longer so you can work more.
Personalised marketing
Plastic
That would be problematic, because the problem is not plastic itself, but its use. Plastic has allowed countless medical and scientific benefits, such as ureteral stents, stents for aneurysms, catheters… And these are just the examples that came to mind on the fly.
Blockchain technology hasn’t contributed anything of lasting value, and too much money, energy, and good will has been burned by people trying.
Its most popular applications are cryptocurrencies, which are used for gambling, money laundering, and for collecting payments from ransomware victims. Someone once bought a pizza with them, but since that time their transactions have become too slow and their value too volatile to exchange them for anything so concrete.
Various attempts have been made to use blockchain technology for public or shared databases, but it turns out to be worse than all the other faster and much simpler existing solutions in that space.
Others have attempted to bolt it on to various business and social systems, but it hasn’t provided any practical benefit there either. It remains a slow and cumbersome alternative to every problem.
Its unique superpower is that it can be used to make contracts between parties that have no trust in one another and no social or legal system of enforcement, so long as your definition of a contract is sufficiently narrow, can be reduced to terms understood by the world’s slowest logic engine, and is perfectly encoded the first time around and doesn’t require any adjustment thereafter. If one or more of those conditions fail, you’ll find yourself turning to the social and legal systems of enforcement you thought you didn’t have.
Concrete. It is impossible to have any sort of modern civilization without concrete but you can still have education, division of labor, and a few of the things we enjoy in the modern world without ever becoming modern.
Concrete is ancient though. The Roman empire had concrete
