Indicators of economic development, like the GDP, do not always tell us how people are really doing. Or at least how they feel.
When the Pew Research Center asked 43,000 people from 38 countries if the world is better off now than it was 50 years ago, 43 percent said yes while 38 percent said no.
Interested in what things the latter group blames for their discontent, Reddit user Madbonkersbean made a post on the platform, asking everyone "What invention has most negatively impacted society?" Here are some of the most upvoted replies they've received.
Image credits: Madbonkersbean
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> In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
Social media
I've watched society go from mildly disgruntled over multiple decades, to flat out delusional and insane within 5 years.
Nothing else has touched that many people all at once and undermined how we used to think of ourselves
It causes so much distraction and splintered thinking that people avoid looking inward, toward self.
Religion.
Hands down.
Pop up ads... even the inventor hated it
The thing that has the most negative long term impact on society is probably going to be something affecting us right now that we have yet to experience the full ramifications of
My bet is on the widespread presence of plastic in literally everything
Facebook. Hands down.
Millions of users that are basically technologically illiterate with no critical thinking skills finly connected. They put faith/trust in the articles with attention grabbing headlines that are shared by their peers because they trust their peers and grew up in a time where you relied on the people in your community. But with no critical thinking skills they don't understand that an article about the earth being flat that was produced by an amateur crystal enthusiast has no scientific basis. They don't even know at the bare minimum to verify the source.
"Well aunt Edna shared it and she knows a thing or two."
It allowed misinformation and stupidity to spread incredibly quickly.
Stopped using FB when it became a cesspool of "im better than YOU", anti-vax, praise be to god minions, and hail trump posts
I think the way that capitalism is designed to bring psychopaths and sociopaths to the top. those heartless f***s would fire their own parents/siblings for personal gain.
Any heirarchical society inherently does this, not just capitalist ones. Look at the asshats in charge of the Communist bloc, when it existed. The Aztecs. The Chinese empire. And so on.
Deepfake, the fact this has lead to morphing of many women images to "punish" them or to sexualize them is scary af. Literally feels like revenge p**n
AI, wait and see
What frightens me most about AI is that it's learning from our internet personality. It's like teaching a baby to speak exclusively by putting them in the front seat of a car during traffic and learning from the drivers road rage. AI is not learning how we actually interact with each other. It's learning how we interact with each other on the internet. That fact alone should leave us petrified of it.
Warning labels. They impede the progress of natural selection.
Daylight Savings Time, at least where I live. You go forward an hour for spring and summer months, and you go back an hour in fall and winter. If you don't adjust very well to change, it can be a real b***h.
Tiktok
TikTok started as a good thing but now totally fckd up. Human trafficking, dangerous content to be famous, animal cruelty etc. Bad bad bad…
Nuclear weapons: devastating impact, global tensions, potential for catastrophic conflict.
Plastic, right now you have microplastics in every single organ, including your brain.
And for some having plastic in the brain is an improvement.
Cigarettes killed 100million people in the back 80 years of the 20th century alone.
Infinite Scrolling and I daresay algorithms that feed into an echo chamber.
The information bubble echo chamber is the worst. It's what has fed so many negative things in our world. I miss civil discourse where we could learn from one another instead of just shouting at one another.
Kid friendly 'youtube shorts'. I just feel like it ruins the attention span of children, giving them short/one minute attention spans over time. They just get sucked into that s**t. I know it's not super significant compared to other inventions that could've negatively impacted society. I'm trying to think of something that might not have been mentioned here yet lol.
Super creepy too. I saw a documentary about it a couple years ago. I wish I could remember where I saw it, but it was about groups mashing together free 3D animation assets with kids songs in order to suck kids into these endless playlists on YouTube for ad revenue. Parents will just hand the toddler an Ipad and the kid spends hours watching these playlists and YouTube counts it as interaction so the "creators" get money. At least it's creepy and at worst it's dangerous.
Asbestos. I feel very bad for the people who were unknowingly affected by it.
The 24-hour news cycle .
They have so much time that they have to make more stories to keep you informed. 24-hour news will be our downfall. Half an hour every night is enough.
Junk food.
Not a bad thing per se, but lack of will power is! I love a cheap and dirty burger occasionally, but I think the last time I had one was 10 years ago. Chips (or fries) I have more frequently, but not more than once every few months.
Leaded petrol is estimated to have lowered the IQ of everyone born in the 60s and 70s by around 6%.
That's my excuse anyway, what's yours?
Everyone here is only drawing from relatively recent examples , but if you go back longer then really alcohol is the winner here as it has had the most long lived and consistent negative impact on all societies around the world.
and technicaly speaking, without beeer we would not have a civilization, beer was a safe drink becase water wasnt drinkable... but yes, i have to agree, alcohol had very long and very negative impact on society. and its legal becase someone could make money of it, noone cares if its harmfull. they would sell azbestors drinks if they could make a money of it...
Sugar in our food and drinks.
especially in those products where it does not belong at all. E.g. bread is not supposed to taste like cake, but the producers don't seem to mind as long as they can get people addicted.
Ive got a few here but if i have to pick one:
Fractional reserve banking and fiat currency. Giving the banks power to manipulate the value of currency has been a blight on society, it has been used to enrich the banks and steal wealth of money, i wish we could go back to money being a unit of value not a fiat currency that can be manipulated.
It's an insidious invention that enslaves people and transfers more wealth to the already- wealthy.
Guns. Literally their only purpose is to take the life of another living thing.
Adding lead to gasoline, adding lead to house paint, using lead pipes ... I know that lead is a fundamental element, but exposure to lead in our environment causes cancer and brain damage.
It's often speculated that had the cotton gin not been invented, slavery might have ended sooner
PFAS
pipocapop:
This should be higher on the list. Almost all waterproof products and stain resistant products contain PFAS. Even fast food wrappers contain them. It is found in majority of water supplies and 90% of people’s blood and we don’t fully understand the health effects. It does not degrade and accumulates in the food chain.
Shareholder Value
Focusing on this quarter's bottom line for shareholders to the exclusion of all else is destroying our economy and society.
Nuclear arms race and proliferation...
Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency is accelerating climate change and no one seems to highlight the dangerousness that it is causing. I hope it ALL implodes upon itself!
Lobotomy.
In hindsight very few unlucky people actually underwent lobotomy but still.
My mum's school friend was lobotomised when they were in their teens because she had anorexia. Mum said she didn't seem to have a problem with anorexia any more after that but that she had a whole host of other problems instead and was never the same again. No wonder. That was in the UK in the early 70s.
The invention of Fentanyl. Destroyed so many people, families and frankly society in general.
Note: this post originally had 50 images. It’s been shortened to the top 40 images based on user votes.
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A lot of these sound like "let's go back to the good old times" by people who never had to live during the 'good old times', and are too lazy or afraid to look up how life really used to be. Don't fall for this kind of sentimentalism.
Exactly. We’re living in the good old days. People who romanticize a more “idyllic” or “simple” life have no clue how hard life was for the vast majority of human history.
Load More Replies...
I am sort of disagree with quite number of them. There are nuances to everything. Plastics are useful, cheap and multipurpose. We just have to dispose & recycle them properly. Same thing with social media. They connect us. In a way that was not possible before. We just have to use them properly. Limit the usage when appropriate. LED lights. They are bright, high energy efficiency and can last a long time. It saves energy (70 -80%) vs less than 5% on incandesent light. Even paid subscriptions has its place. Especially if you intent to use them only for a short amount of time. Cheaper then buying it outright at the full price. Saying all of them should never existed is doing great disservice to society.
I mostly agree with you. Except I do think we should reduce our use of single-use plastics. The thing about recycling is that many plastics aren’t actually worth recycling because it would cost more and use more energy than just using new plastic. The quality also degrades when they’re recycled, so you can’t just keep recycling them infinitely. We shouldn’t eliminate them completely, but we really don’t need to use plastic for everything we’re using plastic for. What’s surprising, though, is that plastic grocery bags are actually better for the environment than the other options as long as they’re disposed of properly (incineration). But I’ll keep using my reusable bags because I have to use them at Aldi if I don’t want to buy paper bags every time and I might as well use them everywhere else. And the post about LED lights was specifically about LED headlights on cars, which are too bright and make it hard for other drivers to see.
Load More Replies... I'm surprised no ones said this yet...but, the plow. I've heard it said that agriculture is the worst thing human beings invented. It allowed us to discontinue a nomadic hunter/gatherer life, and allowed us to live in environments we aren't physically well adapted to. Becoming sedentary with more food allowed the population to grow, gave more time to create new technologies, and created greater stress on the ecosystem surrounding us. This is an overly simplistic explanation, but without the plow (agriculture) the huge society we have with its guns and smartphones and bitc9un or whatever would t ever have even been possible.
So you’d rather live in a world without electricity, cars, modern medicine, etc? Because that’s the alternative.
Load More Replies... A lot of these sound like "let's go back to the good old times" by people who never had to live during the 'good old times', and are too lazy or afraid to look up how life really used to be. Don't fall for this kind of sentimentalism.
Exactly. We’re living in the good old days. People who romanticize a more “idyllic” or “simple” life have no clue how hard life was for the vast majority of human history.
Load More Replies... I am sort of disagree with quite number of them. There are nuances to everything. Plastics are useful, cheap and multipurpose. We just have to dispose & recycle them properly. Same thing with social media. They connect us. In a way that was not possible before. We just have to use them properly. Limit the usage when appropriate. LED lights. They are bright, high energy efficiency and can last a long time. It saves energy (70 -80%) vs less than 5% on incandesent light. Even paid subscriptions has its place. Especially if you intent to use them only for a short amount of time. Cheaper then buying it outright at the full price. Saying all of them should never existed is doing great disservice to society.
I mostly agree with you. Except I do think we should reduce our use of single-use plastics. The thing about recycling is that many plastics aren’t actually worth recycling because it would cost more and use more energy than just using new plastic. The quality also degrades when they’re recycled, so you can’t just keep recycling them infinitely. We shouldn’t eliminate them completely, but we really don’t need to use plastic for everything we’re using plastic for. What’s surprising, though, is that plastic grocery bags are actually better for the environment than the other options as long as they’re disposed of properly (incineration). But I’ll keep using my reusable bags because I have to use them at Aldi if I don’t want to buy paper bags every time and I might as well use them everywhere else. And the post about LED lights was specifically about LED headlights on cars, which are too bright and make it hard for other drivers to see.
Load More Replies... I'm surprised no ones said this yet...but, the plow. I've heard it said that agriculture is the worst thing human beings invented. It allowed us to discontinue a nomadic hunter/gatherer life, and allowed us to live in environments we aren't physically well adapted to. Becoming sedentary with more food allowed the population to grow, gave more time to create new technologies, and created greater stress on the ecosystem surrounding us. This is an overly simplistic explanation, but without the plow (agriculture) the huge society we have with its guns and smartphones and bitc9un or whatever would t ever have even been possible.
So you’d rather live in a world without electricity, cars, modern medicine, etc? Because that’s the alternative.
Load More Replies...