Remember when we thought the internet was going to revolutionize the world? It was going to change our everyday lives. And it did. Oh technology... but did it lead us where it should have? Sometimes invention is a hardship. Much to our chagrin.
Redditor u/scrabbleking1966 wanted to know which life creations that were meant to bring about innovation actually brought about chaos by asking.... What great invention has turned out to be a curse?
Boomer Trouble.
Those damn phones - boomers 2019. WEERDMEMES
Boomers are on their phones now more than millennials ever were. Every single boomer I know just reads Facebook during dinner and it's absurdly rude. shadowmask
Beep Beep.
Cars are a blessing and a curse. So many people die from car wrecks. Yet I cant imagine not having them. Yeah their value is almost immeasurable but they can and often do cause so much death and destruction. I think we forget how much of a death trap they really are or at least they can be. Lukealloneword
Micro Successes....
Microtransactions. Before its creation, publishers and developers were able to take their time making amazing games that everyone loved and they only costed 20-60 dollars. They were successful.
After their creation, developers and publishers suddenly couldn't support themselves and constantly released rushed video games stuffed with microtransactions "just to stay afloat". It's not true, but that's what microtransactions do to people. They need more, more MOOOOOOORRRRRREEEE.
It's a curse. goody_fyre11
Bad Air.
The Vape. It was supposed to be a device to help you stopped smoking, instead, it brought more people to do it. Colonel37Sean
War Materials.
Nuclear weapons. Nighttime_traveller
Even the people in the process of inventing them knew they were a curse.
"I am become death, destroyer of worlds." - Oppenheimer upon seeing his theoretical research turned into an enormous ball of plasma and gamma rays. Reddit
Revolution!
Communism. depshet
Revolution from the ground up is what is needed, unfortunately it came from the top-down undermining the very rights of the people it aimed to protect. tomatoaway
Cursed Webs.
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To everyone saying internet is a curse. Stop it. At its worst the internet is morally neutral and at its best it's a universal database for nearly all the information in the world. The internet isn't a curse. The idiots who use it in bad ways are. jelly-filled-ham
Bless Us....
Religion, it has started way to much wars and caused way to much death. I'm not just thinking about Christianity, Jews aren't blameless they have done some things and Muslims are definitely not blameless at least as a whole because of all their radical members that they have (not all Muslims are radicals) but the people who blow up buildings and commit acts of terror for their god and their religion. Also The holocaust happened mostly out of the hate the nazis and Hitler had for the Jews. MaVoKG
Big data and Data science.
Big data and Data science. The early days (90s-early 2000's) were great. You could find anything you wanted to learn, anything you wanted to buy, communicate across he world, and pretty much everyone had the same ads and potential experiences. Now big data is being used to track every darn thing you do, and machine learning is being used to increasingly create echo chambers. Even worse, the corp world is using big data and machine learning to automate jobs people actually enjoyed doing, and may be the cause of the next big jobs crisis. cowanon7
Chlorofluorocarbons.
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Chlorofluorocarbons.
It was functionally great. The cold improved medical science, food preservation, and health in general. Of course it destroyed the ozone layer.
Fun fact: one of the core inventors, also invented leaded petroleum. Thomas Midgeley Jr. His final invention was a pulley system to support him due to polio. He ended up being strangled in it. CarNoob1337
The Famine.
Zyklon A. It started out as a extremely effective pesticide that caused no harm to the plants and had an extremely noticeable smell to let you know to back away because it was toxic. And then in ww2 the Germans took it and removed the smell and turned it into zyklon B the infamous gas used in the gas chambers in concentration camps and death camps. (Side note zyklon A was invented by a Jewish German scientist who also invented the first mass market fertilizer and pretty much saved Europe from a massive famine). m8key
Oh the Plastics....
The plastic. jkthor_9
We overuse plastics and suck at recycling. Plastics definitely have a bunch of medical impacts that have advanced society. But we have over used plastics and can't clean up after ourselves. And they're finding micro plastics in fish now. The dire consequences of our plastic litter may not even be apparent for a couple more generations. It will cause a disruption of food chains and entire ecosystems. HairyColonicJr
In Everything! Everywhere!
High fructose corn syrup in everything!! SithLard
Sugar in everything. HFCS is a red herring, and virtually no different healthwise than plain old sugar. Plain old sucrose sugar is, by definition, 50% glucose and 50% fructose. Most HFCS is sold as either HFCS 42 or HFCS 55, being 42% fructose and 55% fructose, respectively. CutterJohn
Before the gin....
The cotton gin.
Before the gin, picking the seeds out of cotton and separating the fibers was a labor intensive process that made cotton too expensive for the mass market. When it was invented, demand for cotton boomed as the price started to come down and slavery boomed with it. There was a lot more traction for abolition until that happened. Instead slavery increased and we had to fight a war to get rid of it. A time whose social repercussions can still be felt today, to put it mildly. ahfuq
Interweb Issues...
The internet.
When it became common, it was basically all of human knowledge in one, easily searchable database with instant results. Instant, global information and news. You could write a blog post or tweet and if it went viral, you'd get the same reach as international media conglomerates, overnight. Finally, everyone could easily fact-check, learn new things, debate with others. The potential was staggering.
Today, the internet exists only to amplify polarizing bull. You get online only to find your own personal echo chamber, custom-tailored to suit your own view of the world, regardless of how far from reality that view is, and you'd find others to agree with you and reinforce what you already have decided to be true. Free speech has been weaponized for propaganda and profit.
Man landed on the moon with a fraction of the computing power found in a twenty-year-old phone, and now that same power helps us argue that the Moon landing was faked and the Earth is flat.
We have instant access to the total sum of all human knowledge at our fingertips, and we've never been less informed. nrtlbwlitw
The MP3.
The MP3. At first a great format, now a relic of the early 2000's that sounds inferior to CD's and records, yet we still insist on using it despite FLAC being far superior. Led to music being mastered and people dropping proper sound systems.
Unlike video, where we thrive to get the sharpest, most dynamic image possible, music seems to content itself to la compressed dynamic range, low end quality sound and tiny speakers. SiriusXAim
Gas Ways.....
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Leaded petrol and CFC gas. Incredibly both invented by the same person. Cwlcymro