The way you start every fucking day by unsubscribing to somehow some new piece of spam
The way you lose your train of thought because you are closing newsletter signup popups and cookies acceptance popups and now being tracked and monitored in exactly the same way as before but now with added friction
The way Audible sometimes just crashes
The way Disney+ just forgets where you got up to and you get to fuck around and try to figure it out yourself
The way you need multiple streaming service subscriptions just to watch a handful of reasonable quality, interesting things
The way Google Home misinterprets basic requests and never seems to have any of the promised additional functionality or improvements and complains if you turn off a light with a switch as if it’s a threat
The way the connected wifi fan sometimes just can't be connected anymore
The way Twitter reloads while you are reading a tweet, whisking it away so you can never find it or read it again, replacing it with an ad for a game where a woman is too hideous for her husband and you have to fix her
The incomprehensibly frustrating selection of content now presented to you on Facebook mainly comprised of videos of unknown but extraordinary length of people icing cakes or staged “surprises” or fake security footage where nothing happens until the last few seconds but they tell you it’s about to happen for the entire time as all meaningful actions like communicating and transacting are now done elsewhere on the internet and the site is almost entirely populated with click harvesters, alt right extremist groups and conspiracy theorists
The way simple nice things like Wordle have to inevitably be swallowed up by capitalism
The way startups can't hire anyone except the damaged and deranged dregs fired by the big corporates who are vacuuming up the whole industry into their platform nightmares
The way a company who makes an html page with a list of links is worth more than a billion dollars
The way that our phones and ever-present screens funnel 24/7 news reporting and commentary down our throats so we can never be free from the collective anger and pain of the entire world as it writhes its way through increasingly horrific natural disasters
The way that basic websites entirely fail to function if you dare to use any browser other than Chrome
The way that massive, user-facing bugs seem to linger in production for days, months, years in a way that seems to indicate a disdain or even distaste for the actual people who the product is made for, like the way Twitter’s message tab sometimes takes 10+ seconds to load or LinkedIn will sometimes just not have a visible navigation bar
The way that all the ride sharing and house sharing services have inevitably turned to shit with the lowest quality and most expensive options being the only ones available
The way that Instagram forces you to pollute your psyche with altered faces and mindless, brain rotting junk simply to see an occasional update from an actual friend having a baby or getting a dog, leaving a trail in its wake of teenage girls with bulimia and women with faces puffed full of filler and a crushing sense of inadequacy and loneliness
The way the car's smart parking technology ends up bumping the car in front and the curb
The way Fitbit now just can't track my heart rate to the platform I want and seems uninterested in ever fixing this, despite this being the main reason why Fitbit would ever exist
The way the mask slips when the merge tags fail and you are addressed as %FIRSTNAME%
The way you get an email confirming you asked to never receive any emails ever again
The way the batteries aren't included or are dead whenever you want to use the thing
The way the TV needs to update the app you want to use and makes you wait until it's done and then it's always literally exactly the same as it was before
The way my phone’s keyboard, trying to be smart and learn and suggest “helpful” things, includes a gif keyboard which activates if I accidentally press the emoji button, which I do constantly because phones are bigger than ever and my hands are small, causing various messages I send to include the gif of the monkey looking suspicious, for no reason other than the heel of my hand grazed the side of my phone, making me want to throw my phone in the ocean
The way each increasingly bloated OS update provides literally no new value or even increasingly any noticeable difference at all other than some tiny widget hidden via a shortcut you will never discover
The way you can't shop online unless you're an expert in scams and drop shipping and low quality fake detection with a slim chance the stupid trinket thing you bought isn't just made for 5 cents in a sweatshop in Shenzen and will fall apart in three days if it's not literally damaged in the post
The way designers use icons whose meaning you can only guess at by using them, often finding out that they were irreversible and destructive action signifiers
The way in which tech companies, driven by an insatiable appetite for growth, are “innovating” by finding the next frontiers that regulation has yet to fully cover due to the ever widening gap between private industry and public legislation, and drive their extractive machinery in to suck out every drop of value before laws inevitably prevent them from doing so, even if it means violating human rights or driving genocides or accelerating climate change or colonizing the moon
The way that cryptocurrency people have essentially migrated to a different world where nothing matters because this world is on fire, where profit is king and money can be made from nothing with no consequences and no risks other than the literal tonnes of carbon used to get computers to solve increasingly hard problems for the entertainment of a small group of 20 something white men who should probably go outside
The way the metaverse is clearly a dystopia but somehow still a burgeoning trend on LinkedIn, featuring in the posts of beige middle managers in “tech teams” at corporate banks who sit in small grey felt cubicles and have a single photo of their cat pinned to the side to remind themselves of their identity as they make courtesy calls to other departments about emails they sent three days ago
The way NFTs are the ugliest and most horrible fedora trap ever created by our cursed species with an apparent aim to create the least pleasing imagery possible, both in content and in quality; a pyramid scheme loosely wrapped around another, slightly more dignified pyramid scheme
The way, as we approach the singularity clutching our shining, buzzing rectangles of horror, we’re supposed to be living in the best era, the most enabled and convenient, the way tech has saved us the hassle, the way it has connected us, the way it has given us access to more information than humankind has ever known, a firehose of data, of stories, of faces, of trends and memes and cats and dead bodies and raw genitalia and lies and scams and crypto-ransoms, the way it’s going to save us, it’s going to save us, it’s going to save us