Category: Technology

I know what you’re thinking. “Things were better in the old days” is the oldest complaint in human history. Every generation says it. Socrates probably said it. Your grandfather definitely said it.

So let me get this out of the way up front: nostalgia bias is real. Psychologists call it rosy retrospection — a well-documented cognitive tendency to remember the past as better than it was. We forget the bad stuff, polish up the good stuff, and end up comparing a curated highlight reel of 1995 against the unedited reality of today. I know this. I’ve read the research. I’m aware that my brain is doing this.

And I still think something is measurably wrong.

Not with everything. Not in some grand civilizational collapse. But in a specific, observable, increasingly irritating way that touches almost every consumer interaction I have. The products are worse. The people selling them know less. And the systems designed to help you when things go wrong are engineered — deliberately, I’d argue — to make you give up before you reach a human being.

Let me walk you through it.

The kid in the electronics store

A few weeks ago I walked through a shopping mall about half an hour before closing time. Most of the stores were quiet. And in almost every one, the same scene: young employees sitting behind counters, staring into their phones.

I’m not about to do the boomer rant about kids and their screens. But this observation triggered a memory — or maybe a realization — about something that’s changed fundamentally in retail.

Before smartphones, when a shop was empty and the evening was slow, employees had nothing to do. Nothing except look around the store. Read the product brochures stacked on the counter. Pick up a speaker, a camera, a jacket, and actually handle it. Boredom forced engagement with the inventory. You absorbed product knowledge by osmosis, simply because there was nothing else to absorb.

That mechanism is gone.

I’ve tested this more times than I’d like to admit. I’ll spend ten minutes on my phone researching a product — a speaker system, a pair of headphones, a piece of kitchen equipment — and then walk into the store to buy it. When I ask the employee a basic question about the product they’re selling, I already know more than they do. Every single time. Not because I’m some kind of expert, but because the bar has dropped through the floor.

This isn’t just my perception. Retail training hours have been in decline for years. The shift from specialty stores — where the guy selling you a hi-fi system had been an audiophile for twenty years — to generic big-box chains staffed by whoever applied last Tuesday has created an entire generation of retail workers who are paid minimum wage to stand near products they’ve never used, for a company that invested nothing in teaching them about what they sell.

The transaction used to include knowledge transfer. You went to the store partly because the person there could tell you something you didn’t know. That value proposition is dead. Now the store is just a warehouse with lights, and the employee is a checkout obstacle between you and the exit.

The washing machine that lasted thirty years

My parents had a washing machine that ran for over twenty years. Their fridge lasted even longer. Damn, they still have a freezer that’s almost as old as me, when I think about it. These aren’t exceptional stories — ask anyone over fifty, and they’ll tell you the same.

Now look at the data. A widely cited figure from the National Association of Home Builders puts the average lifespan of a modern washing machine at about ten years. Refrigerators fare slightly better at thirteen. The machines your parents bought in the 1990s routinely doubled those figures.

Part of this is survivorship bias — you remember the ones that lasted, not the ones that broke. Fair enough. But the trend in appliance durability is backed by repair industry data, consumer reports, and the simple observation that appliance companies now make more money from extended warranties and repair services than they do from building things that work.

Clothing tells the same story. The fast fashion model — Zara, H&M, Shein — has produced a race to the bottom in fabric weight, stitching quality, and garment lifespan. A cotton t-shirt from 1995 had measurably more fabric per square meter than one from 2024. The stitching was tighter. The dye held longer. You can argue that it also cost more in real terms, and that’s true. But the point isn’t that cheap things are cheap. The point is that the baseline has shifted downward across the entire market, and even mid-range products now feel disposable in a way they didn’t a generation ago.

Tools are another case study. Craftsman, once the gold standard of American hand tools, moved manufacturing overseas and watched quality decline in lockstep. Stanley, DeWalt, the whole lot — the tools your grandfather left you in the garage still work better than the ones on the shelf at the hardware store.

I’m not romanticizing the past. Plenty of things are genuinely better now — electronics are faster, cars are safer, medical care is miraculous compared to the 1980s. But durable goods, the physical objects you use every day, have gotten measurably worse. The question is why.

The answer, as usual, is incentives. A washing machine that lasts thirty years is a terrible business model. One that lasts eight years and requires a service call at year five is a revenue stream. This isn’t a conspiracy theory — it’s publicly stated corporate strategy. It has a name. Planned obsolescence. And it’s a topic worth its own article, which I’ll get to.

The phone tree from hell

If the product breaks and you want help, good luck.

Customer service has undergone a transformation in the last decade that would be impressive if it weren’t so infuriating. The goal is no longer to help you. The goal is to make you go away.

Call any large company — your telecom provider, your bank, an airline — and you’ll enter a phone tree designed by someone who actively hates you. Press 1 for this. Press 3 for that. Describe your problem to a robot that doesn’t understand you. Get transferred. Describe it again. Get disconnected. Start over.

This has gotten dramatically worse with the introduction of AI chatbots. Companies have figured out that if they put an AI between you and a human, a significant percentage of customers will give up before they ever reach a person. The chatbot doesn’t need to solve your problem. It just needs to absorb your frustration until you stop trying.

Research backs this up. Studies consistently show that consumers overwhelmingly prefer human agents over AI for anything beyond the most basic queries. But companies don’t care about your preference — they care about their cost per interaction. Every call you abandon is money saved.

Some companies have gone further, implementing what UX researchers call dark patterns — interface designs specifically intended to make it difficult to cancel a subscription, reach a human, or file a complaint. The “contact us” page that leads to an FAQ. The chatbot that loops you back to the same three unhelpful options. The phone number that doesn’t exist on the website and has to be found through Google.

This is not incompetence. This is strategy. And it works precisely because most people don’t have the time or energy to fight through it.

The airport, the software, the bridge

The consumer-facing problems are annoying. The institutional ones are scarier.

In early 2023, a cluster of serious runway incursions at U.S. airports got bad enough that the FAA issued a Safety Call to Action. The most serious near-misses — Category A and B, where aircraft nearly collided — rose sharply over the preceding years. An inspector general’s audit found that the FAA had implemented only five of its own twenty-four safety recommendations by late 2024. The good news: the numbers dropped in 2024. The concerning news: the problem was driven heavily by understaffed control towers, and the staffing issue hasn’t been fixed.

Software updates that make things worse have become so common there’s a running joke about it in tech circles. Every major platform — Windows, iOS, whatever your bank is running — has shipped updates that broke features that worked fine before. The instinct to “move fast and break things” has migrated from Silicon Valley startups to institutions where breaking things has consequences.

The American Society of Civil Engineers gives U.S. infrastructure a C grade — the highest in the report card’s twenty-seven-year history, but still a C, with nine out of eighteen categories in the D range and a projected $3.7 trillion investment gap.

None of this is apocalyptic. Planes still fly. Bridges mostly stand. Software mostly works. But the margin for error feels thinner, and the people responsible for maintaining it feel less capable, or at least less supported, than they used to be.

So what’s actually happening?

Here’s my honest assessment, stripped of both nostalgia and doomerism.

Some things are genuinely worse. Product durability has declined, and the incentives driving that decline are structural, not accidental. Retail expertise has evaporated as companies cut training budgets and rely on high-turnover, low-wage staff. Customer service has been deliberately degraded to reduce costs.

Some things are perception. We notice failures more because we’re exposed to more information. A runway near-miss in 1985 might never have made the news. Today it trends on Twitter within hours. Our sense of institutional competence may partly reflect the fact that we now see every crack in the facade, not that the facade has more cracks.

And some things are the predictable result of optimizing for the wrong metrics. Companies optimize for quarterly earnings, not product lifespan. Airlines optimize for on-time departures, not safety margins. Software companies optimize for feature count, not stability. When you measure the wrong thing, you get more of the wrong thing.

The competence crisis, to the extent it’s real, is not about individuals being stupider than they used to be. It’s about systems that have systematically devalued competence — in hiring, in training, in product design, in customer interaction — because competence is expensive and most consumers will tolerate its absence until something breaks badly enough to make the news.

The uncomfortable takeaway

I don’t have a neat solution. I’m not going to tell you to “vote with your wallet” or “support local businesses” or any of that bumper-sticker advice.

But I will say this: recognizing the pattern changes how you move through the world. When you understand that the phone tree is designed to make you quit, you stop blaming yourself for getting frustrated and start treating it as a system to be gamed. When you understand that the kid in the electronics store doesn’t know anything, you do your own research before you walk in. When you understand that the washing machine is built to fail, you buy the one with the best repair track record, not the one with the best marketing.

The world isn’t falling apart. But it is being optimized in ways that don’t serve you. And the sooner you stop being surprised by that, the sooner you can start making decisions that actually work in your favor.

A friend of mine lives in a block of flats in Oslo. Normal building. Normal entrance. For years, there was a panel of doorbells next to the front door — one button per apartment, each with a name label. You found the name, pressed the button, the door buzzed open. The whole interaction took about three seconds. It worked perfectly. It had worked perfectly for decades.

Then someone replaced it with a QR code.

Now, to ring my friend’s doorbell, I take out my phone, open the camera, scan the QR code, wait for a webpage to load, scroll through a list of residents to find his name, tap it, and wait for the system to connect. On a good day this takes maybe thirty seconds. On a bad day — poor signal, slow page load, wrong browser — it takes a minute or more.

For me, a young-ish man who’s reasonably comfortable with technology, it’s an annoyance. For the eighty-year-old woman who lives on the third floor, I imagine it’s closer to a hostage situation.

Somebody sold this system to the building’s board. Somebody made a pitch about modernization, digital infrastructure, maybe even security. Somebody got paid. An economic transaction occurred. GDP went up by the value of that transaction.

And the end result is that entering the building is now ten times harder than it was before.

This is what I’ve started calling fake economic activity. Solutions that generate revenue without generating value. Products and regulations that create the appearance of progress while making the user’s life measurably worse. And once you start noticing it, you see it everywhere.

Frédéric Bastiat saw this coming in 1850

The French economist Frédéric Bastiat published a parable in 1850 called “The Broken Window.” A shopkeeper’s son breaks a pane of glass. The onlookers console the shopkeeper by pointing out that the glazier will now have work. Money will flow, and the economy will benefit. Bastiat’s point was that this reasoning is insane. The money spent replacing the window can’t be spent on something new. The economy didn’t gain a window; it lost whatever the shopkeeper would have bought instead.

The broken window fallacy is one of the most important ideas in economics, and it describes exactly what’s happening with half the “innovations” being sold to us today. The QR code doorbell didn’t add value to the building. It replaced something that worked with something that doesn’t work as well. But it generated economic activity — a sale, an installation, a subscription fee, maybe ongoing maintenance. By the crude metric of GDP, this counts as growth. By the metric of “does the building work better than it did before,” it’s a net negative.

This distinction between economic activity and actual value creation, is one that mainstream economics is remarkably bad at making. GDP measures movement, not direction. It counts the ambulance ride to the hospital the same as the gym membership that keeps you out of one.

The paper straw that dissolves in your drink

Let’s talk about straws.

In 2019, the EU banned single-use plastic straws under its Single-Use Plastics Directive. The intention was good. Plastic waste is a real problem, particularly in oceans. Nobody with a brain disputes that.

But here’s what actually happened.

Restaurants and bars replaced plastic straws with paper ones. Paper straws cost more to produce. They require different machinery to manufacture. They dissolve in your drink after about ten minutes. They taste like wet cardboard. Every single person who has used a paper straw knows this. It is perhaps the most universally loathed consumer product of the 2020s.

And the environmental benefit? Straws represent approximately 0.03% of ocean plastic waste by mass. Even if you eliminated every straw on earth, you would barely register a change in the actual problem. Meanwhile, a 2023 Belgian study tested 39 straw brands and found that 90% of paper straws contained PFAS — “forever chemicals” — including PFOA, which has been globally banned since 2020. The stainless steel straws? Zero PFAS detected.

So the “green” replacement for plastic straws is a product that performs worse, costs more, contains banned toxic chemicals, and addresses a fraction of a percent of the problem it claims to solve. But it generated enormous economic activity — new manufacturing, new supply chains, new regulations, new compliance costs — and made everyone involved feel like they were Doing Something.

The cap that won’t let go

If you’ve bought a bottle of water or juice in Europe recently, you’ve encountered the tethered cap. Since July 2024, EU regulations require that plastic bottle caps remain attached to the container. The idea is that loose caps get lost, end up in landfills or oceans, and don’t get recycled with the bottle.

Again, the intention isn’t crazy. Bottle caps are a common litter item. But the execution reveals the same pattern.

In Germany, where the regulation was rolled out, ninety-seven percent of plastic bottles were already being recycled, and over ninety-one percent were returned with their caps attached. The problem the regulation targets barely existed in countries with functioning deposit systems. A German MEP formally questioned the regulation’s logic in a parliamentary submission, calling it “illogical.”

Meanwhile, a consumer study by the German Institute for Standardization found that children, elderly people, and people with physical disabilities had serious difficulty opening the new caps. Some couldn’t open them at all. Others experienced spills and minor injuries. The cap that was supposed to help the environment now prevents a portion of the population from drinking their water without assistance.

But somebody manufactured those caps. Somebody retooled the bottling lines. Somebody ran the compliance process. Economic activity was generated. Boxes were checked.

The app that replaced the parking meter

This pattern extends far beyond environmental regulation.

In cities across Europe, simple parking meters have been replaced by apps. To park your car, you now need to download an app, create an account, enter your license plate, select a zone, enter payment details, and start a session. When you return, you need to remember to stop the session or you keep getting charged.

The parking meter required coins. You put them in, you got time. A child could do it. The app requires a smartphone, a data connection, an account, and the patience of a monk.

For the city, the app is cheaper to maintain than physical meters. For the app company, it’s a revenue stream. For the user, it’s yet another account, yet another password, yet another piece of friction added to a task that used to take fifteen seconds.

The same logic has colonized laundromats (apps to start washers), restaurants (QR codes to order), hotels (apps to unlock rooms), and even some public bathrooms (QR codes to enter). In each case, a simple physical interaction — push a button, turn a handle, hand over cash — has been replaced by a digital one that requires more steps, more time, and more dependence on a device that might be dead, out of signal, or running the wrong operating system.

The justification is always efficiency. But efficient for whom? Not for you. For the company that no longer has to maintain the physical thing, hire the person, or process the cash. The efficiency gain is entirely on their side. The friction is entirely on yours.

David Graeber’s ghost is nodding

The late anthropologist David Graeber wrote about a related phenomenon in his 2018 book Bullshit Jobs. His argument was that a huge portion of modern employment consists of roles that even the people doing them believe are pointless — administrators administrating administrators, compliance officers ensuring compliance with compliance requirements, consultants consulting on the need for consultants.

Graeber’s specific numbers are debatable. A YouGov poll found thirty-seven percent of British workers thought their job made no meaningful contribution. Other studies put the figure much lower. But the qualitative observation lands hard: a lot of economic activity exists not because it produces anything useful, but because it employs people and generates transactions.

The QR code doorbell is the product-design equivalent of a bullshit job. It exists not because anyone needed it, but because someone could sell it. The paper straw exists not because it solves the ocean plastic problem, but because it’s a visible, marketable response to a problem that requires invisible, structural solutions nobody wants to pay for.

What GDP doesn’t measure

Here’s the thing that bothers me most about all of this.

We measure economic health primarily through GDP — the total value of goods and services produced. By this measure, replacing every functional doorbell in Norway with a QR code system would be a net positive for the economy. So would breaking every window in Oslo and replacing them. So would making every product slightly worse so people have to buy replacements more often.

GDP doesn’t measure whether life got better. It measures whether money moved. And when your primary metric rewards movement regardless of direction, you get exactly what we have now: an economy that generates enormous activity while making the everyday experience of being a consumer subtly, persistently worse.

This isn’t a left-wing argument or a right-wing argument. It’s an observation about what happens when you optimize for the wrong thing. And it connects to a deeper question about what the economy is actually for.

Is it for producing the numbers that make quarterly reports look good? Or is it for making the experience of daily life — buying things, entering buildings, parking cars, drinking through straws — actually work?

How to think about this

I’m not a Luddite. I love technology. I’m building my own server infrastructure at home. I think automation and AI will make certain things genuinely better.

But I’ve started applying a simple test to every “innovation” I encounter: is this better for me, or is it better for the company selling it to me? If the answer is only the latter, it’s not innovation. It’s extraction dressed up as progress.

The doorbell worked. The parking meter worked. The plastic straw worked. The bottle cap worked. Replacing them generated economic activity, created the impression of forward motion, and made someone money.

None of it made my life better. Most of it made my life slightly, persistently worse.

And the most dishonest part? They keep telling me it’s for my benefit.