I asked Copilot to search my blog for, “posts where technology improves while systems (work, economy, institutions, structures) get worse.”
It shared the following summary:
The reason I asked for this is because I wanted to look back on posts that reminded me of this skit out of Norway. It is, as the Threads post suggests, “utterly brilliant”!
You can find the video and more information on the website at the end of the video.
We aren’t imagining this, things are getting intentionally worse. On social media we are not the customer, we are the product sold to advertisers. And even when we are the customer, we don’t buy anything outright anymore, no, we get locked into subscriptions.
Copilot didn’t find the one post I was looking for, but I found it to share here:
I’ll end here with a couple paragraphs from that post, no need to try writing something I already said,
“I want to use my credit card at a gas station, not only must I put in my pin, I need to say how much I want to spend as a maximum. Every instant teller I go to asks me what language I want to work in… how hard would it be for the machine to know my preference after asking once? And as for autocorrect… it’s getting worse, not better.
I love my tech, but it seems to me that technology is all about adding features, and not about user experience (UX). The user is forgotten as new bells and whistles are added. Or things are so locked down that I need Face ID, a confirmation text, and coming soon, a DNA scan. Between new features and new security measures, there seems little time spent thinking about what the experience is for the end user.”
