Me: Cars
Religion
Advertising.
The only correct answer in this thread.
It’s the biggest industry in the world by a very large margin and the most destructive one on a global scale.
Even advertising isn’t necessarily bad, having people telling you about things you might like used to be a good thing.
I personally think it’s people like Edward Bernays who had the idea of, I guess, ‘Malicious Advertising’. They really solidified the idea of applying propaganda techniques to advertising strategies and that just kind of become expected and the norm.
More people need to know about Bernays. Literally wrote the book, Propaganda in 1928. Went on to found the industry of Public Relations. He is the reason advertisers target your subconscious, make you feel bad, an use their products as a salve for the pain they inflict.
Adam Curtis covers the effects well in The Century of the Self. Watch out, it clocks in at just under 4 hours.
Some level of advertising is surely okay, right?
If I open a bakery and put a sign out front that says “Baked good for sale!” I don’t think anyone would complain but that IS advertising.
This begs the question: What level of advertising is okay?
This begs the question
Nope. It just raises the question.
A level that does’t require selling people’s data
Religion. So many of today’s issues stem from the magical thinking inherent in religion.
Amen
[Gestures broadly to Thomas Midgley Jr.] [Link]
nuclear weapons, too feckin dangerous to have
I’m in mixed mind about them because you’re right, they’re too destructive, but for the time being their existence has prevented conflicts from breaking out, and since wars are typically only waged with the promise of financing it afterwards via looting or expansion, nobody is really willing to render land unusable in the process of conquering it.
This is a good point I never considered before.
That comment is the first time you’ve considered MAD? I mean, congrats on being one of today’s lucky 10,000, but I’m surprised you didn’t learn about it in school.
When it’s presented in school, it is presented as thing of the past and localised to how Russia and America treated/still treat one another, rather than threading the needle by explaining that it still applies today. I’m pretty sure I only picked up on it after reading online explanations/justifications of nukes.
Or in other words people focus on the panic of it so much that they don’t stop to think of it as a good thing
TBF I think even without Nukes we wouldn’t have war between big countries. Because the UN would discourage it. Ukraine being a big exception to that
Except the part where we have exhaustive evidence that nukes do not always render land unusable.
Nagasaki and Hiroshima are entirely fine. The radiation levels were back at safe levels in days. Yes, we definitely fucked up a lot of land with nuclear testing and power plant overloads, but the actual nukes humans have dropped on other humans? They’re most effective when used in an air burst, and they clear up within days.
The power generation and medical applications of nuclear science cannot be overlooked based on warmongering, especially when the part youre concerned about isnt even an issue in that application of the field.
So far crypto currencies. So far they seem to expend a huge amount of electricity and used mostly for speculation.
Either leaded gasoline or pfas
Leaded gasoline is an Amazing answer. Fuck. Take my UpDoot.
Social media year over year shows it was a mistake.
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead
https://youtu.be/Is3icfcbmbsNever actually did anything and never actually claimed to. Most people assumed it was a headache relief but the company never said that. They just said to put the shit on your forehead
Meta
24 hour news networks.
News used to just be the news when there was a half hour of local, half hour of national twice per night with a morning show for fluff, weather, and brief news updates. 24 hour news needed to fill the whole 24 hours and also pay for itself by getting eyeballs on advertisers. That’s when all of the sensationalist stuff started taking over.
Lead pipes.
Leaded gasoline has to be worse.
Lead pipes are fine. Step 1: Install. Step 2: ignore one generation of aggressive residents. Step 3: never touch the pipes again
The wheel. Everything went downhill from there.
Teflon
Asbestos
PFAS
Disposable vapes come to mind, although the real answer is probably some extremely depraved torture device.
