If technology is getting better all the time, then why does it seem we are all forced to deal with more and more terrible technology every day? Whether they are officially certified Technological Antisolutions (as indicated by the badge), or just poorly made, we are compiling a list of companies that have earned our ire.
Reader submissions are highly encouraged! Click here to submit one.
Tesla is the antisolution par excellence. People genuinely believe it will solve both our society's collapsed public transportation infrastructure and our addiction to gas powered personal vehicles in a warming climate. They release under-tested self-driving software that will never work as advertised. Through Tesla, Elon Musk became the world's richest man. He then went on to spend some of that money acquiring Twitter, forever intertwining the future of transportation with 140 character hot takes, and personally ensuring we continue to live in the dumbest timeline.
Wysa provides mental health therapy via AI. According to NPR, Wysa's "chatbot-only service is free, though it also offers teletherapy services with a human for a fee ranging from $15 to $30 a week; that fee is sometimes covered by insurance." Despite the devestating implication of AI therapy that no single human being of the 8 billion on the planet actually cares enough about you to help you, Wysa has raised $30 million in venture capital.
allows polluters to offset their carbon by, among a variety of similarly stupid ideas, "pickling" trees. Despite the near infinite uses of wood — the substance from which trees are made — in solving real, actual problems, Inter.Earth buries trees in salt marshes so that they will not decompose in order to make money from carbon credits.
Much like Inter.Earth, Kodama Systems is burying trees underground to sequester their carbon. They have raised $6.6 million from Bill Gates's climate fund and other investors. Companies like Kodama innovating in "biomass burial" make their money by selling carbon credits for the wood that they cut with chainsaws, load onto trucks, and haul to pits dug with heavy machinery to then be buried. Carbon credits allow people to believe the obvious absurdity that Shell is on track to have "net-zero emissions" by 2050.
Volkswagon offers Car-Net, a subscription service that can track your vehicle in case it is stolen. When A 2-year-child was abducted inside a stolen Volkswagon car, VW told law enforcement they would "not track the vehicle with the abducted child until they received payment to reactivate the tracking device in the stolen Volkswagen," according to the sherrif's office. Perhaps it should be unsurprising from a company that started during the Third Reich and used forced Jewish labor. Even less surprising when you consider that we live in a society so warped, so inhuman, and so blindingly addicted to the commodification of anything and everything, that even what should be our mutual obligations to help kidnapped children can be exploited for profit.
Starling lab says they create "Data Integrity prototypes tools and principles to bring historians, legal experts and journalists into the new era of Web3." Journalists and legal experts are working with Starling to preserve crucial human knowledge on the blockchain, a system whose integrity relies on the value of cryptocurrencies. When the value of crypto collapses (when, not if), people will no longer have reason to use significant amounts of electricity to constantly recalculate and verify the blockchain. If Starling has their way, the integrity of human knowledge, including evidence being held for future trials, will cease to be reliable the moment crypto currencies collapses; any bad actor, world power, or corporation with enough resources could forever alter that information by forcing what is called a false consensus. When that happens, we will be forced to rely on the work of archivists, historians, and librarians, the same way we have always done.
According to reports, Landlife is a "technologically driven" company that uses drones, blockchains, and AI to sell carbon offsets. However, according to those same reports, they are also responsible for starting two wildfires, damaging tens of thousands of acres, wiping out any possible value to the offsets they sold, and offering us a perfect, tidy microcosm for the inanity of carbon markets.
Submitted by Fernando R.
95% of American schools do some sort of lockdown drill. Unlike fires, mass shootings are not natural or accidental phenomena. But for guns, we would not have this problem, but I blame our inability to imagine solving problems with kindness. From homelessness, to substance abuse, to even violence itself, Americans time and again turn to an increasingly militarized police force for solutions. In this tradition, we have ZeroEyes, "a team of military veterans who are passionate about protecting our country." They provide "a proactive, human-verified gun detection solution that integrates into existing security cameras to stop mass shootings." Unable to imagine spending money on making a just and kind world, or even what that might look like, we choose instead to put our children under constant AI surveillance run by a for-profit company. Is it really a surprise that they turn to violence themselves?
Microsoft and Maybelline have partnered to allow Teams' Enterprise users to virtually apply "digital makeup" using "AI-powered 'makeup' filters." It is now possible to exist in a permanent state of professionalism, safe from registering the humanity of our remote colleagues or divulging our own. Everyone in a virtual meeting should be a perfectly smooth-faced professional inhabiting a blurred void. Anything less would be unprofessional.
I hope they do voices next. We shouldn't be forced to listen to normal people's real voices in business meetings, especially women's, when we have the technology to do sexy voice filters.