What's the worst invention of the 21st century?

Modern social media

Microtransactions in video games. Hell, I'd say that modern video games in general are pretty bad, ESPECIALLY modern mobile games.

The generative AI's that "creates" content. Just dumb black boxes remixing what you give them, overconfident and inaccurate, yet seen as the ultimate tools by people.

Generative AI

Full scale mass surveillance capitalism. Governments used to have to hire agents, dress them up, and have them bug peoples phones. Now they can just buy it in bulk. No warrent, no black site op, just cashing checks.

Node Package Manager

Cryptocoins

Smartphones without keyboards

Roblox

Quantum computers a real candidate once they get off the ground. They might help solve a few problems in chemistry and condensed matter physics, but on the other hand they definitely will make a lot of encryption we heavily rely on obsolete, and the replacements are noticeably inferior. And that's about it, because quantum algorithms are hard to design. So, that seems like a net negative to me.

Deep neural nets are powerful, but the fact we fundamentally don't understand how they work is a bit nerve-wracking.

There's a lot of people who don't know when the 21st century began.

SPAM. Not the food variety, but the other. Inventend by a lawyer.

Although initially good, the internet. From malware to corporate tracking, it’s become a cesspool. And yet, here I am.

Social Media. Cancerous all of it. Psyops and psychological manipulation. If you studied psychology and sociology you would know there is a huge stage 4 cancer in society and it is social media.

Separate apps for various retail stores. I don't want a home depot app. I don't want a kroger app. We have a generic app for this category called a web browser. If you want me to download a specialized app for your store, I assume that means that my browser does not sufficiently breach my privacy for your "business purposes."

I also second social media, but I need to make another suggestion it'd be Keurigs k-cups. So much plastic waste for the barest level of convenience.

corporate personhood.

proof-of-work blockchains. instead of a utopian decentralized currency we have a utopia for scammers and day traders, and uses a ton of energy at a time when we need to conserve to combat global warming.

Facial recognition technology. Not only is it not as perfect as people claim in identifying people, but some countries are using it to attack the LGBT since it was discovered the LGBT have different variances in facial features. And yet that's not even 100% perfect, so now you have a bad technology for a negative purpose repurposed into another negative purpose that it's causing collateral damage with because it's as awful at that as the first thing.