Over-reliance on proprietary, closed-source products and services from megacorporations.
For instance, it's really absurd that people in many parts of the world cannot function without WhatsApp, they can't even imagine a life without it. It seems absurd that Meta literally has them by the balls, and these people can't do anything about it.
Also the people who base their entire careers on say Adobe or Microsoft products, they're literally having their lives dictated by one giant corporation, which is very depressing and dystopian.
Work to live.
Edit: we have built a world where we measure success by money. This has meant we are all in pursuit of it all the time, even if we don't want to be. The rich get richer by driving us to do more with less, which marginalizes those who cannot be a productive part of that. We supress our compassion because it isn't making money. People suffer. Those of us who can contribute subject ourselves to a different kind of stress so we can enjoy a few hours of leisure here and there but we never really are free of the shackles of our employer. If you advance to a management position you are forced to evaluate and possibly fire people you could be friends with. When hiring you are evaluating how well people bend the knee. It's not a great world we've made for ourselves.
Once got in a conversation about nuclear power that hit the point of "Yes nuclear is safer and more efficient but what about the jobs of the coal employees? Do you want them all to starve?"
Took a while to digest because there's a lot of normalization surrounding it, but after a while I realized what I had been told was:
"We have to intentionally gimp our efficiency in both energy production and pollution generation in order to preserve a harder, more costly industry, because otherwise people wouldn't have a task that they need to do in order to feed themselves."
Kinda disillusioned me with the underpinnings of capitalism, just how backwards it was to have to think this way. We can't justify letting people live unless they're necessary to society in some way - which might've made solid sense in older, very very different times in human history, but now means that so much of our culture is tied up in finding more excuses to make people do work that isn't really necessary at all.
New innovations happen, and tasks are made easier, and that doesn't actually save anyone any work, because everyone still has to put in 40 hours a week. New tech lets you do it in 10 hours? Whoops, actually that means that you're out of a job, replaced with an intern or something. Making "life" easier makes individual lives harder, what the fuck? That isn't how things should be at all!
Not exactly an easy situation to crack, but to circle back to the point of the thread - I hate how normal it is to argue on the basis that we need to create jobs, everywhere, all the time. I wish we'd have a situation where people can brag for political clout about destroying jobs instead, about reducing the amount of work people need to do to live and live comfortably, instead of trying to enforce this system where efficiency means making people obsolete means making people starve.
our strange treatment of animals
we anthropomorphise and infantilise our pets, yet boast about the animals we eat who've had legit insanity level cruel lives thanks to our systems.
[ not saying fussing over your pets is bad, i love it too, just the contrast is whiplash++ ]
lack of body autonomy
hint: most lqbqtia rights, reproductive rights, medical/medication rights, are all the SAME RIGHT:
your body, your choice.
it is constantly under attack, and diffused into separate arguments when its the one right effecting all these issues. newsflash: when it comes to my body, your unwelcome opinion, religious or otherwise, ain't worth the air its vibrating through.
slippery slope gatekeeping laws
making harmless x illegal because a subset of x might lead to harmful y. if y is bad, then enforce your ban on y, and fuckoff trying to use it as an excuse to control x₀, x₁, x₂ etc.
To some degree literally all of it. My monkey brain was designed to handle at most 150 people, wandering around all day searching for food, unprocessed food, using my body, having a close community I trust, relationship with nature, extreme knowledge of a small amount of things, and an uninterrupted sleep cycle powered by the son.
My humanity is a poor fit for the world I am in.
Western society handing money, tax breaks etc hand over fist to rich people while our quality of life slowly erodes over time.
Much of the concept of "intellectual property". Here's a good essay by Richard Stallman:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
Copyright by and large needs to be abolished. Patents in software are nonsensical, and elsewhere they should be drastically scaled back. Trademark is alright, with a few adjustments needed.
But all of the above is hiding behind a concept of "property" that just does not apply to intangible things, and we need to stop using that term to describe them.
some more
public philosophy mirages
eg.1 "free market will balance everything"
will it now? until we actually see one, we'll never know. we don't live in a free market, and never have. they rig the shit out of it with eg. drm and region locks, and then gaslight us that its free & balanced. lol.
eg.2 "democracy is the best we have"
same as above, when i see a true democracy i'll let you know. caveat: unsure of your exact country's situation, but when was the last time you consistently voted on what you want to happen, rather than who will fail to implement their election promises (with 0.0% accountability btw).
also, friendly reminder: mostly the "who", you can vote for was already chosen in a private vote by the political parties, before they even pretended to care about our opinion. lol.
strawman public discourse
arguing in the media over the wrong points in an issue to keep public discourse on a 'lively' treadmill
eg.1
Q: Is climate change human caused?
A: Doesn't change the issue: stop poisoning the water, air and soil - we need them to live. duh.
eg.2
Q: Is being lgbqta a choice?
A: Doesn't change the issue: if its not a choice they can't control it, leave these people alone. if it is a choice, its a free country, leave these people alone.
edit: if you disagree with any of the above, please expand, i'm open to a new perspective.
Positive attitude towards billionaire philanthropists. First, they made a fortune on the result of labor alienated from workers, then they threw a pitch and became good guys
That few countries take a person's wealth and income into account when fining them for breaking laws. I see examples like these and wish this were the norm everywhere.
Religion
This is the thread that made me make an account and what a pain it was to find without having saved it anywhere. I've been holding out for someone to say it, but havwn't seen it specifically.
Single use plastics. I still remember the weird feeling of doom when learning the world population and making the quick relation to disposable plastics, constantly being told "but it's only a little bit." A little bit for several thousand years, per billions, is too many bits.
Ticketmaster fees
Modern devices not using USB-C.
Homelessness.
Billionaires.
War.
Magic, aka science and technology.
Expensive wedding
Jewels
GoldiPhone prices.
Gasoline.
Here’s a toxic and highly volatile liquid. Rather than transferring it in specialized canisters with safety seals, we just let you dump it out of a hose. There is absolutely no safety training on how to handle it, and all you need is some cash to obtain a lot of it. It’s something of a right of passage for children to dispense it for their parents.
And despite the fact that the vehicles that use it spend 90% of their time parked in one place, you can’t have it delivered to that place like you can with other utilities like water, electricity, and natural gas. You have to go to special stores and comparison shop.
And even the stores you buy it from have it delivered by truck. They don’t even get it piped in.
Oh, and even when used correctly, it'll kill you if you use it in an enclosed space.
And it's killing the planet too.
Offices of all types (medical, billing, tech support, etc.) only doing business on a callback basis. Customers and clients are expected to be continuously available to receive a call at the office's convenience.
We have all become unwilling, unpaid, on-call employees of most every company we deal with.
Circus politics
Presidential debate that are nothing more than a bad episode of Maury
The requirement for people to post their lives online, in the early days if the Internet the general rule was you don't post personal information online, now it's gone the complete opposite direction, I've met multiple people who write you of as "strange" just because they can't poke through your Facebook/Instagram/snapchat/twitter.
I don't keep social media accounts because it doesn't intrest me, and have been told multiple times that people don't trust me because I don't air out everything I think on an online platform.
Rampant alcoholism.
In America, gaslighting by corporations and conservatives attempts to convince us that for profit healthcare is normal and fine. It’s ok for billionaires and huge corporations to get tax breaks and pay less or zero taxes because they “create jobs.” Businesses have the right to control elections with massive donations because…that’s free speech. Most rich people got that way by working hard…and anyone can do it. Immigrants are responsible for poor job markets and other economic woes.
Society itself. Have you seen this shit? What the fuck are we thinking?!
United Kingdom
Governments fear mongering people into doing what they say. Shutting down people's lives from fear of death from Covid, a government sanctioned and authorized "pandemic". Now, it's normal for governments to dictate people's lives. Lame.
