I hated Elon Musk well before he got involved with Trump. It was obvious to me that there was something deeply wrong and evil about that man. People keep falsely assuming rich = smart. Elon is proof that’s not true.

I hated Beanie Babies when it first became a craze. The company who made these stuffed toys had full control over their value and was deliberately causing shortages & errors to drive up perceived value.

I hate NFTs and cryptocurrency for the same reasons I hated Beanie Babies. I advised my sister against investing her savings into cryptocurrency, but she wouldn’t listen. She lost everything.

And now I hate what Nintendo is doing with the Switch 2. I can see the writing on the wall, this is a shameless cash grab using deeply unethical anti-customer tactics.

Twitter. Have hated it since it launched and stayed the fuck away from using it until I had a teacher who demanded I make a Twitter profile for a specific workshop. I still regret all these years later that I caved and did as she said. I should have just kept telling her no. Other than that, I have stayed away from that platform and when Felon Muskrat bought it I had no opinions on it because at the time I just saw him as a goofy edge lord and why wouldn’t he want to buy the goofiest platform on the internet?

But well, at least he has made most of the rest of the world realize how terrible Twitter is as a social media platform. It always was and it always will be. Fuck that place. I genuinely hope he runs it into the ground completely and that it dies.

Too bad new alternatives have sprung up in the meantime.

I still think it is utterly embarrassing that politicians around the world use these types of crappy as fuck platforms to communicate with the public. I cannot take any of them seriously. It is pathetic and embarrassing.

Proprietary software in general, Discord and Twitter in specific

Krzysztof Stanowski and Scott Adams

I hated Donald Trump in the '80s already. I thought he was a dishonest blowhard and was amazed that anybody believed anything that came out of his mouth.

I hated Elon Musk from pretty much the moment he showed up as the “darling awkward little geek bro”. He always struck me as inauthentic and a little bit stupid. (I was wrong on that last point, mind. He’s a lot stupid.)

I guess TikTok, because I tried it once and uninstalled it. It felt like the app was using me, not the other way round.

Centralised, monolithic online services. Even when they were ‘good’, I was leery of services like YouTube, Facebook and WhatsApp because they made no attempt to be interoperable or peerable. Two GMail users will have a richer experience emailing with each-other than they would with someone on, say, Yahoo Email or an Exchange server, but it would always work, eventually, somehow. Obviously we now have the concept of the Fediverse, but federated peers forming ad-hoc connections using an lowest-common-denominator protocol is the basis of the whole Internet.

Mr. Beast

The phrase “based off of.” It’s always been stupid. I’m still ahead of the curve because many people still think it’s OK. It’s not.

The stock market. Only when society collapses due to climate change and whatnot the Western hoi polloi will realize it had become a cancerous pyramid scheme that eventually runs out of tissue to metastasize in.

- -
✍︎ arscyni.cc: modernity ∝ nature.

P Diddy. He did an Apprentice type show and was overall pretty creepy. There were a handful of scenes that made me think his closet was stocked full of skeletons.

Myself.

Social media. Started strong in the mid 2000’s, peaked in features and quality and social usefulness in the early 2010’s and around 2014 they started removing features and enshittify because they got their core userbase and, once locked in, they could milk them.

Remeber when facebook was about “connecting with old friends” and you could search by city, age range and a whole lot of filters? Or when YouTube was “broadcast yourself” and could fully customize your channel page? Then they reduced it to a stupid banner that got smaller and smaller.

Bonus: everything that relies on infinite growth to keep cost down. I was skeptical of streaming services and guess what, they suck because they operated at loss for years, because “more future customers pay for the present ones”

Amanda Palmer. I’ve always thought she was a narcissistic asshole who uses people like she’s rearranging furniture. And that has turned out to be extremely true.

I never liked the Twilight books when they were just books