Anyone can change the world. What’s harder is changing the world for the better. Because sometimes, people make a new discovery or come up with a new invention, and all it does is make things worse. Want to see what we mean? We’ve gathered examples from around the web of inventions that backfired miserably, making the world a worse place than it was when they started. From toxic building materials to social media that makes us feel more alone, these examples prove that sometimes, what looks like progress is actually a step backward.
#1: Like and Subscribe
It used to be that only newspapers and magazines had to be subscribed to. With everything else, once you bought it, you owned it, and no one could take it away from you, unless they were a burglar. These days, though, there’s been a massive shift towards subscriptions for everything, like software, movies, and music.
Adobe could tell you just how popular that’s been for software (yes, we’re still mad, Adobe), and it’s very disconcerting to live in a world where you can pay for the right to watch a certain show and then lose access to it later. Let’s go back to owning things, shall we?