21st century capitalism, for me, has as its salient feature the flight away from quality. There is now an inbuilt acceptance that everything will just get slowly worse. There are now entire areas of commerce where you simply cannot buy a well designed high quality product, when you used to be able to. Everything is a race to the bottom.
This is most exemplified in my mind by the way Telsa enshittified DOOR HANDLES.
If you’ve never used the door on a Tesla, the thing is that you cannot close and latch the door if you’re holding the handle. Holding the handle means that the latch is disengaged.
Which means you have to slam it.
Whoever designed this must never have lived anywhere windy.
Earlier I posted about what I want in a car, and how it’s getting harder and harder to buy one that isn’t an SUV/iPad crossover. They look great, but are just dreadful from an ergonomic and safety point of view.
And they’re getting worse. There have been a few joyous years when you have been able to use the satnav system on your phone for directions via CarPlay or the Android equivalent, instead of the dreadful shit the manufacturers include.
They’re now moving away from letting you connect your phone. In the future, not only will we be forced to use their dross; we will have to pay a monthly subscription for it.
I honestly hate it all.
like this
Spencer likes this.
reshared this
Tobias, FeralRobots, gz, Björn Gohla, BoredomFestival, John Lindsay, Bread Oventin, Lojie :blobcatcoffee: and simon gray reshared this.
Sarah Brown
in reply to Sarah Brown • •I paid over 30k euros for a car and the app that accompanies it is dogshit.
Nobody cares any more.
Caesar reshared this.
Loungeiguana
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •BoneHouseWasps 🔶
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •All so true. When our kids were small and I had an iPhone (a 4S), my BIL and I were wanting to share pics of our kids, post Christmas. No problem, he says, I'll just Bluetooth them over from my crappy, old Android (my sister wouldn't let him buy a decent phone as he was *constantly* breaking or losing them 😁) .
And he couldn't, because on my spanky new iPhone, Apple had deliberately broken Bluetooth connectivity.
I thought then, this is going to get worse. I think of that often.
Sarah Brown
Unknown parent • •gz
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •fuzzyface
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Llwynog
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Llwynog
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Lojie :blobcatcoffee:
in reply to Llwynog • • •@llwynog
I have the same experience when it comes to clothes and textiles from the parents' or grandparents' generation:
clearing out my parents' house I remember handling old clothes (coats, blouses, shoes, gloves and scarves), and the realization on the first touch:
"Wow, this such a great, thick and built-to-last quality of textile!"
This was clothing that was 50 to 80 years old.
I wasnt used to feeling that kind of quality in my clothes lifetime. Mindboggling. Sad.
Sarah Brown likes this.
Miguel Arroz
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •Capitalism does to products what it does to everything else: the wealth gap, here visible in quality and price tag.
The midrange products are kinda gone or turned to shit. We now have a lot of shitty cheap stuff (getting less cheap by the day in many cases) and very high end quality stuff, unaffordable by most.
On top of that, all the crap technology now allows like subscriptions to be able to use the hardware we paid for are not prevalent.
Miguel Arroz
in reply to Miguel Arroz • • •Sarah Brown likes this.
simon gray
in reply to Sarah Brown • • •I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore! Speech from Network (1976)
YouTube