Agriculture.
We could have stayed in a world where we lived in harmony with nature instead of trying to control it.
this post was submitted on 13 Feb 2026
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Religion
Cars are too prevalent in most countries, but they are undeniably very useful when used correctly. I would probably say the social media does more harm than cars, but idk if it's the worst invention. Lots of candidates.
What about the idea of burning oil products in general? Sure, that made powerful and light engines possible, and they have transformed economies, logistics, trade, and entire countries. However, if we hadn’t invented that, progress would have been a lot slower.
Nevertheless, I would argue that the past 200 years of industrial progress weren’t worth the climate crisis.
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Advertising.
Some level of advertising is surely okay, right?
If I open a bakery and put a sign out front that says "Baked good for sale!" I don't think anyone would complain but that IS advertising.
This begs the question: What level of advertising is okay?
A level that does't require selling people's data
This begs the question
Nope. It just raises the question.
I can't specify a threshold, but it really comes down to the level of invasiveness.
I miss the days of requesting big thick catalogues be sent to you in the mail from companies you’d want to do business with. They’d send you a catalogue once or twice a year and then stop if you don’t buy anything for a while. I think that was a good method, the same way I don’t mind seeing other things available on websites I’m buying from.
I also don’t mind stuff like local coupon/advert mailers that come once a month or whatever, but those tend to all just be big companies advertising “sales” that always run these days, rather than anyone I’d want to try to support. But I like the idea of packaging up all the ads they want to send out and delivering them in one go. Maybe with an opt-out. All other junk mail, stuff you didn’t request, should be banned.
And I think signage on store windows and stuff is fine, as long as it’s not an eyesore, but billboards and rooftop signage should definitely be banned. Protruding signs like that hang off the side of buildings should also go.
Meatspace advertisements are the worst imo, because there’s very little you can do to avoid them.
The only correct answer in this thread.
It's the biggest industry in the world by a very large margin and the most destructive one on a global scale.
Even advertising isn't necessarily bad, having people telling you about things you might like used to be a good thing.
I personally think it's people like Edward Bernays who had the idea of, I guess, 'Malicious Advertising'. They really solidified the idea of applying propaganda techniques to advertising strategies and that just kind of become expected and the norm.
More people need to know about Bernays. Literally wrote the book, Propaganda in 1928. Went on to found the industry of Public Relations. He is the reason advertisers target your subconscious, make you feel bad, an use their products as a salve for the pain they inflict.
Adam Curtis covers the effects well in The Century of the Self. Watch out, it clocks in at just under 4 hours.
Religion. So many of today's issues stem from the magical thinking inherent in religion.
It's easily disprovable, but even in the face of countless arguments against it, people still willingly throw themselves into it by the millions. They're too fearful of the unknown, they're fearful of belonging somewhere when we die and religion is the prime example of how easily controllable people are when they're fearful.
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Shareholders.
nuclear weapons, too feckin dangerous to have
I'm in mixed mind about them because you're right, they're too destructive, but for the time being their existence has prevented conflicts from breaking out, and since wars are typically only waged with the promise of financing it afterwards via looting or expansion, nobody is really willing to render land unusable in the process of conquering it.
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It's likely LLMs in their current corporate circular funding form and cryptocurrency.
Capitalism.
So far crypto currencies. So far they seem to expend a huge amount of electricity and used mostly for speculation.
Slavery. Even after banning it pretty much everywhere, people still find ways to treat others as disposable property.
Customer service. People have normalized that positions of power can be used to abuse others.
It's a three way tie between:
-
Leaded Gas
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Aerosols
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Nuclear bombs
Interesting fact, the same man, Thomas Midgely Jr, invented both tetraethyl-lead as a fuel additive and CFCs, almost killing everyone on earth twice over.
Karma got him in the end after he got tangled in one of his contraptions after he became bedridden with polio and died of strangulation.
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Social media year over year shows it was a mistake.
24 hour news networks.
News used to just be the news when there was a half hour of local, half hour of national twice per night with a morning show for fluff, weather, and brief news updates. 24 hour news needed to fill the whole 24 hours and also pay for itself by getting eyeballs on advertisers. That’s when all of the sensationalist stuff started taking over.
I think it has to be something that poses an existential threat to human life on this planet, so cars (and other inventions dependent on fossil fuels) is a pretty good pick for the top of the list, IMO. I saw someone in the comments pick animal agriculture, and that, too, contributes to the existential threat of a warming planet; so that, too, feels like a good pick for the top of the list.
For me, though, nuclear weapons has to be the worst thing we've ever invented. No other invention is capable of ending human life on this planet so quickly and so thoroughly.
Theoretically, perhaps. Statistically, not even close. Mines have likely injured and killed more, both civilian and armed-forces.
Theoretically, we can argue that nuclear/atomic weapons have saved lives, due to conflicts that haven't happenned.
A financial system that breeds billionaires
Easy question:
AI
Net negative pushing us toward unavoidable global ecosystem collapse: it produces nothing but the unfulfilled promise of eventually replacing human workers, which it has never shown the capability to do and according to the researchers who founded the AI companies will never do due to "AI Scaling Laws". It has increased power consumption and costs by over 30% in some US States.
Head on! Apply directly to the forehead
https://youtu.be/Is3icfcbmbs
Never actually did anything and never actually claimed to. Most people assumed it was a headache relief but the company never said that. They just said to put the shit on your forehead
Disposable vapes come to mind, although the real answer is probably some extremely depraved torture device.
industrialization.
it's caused unfathomable damage to us, our planet, and the organisms we share our world with.
it's also saved just as many as it's harmed, but there is an upper limit when our planet dies and we all die with it.
The wheel. Everything went downhill from there.
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.
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Humans
Leaf blowers. They solve nothing permanently, it just moves around the leaves, meaning the blowers will be back again tomorrow morning, waking me up...
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Weapon of mass destruction
The corporation.
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