Private health insurance

McMansions.

Generatige AI and Surveillance Systems

Derivatives and other complex financial instruments.

Tools for cheating others out of money, obfuscating transactions or skirting legal restrictions.

Digital currency to ‘replace’ physical currency.

Gone are the days of storing physical coins that could increase their value in the future. Instead, we have digital coins with a dog on it and can be lost via hard drives dying.

This also includes items like credit/debit cards, gift cards, and pre-paid cards. A single piece of plastic should hold less value than natural metals like copper and nickel.

Something with actual mass should hold more value than something without mass (data).

All things plastic disposable.

Generally just over engineering. Cars used to be serviceable but here we are, thousands of small decisions later, decisions that led to things being standardized as far more complicated. Good luck working on a new car.

Same trend is everywhere in society. Websites used to be 20 KB of specially formatted text and maybe 500 KB of images. Now they’re literally megs of images and JavaScript and to build one in a modern setting, you’re expected to use and install gigs of dependencies. And beyond that we’re being asked to burn down rainforests for a half genius/half moron machine to “help” us with the process. This is “more efficient” after all.

AI, and Nukes.

Not quite technology, unless you factor in the development of cable TV, but 24 hour news networks. That was the start of news as entertainment, as they didn’t have enough to fill 24 hours and had to do whatever they could to get and retain viewers.

customized aftermarket mufflers

Cars, and all the resulting infrastructure.

Ruined city structures and, to an extent, local communities. Small corner stores and tight-knit communities have vanished in favour of giant shopping malls meant to serve everyone in a huge radius.

The dentist’s drill.

Language. The beginning of the end.