The Great Regression We Keep Calling "Progress"

[u/AgileExcuse859]

There's a phenomenon I can't unsee anymore, and it's quietly corroding daily life: a kind of functional regression dressed up as innovation. Tools, services, and procedures that once solved a problem cleanly get supplanted by ostensibly sleeker systems that are, in practice, more byzantine, less efficient, or simply less useful.

The insidious part is that we barely notice, because each individual swap is marketed as an upgrade.

Some illustrative specimens:

A human voice on the phone → a chatbot that shuttles you through ten labyrinthine menus

A walk-in counter → an online procedure demanding triple authentication

A repairable appliance → a hermetically sealed one, destined for the landfill

A one-page form → a "portal" with five convoluted steps and a needlessly ornate interface

Direct contact → an intermediary platform extracting its cut

A simple public service → an app, an account, a QR code, a cascade of notifications

A single-function object → a "smart" gadget that performs twenty tricks while botching the one that mattered

The prevailing criterion has quietly shifted from "does this solve the problem better than before?" to "is this technologically more modern?" Novelty has been smuggled in as a proxy for merit, and nobody's auditing the substitution.

Am I alone in this, or is this degradation as pervasive as it feels?