I love technological progress and am no Luddite but the technology that’s most visible to consumers rarely just makes everyone’s lives better. For every truly transformative tech like smartphones, there’s a dozen “disruptions” that just replace some previously functioning part of society with something shittier. (Like phone trees instead of a customer service agent. AirBnB causing rent to rise while breaking zoning laws. Generative A.I. has potential but so far, it’s mostly just automating content farms. Crypto wasn’t a real technological innovation but Silicon Valley VCs pretended it was.)

In a competitive market, even those shitty “innovations” would eventually translate into lower prices but we live in an age of weak enforcement of laws to create and foster competitive markets. Of course there’s a rise in pissed off consumers when all the upside goes to profits/shareholders.