I don't disagree with the overall point he's making here, so maybe I'm being pedantic by highlighting how most of these can be overcome by conscious effort.

You want to order from a local restaurant, but you need to download a third-party delivery app, even though you plan to pick it up yourself. The prices and menu on the app are different to what you saw in the window. When you download a second app the prices are different again. You ring the restaurant directly and it says the number is no longer in service. You go to the restaurant and order in person. You mention that their website has the wrong number and the woman behind the counter says they have to contact the company who designed the site for changes, which will cost them, but most people just order through an app anyway.

There are plenty of restaurants with working phone numbers, use one of those instead. Bonus points for telling the offending restaurant why you won't be ordering from them.

You want to watch the trailer for an upcoming movie on YouTube but you first have to sit through an ad. Then you sit through a preview for the trailer itself. Then you watch the trailer, which is literally another ad. When it ends, it cues up a new trailer, with a new ad at the start of it.

Use a web frontend for Youtube like Piped or Invidious. Or one of the many unofficial apps that block ads such as FreeTube, Newpipe and SmartTube. Or download videos directly using a tool like yt-dlp.

The first page of Google results are links to pages that have scraped other pages for information from other pages that have been scraped for information. All the sources seem to link back to one another. There is no origin. The photos on the page look weird. The hands are disfigured. There is no image credit.

Search engines have certainly gotten worse, and will continue to decline as more AI content floods the net. You can get better results for now if you're willing to pay for a search engine like Kagi, or Searxng if you have time to tinker.

Your coworker sends you a PowerPoint pack to support a presentation you are giving to the executive committee, but you can’t make heads or tails of it. You call them over Zoom and they tell you they used ChatGPT to write it. You point out that it is near-unreadable, and they ask what specifically is wrong with it. You mention that, for starters, there are too many words on each slide. They tell you they’ll take care of it. They send you a new pack within the hour saying they asked ChatGPT to remove 30% of the text. It makes even less sense. You tell them you’ll just rewrite it yourself.

Your coworker is dumb, can't help too much with this one.

A billionaire got mad, bought your favourite social media site and ran it into the ground. A different billionaire got mad, bought the magazine site you liked to read on your lunchbreak and shut it down completely. A third billionaire did what they do best, bought the app you use for networking and sold it off for parts.

Seems inevitable with centralized social media. I've witnessed the rise and fall of digg, reddit and many others. Start using and promoting decentralized and federated social media such as Mastodon, Lemmy/Kbin, Nostr and others.

You want to watch a TV show from your youth so you check a streaming service, but it is not there, so you check a second streaming service but it is not there, so you check a third streaming service and it is not there. You search for it on Blu-ray but it doesn’t exist, so you search for it on DVD but it is out of print. You find a seller on eBay who has it, but the listing reads ambiguous as to whether it is the real thing or a burnt copy. You message the seller and they reply with an automated response thanking you for your interest.

Gabe Newell (Valve Corporation, Steam software) famously said that piracy is an issue of service, not price. Netflix started out as a great alternative to cable television but now all these streaming services are trying to suck as much profit out of the viewer as possible in a race to the bottom. Time to sail the seven seas, and make these corporations earn our subscriptions again.

You can’t read the recipe on your phone because it prioritises the ads on the page. You bring your laptop into the kitchen and whenever you scroll down, you have to close a pop-up. You turn AdBlock on and the page no longer loads, then AdBlock sends you an ad asking for money.

Your adblocker shouldn't be asking you for money, use uBlock Origin instead.

The Airbnb charges you a $150 cleaning fee, but insists the place needs to be left spotless. There will be a fee if the bedding hasn’t been stripped and the dishwasher hasn’t been emptied.

Airbnbs have declined significantly over past years. What used to be a great bargain is often times not as good as a hotel for the same price or cheaper. If you must use AirBNB look over the listing to see if there are any unreasonable cleaning requirements before booking.

Your Uber driver is lost because his app hasn’t updated and keeps telling him to turn down streets that no longer exist. You still give him five stars.

Never had this happen out of the many times I've used Uber, but not much you can do here I guess.

Your mother sends you a link to a breaking story, but the article is behind a paywall, so you switch to the website where you do pay for news but there’s no mention of it.

Use the bypass-paywalls browser plugin or archive.today website to get around paywalls.

You buy a microwave and receive ads for microwaves. You buy a mattress and receive ads for mattresses.

Why aren't you using uBlock origin?

Strangers on social media assume you are American and get mad when you correct them.

Internet people gonna internet.

Your Gmail is approaching storage capacity.

Stop using Gmail. Delete your old / unused messages.

Your smart TV needs new firmware.

Never connect your TV to the internet.

Your phone schedules an update.

Modern smartphones are computers, and computers need to be updated. Would you rather have an insecure device and get your data stolen? You can still buy an old dumb phone if it bothers you.