Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

Tech

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can’t escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI

Tech

The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

The bugs, broken apps, and nightmare customer-service bots we can’t escape, presented as a blessed and sacred addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical on AI

By Brian PhillipsMay 28, 2:12 pm UTC • 19 min

This week, Pope Leo XIV presented his first papal encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, which addresses the tremendous moral, spiritual, and political challenges facing the world in the age of AI. It is perhaps the single most profound document ever released by a White Sox fan. Some, to be sure, will continue to champion Mr. T’s epochal “Treat Your Mother Right,” and verily theirs is a valid perspective; the pope’s essay, however, is an at least equally astonishing piece of work. Stretching to over 40,000 words, the encyclical, whose title means “magnificent humanity,” is the most comprehensive, systematic, and insightful analysis I know of the way the concentration of capital and power among a few tech companies threatens to degrade human life on earth. I’m not joking when I say that many professional tech journalists should be shamed by reading it. It raises alarms that they should have been raising for years but that most of them—there are exceptions—preferred to neglect in favor of credulous PR and access journalism. You could say that the mystic saints were access journalists of a sort. However, please don’t.

I’m not Catholic, and I have grave disagreements with the pope on issues ranging from trans rights to women’s ordination. Nevertheless, Magnifica Humanitas understands the way tech creates and controls its own climate of reality, and it offers a compelling, if currently unattainable, vision of what a just society that included AI would look like. It’s very clear about its central message, which is: Tech companies must put humanity first. I’m intensely grateful that it exists.

I’m also intensely grateful that this exists:

Konerko's jersey officially made it to @Pontifex https://t.co/4tkcvFJirC pic.twitter.com/z5kU5RAzZV

— Chicago White Sox (@whitesox) May 20, 2026

That’s right. His Holiness is a big Paul Konerko fan. I cannot think of a better way to demonstrate you’re a real one than to be this excited about a jersey from the 40th-best player of his era. I also love that the White Sox put Konerko’s name above the pope’s on the jersey. Like, sure, you’re the pope—that’s great and all—but did you have a career WAR of nearly 30 across 18 seasons? (The answer is no. The pope is anti-war.) Everything about this image speaks of goodness flourishing. Magnificent humanity!

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Anyway, the pope’s encyclical is an impressive document, and I strongly suggest you read it, or at least read more about it. But it isn’t perfect. I say this with all due respect to the leader of the world’s largest religious organization: He missed some stuff. To truly teach big tech to put humanity first, it is necessary to catalog all the ways that big tech is currently putting humanity last. And because we are living in a time of historically unprecedented exasperation—a time in which many of us go through the day filled with a sort of half-repressed and unacknowledged fury that threatens to burst out every time the app we’re trying to use sends us to a website to log in, but the website won’t allow us to paste the password from our password manager, and clicking “forgot password” sends us back to the app, which immediately crashes—any account of tech’s antihuman tendencies must necessarily include a detailed breakdown of how its products are truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass.

Of course, it’s beneath the pope’s dignity to say, “Truly just a colossal goddamn pain in the ass,” unless maybe he’s talking about Drake LaRoche. It’s definitely not beneath mine. And thus, in a spirit of piety and wise counsel, I do herewith offer the following humble list of the 40 most unbelievably fricking irritating problems in tech. It’s pretty long, but there are probably some annoyances I forgot. I never claimed to be infallible, UNLIKE SOME PEOPLE.

40 Ways the Tech Industry Could Stop Being Such a Colossal Goddamn Pain in the Ass, Proffered on This Day as a Righteous and Apostolic Addendum to Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas

1. Actually text me the one-time passcode, rather than saying you sent it to me while instead texting it to the molten core of the earth. Maybe even text it to me within 30 minutes? Did you think I was trying to log into my banking app, like, sometime in the next few weeks, as opposed to right now, while I’m sitting here looking at it?

1. Do not make me scan a QR code and go through an 11-step account activation process just to park my car for seven minutes. This entire transaction is going to cost $1.15. Your kiosk made me download an app, and now the app wants to know my birthday. All I want is to run in and grab a latte. Have mercy on me, please.

1. When I click the “remember this device” box, maybe, I don’t know, try to remember the device? The box says “remember this device,” but it seems like it actually means “instantly forget this device with extreme prejudice.” Similarly, “trust this device” seems to be a code for “absolutely do not trust this device, which has been stolen by terrorists.” This is my phone. I unlocked it with my eyeballs. I’ve used it to access your site 4,600 times in the past two weeks. If Paul Konerko had been this forgetful, he’d never have finished fifth in 2010 AL MVP voting (amen).

1. Please, please stop asking me to verify my humanity by clicking on tiny motorcycles. Five thousand years in the future, anthropologists studying our electronic debris will conclude that our civilization believed the definition of a human was “a creature that can properly identify crosswalks.” In these prompts, some of the crosswalks don’t even look like crosswalks. I lost 90 seconds of my life trying to decide whether a highway overpass qualified as a “bridge.” Stop doing this to us.

1. I want to watch two YouTube videos. I watch one of them. I click the back button. I see the other video’s thumbnail for about one one-hundredth of a second before the page scrambles, all the images change, and the video I wanted to watch is lost forever in the maelstrom of time and space. Isn’t letting me watch the video I want to watch literally your business model?? Just let me watch it! I implore you!

1. Stop connecting me to customer service chatbots unequipped to handle even a single conceivable customer service issue. Has anyone ever tried to contact customer service because they wanted an imaginary being named “Phineas” to regurgitate the exact text of the FAQ page that didn’t solve the problem in the first place? Why does Phineas have character art if he doesn’t even know your company’s phone number?

1. Stop thinking you’re better than me just because you know the word “stochastic.” Have you ever noticed how there’s always a tech-guy hype word that they use to make themselves sound smart? For a while it was “heuristic”; then it became “stochastic.” I think it's great that you discovered rationalism via a Slate Star Codex post arguing that white men shouldn’t pay taxes, but come on. Anyone can look up a word in the dictionary. Or at least we could, before we got stuck waiting for a passcode to get into the dictionary app.

1. Don’t make me check in online six separate times for every doctor’s appointment when we both know I’m going to have to answer the same questions when I get there. I need to see a specialist; I have an incurable condition called “just punched a marble receptionist desk.”

1. Keep Elon Musk’s lips out of my field of vision. Why are they so weirdly pursed and shriveled? Why are they plump and withered at the same time? Why does he look like a cartoon baby who just ate a lemon?

Brendan SMIALOWSKI / AFP via Getty Images

In Psalms it is written, “By the word of thy lips I have kept me from the path of the destroyer.” Unto Elon Musk I do verily say, “By the weirdness of thy lips I have closed many tabs with a full-body shudder.” (The pope would love this joke.)

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1. Stop doing the thing where the banner at the top of the site auto-hides when I scroll a short way down the page, but then reappears when I scroll back up, hiding the very lines of text I am scrolling up to see. You know that thing? Where the sentence you were looking for suddenly disappears beneath a Javascript-animated link to the About page? It sounds so trivial, right? I want to throw a piano through a wall.

1. For the love of God—ad amorem Dei, as the liturgy would say—please figure out shipping status updates. Congratulations! Your package has shipped. Here’s a tracking code. Oh, clicking the tracking code and going to the shipper’s website suggests your package hasn’t shipped? Well, it has, but here’s the thing—it also hasn’t. Welcome to Schrödinger's UPS Vortex, the quantum rift within which your box is on a truck passing through Memphis, in a warehouse in Topeka, or on the outer rim of the galaxy, where it’s being worshipped as a god by a species of semi-intelligent space protozoa. I once got a text from UPS saying they’d picked up my package the day after the package showed up on my porch. (This technically makes me immortal.)

1. Absolutely forbid drive-through menus from rearranging their content while I am looking at them. Obviously, we all love app-like drive-through menus that display only a small fraction of the menu at any given time. That goes without saying. But respectfully—with the greatest respect—is it really peak UX design for the menus to shuffle their content around while I’m trying to order? What part of ordering a value meal is enhanced by making the value-meal section of the menu flee from my gaze?

1. JESUS EFFING CHRIST (forgive me, Father) GET TOUCH SCREENS OUT OF CARS. Did you know that with physical buttons, it’s actually possible to turn the air conditioner up via muscle memory? You don’t have to take your eyes off the road for 20 seconds to navigate a multilayer options tree that cannot be operated unless you’re staring at it! No one under 30 will believe this!

1. The pregame show is on one app. The game is on a different app. When I get to the end of the pregame show on the first app and switch to the second app to watch the game, the second app auto-plays a commercial, meaning I miss the first 45 seconds of the game so that I can learn about medications that treat moderate to severe ulcerative colitis, a condition I do not currently have. I could assemble a mob of Premier League fans outside NBC headq

[truncated for AI cost control]