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:

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!

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?

2. 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.

3. 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).

4. 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. 

5. 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!

6. 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?

7. 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. 

8. 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.”

9. 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? 

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.)

10. 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.

11. 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.)

12. 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?

13. 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!

14. 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 headquarters in the next 20 minutes over this. CHANGE YOUR WAYS.

15. Speaking of streaming services, could they perhaps go back to being better than cable? Because they used to be, briefly, before they dug deep and figured out every possible way that they could get so much worse. Right now what I’m looking at is like … cable, only changing channels involves a discovery heuristic (sorry) that operates semi-stochastically (God, I’m so sorry; if I keep this up, I’m going to be appointed CEO of Allbirds before I finish this column). That means I’m basically just guessing which random colored square contains the piece of content I want among the ever-shifting content groupings swirling behind the clusters of apps I sometimes subscribe to and sometimes don’t. Of course, I could just remember which media conglomerate owns the Dynzneef service and whether the same conglomerate also owns the holding company that controls the streaming rights to the Sonic the Hedgehog IP. Can you possibly imagine the transcendent, the radiant, the all-consuming passion with which I don’t want to have to do that??? As Moses says to the graven images, GET THEE HENCE.

16. Make weather apps accurately relay the weather. I know we’re currently nerfing America’s meteorological capacity for some galaxy-brained bullshit reason like “so Jeff Bezos can own a third moon of Saturn.” But I’m standing outside. My weather app says it’s raining. It’s not raining. This seems like a problem? Just a thought! 

17. Please stop this man from lecturing about the Antichrist. 

This is Peter Thiel, cofounder of beloved corporations like PayPal and Palantir. Lately, he has been traveling the globe delivering secret lectures on the Antichrist. This is weird, and also concerning. The Vatican agrees. Please put him back in his holding pen until further notice. Broadly speaking, it feels like a lot of Silicon Valley is going down this route of deranged, quasi-mystical, apocalyptic, grandiose nonsense, probably because Silicon Valley CEOs read too many chosen-one fantasy novels when they were young and now need to playact scenarios in which humanity can be saved only by successfully deploying AI-powered credit card–processing platforms. It’s creepy to the rest of us. Stop.

18. Fix search!!!! Look, nothing against AI. Assuming you hate yourself, the world, and humanity, AI is tremendous. But I just googled “what’s wrong with Google” and got six ads for print-on-demand hats reading “I LOVE ELON MUSK’S LIPS”—I’m writing this in Google Docs, so that checks out—and an 11-step plan for learning how to hit a buzzer-beater in the NBA playoffs. One of the steps was just a list of Acura minivans? Melior est in vita amor Dei quam Dei cognitio, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote: In this life it is better to love God than to know Him. I do not believe the same applies to the capital of Bhutan. (If I’m wrong, please disregard.)

19. Speaking of Google, fix formatting in Google Docs. This is a minor one, but as I said, I’m drafting this in Google Docs, and … what the hell is up with this numbered list formatting?!

Google! You are making an industry-standard word processor used by professionals (hopefully not the pope). Have some self-respect.

20. Finance tech friends! It sure seems like it’s easier for companies to charge me than to refund me. Could we look into that? I buy a product at a store. The pending charge appears on my credit card app instantly and is finalized within a day or two. I return a product to the same store. Six hundred years pass. My distant heirs receive a notification that the refund is now pending. Another 11,000 years go by. Old civilizations fall; new ones rise. Deep underground, in a cavern beneath the moon of Saturn formerly controlled by the Bezos clan before it was deposed in a violent uprising in Year 1 of the long-defunct Crystal Spider Calendar, my phone bloops within a pile of moldering historic artifacts. Walgreens has credited my Citi card $6.99 for some expired shampoo.

21. Don’t make me scan a QR code to read a menu. For God’s sake, I am at dinner. I know the QR-code menu trend was a result of a good-faith effort during the early pandemic era to eliminate the leading vector of COVID-19 transmission (menus). But I look at my phone all day. Now I want some peace. Can I just have a nice book, maybe with a spiral binding and a few pictures of pasta, to browse through? Maybe with a nice burgundy fake-leather cover and a wine stain on one page? Doesn’t that sound so nice? 

22. Maybe ban QR codes in general. As far as I can tell, “QR” stands for “quite [r]annoying.” (I could be wrong about that. I looked it up on Google, but the top two answers it gave me were “Queen Christina of Sweden” and a link to Old Navy jorts.) Every time I see one of these pixelated black-and-white micro-bastards—they look like s’mores in the Tron universe—I assume I’m about to be taken to an unfathomably janky account-creation screen that will lose my information the second I hit submit. It may seem hard to imagine a world without QR codes in it, but look. If Paul Konerko could become just the 18th player in MLB history to hit a grand slam in the World Series, a feat he accomplished when he took Chad Qualls deep with two outs in the bottom of the seventh in Game 2, I’m confident we can figure this out.

23. Stop burying every website under 40 layers of pop-ups. When I’m browsing the internet, I’m usually performing a specific task. I am focused. I have an intention, and anything that delays or disrupts that intention is intensely frustrating to me. Websites, however, seem to think that when I’m browsing the internet, I’m sort of … drifting aimlessly through an indeterminate haze, soaking passively in the general warmth of their brand space. You know what this guy wants right now? A pop-up inviting him to sign up for our newsletter. Maybe another pop-up informing him that our fall sale is currently active. (It isn’t; it ended yesterday.) Maybe a third pop-up informing him that some features have changed since his last visit. And can we interest sir in an EU privacy law–mandated cookie consent pop-up? What if some of these pop-ups were unclosable and covered up buttons he needed to navigate the site? Wouldn’t that be divine?

24. Since you don’t respect my opinion anyway, quit pestering me to fill out a survey after every single consumer experience. I keep wondering who looks at these surveys. Is the CEO sitting in his wood-paneled office, reading each individual response on an old-timey stock ticker? If so, you can keep doing this. If not, I rate this experience zero stars out of infinity.

25. Fix Sonos. That’s all. That’s the tweet. Just make it … not … like it is. Please?

26. The email is one sentence. Your nonconsensual AI bubble-pest keeps asking me whether I want help summarizing it. Can you summarize the sentence “No”? 

27. If NASA can send astronauts 250,000 miles into space, surely the richest industry in human history (probably, not looking that up) can make autocorrect features slightly less irritating. I am a ducking grown-ass adult. Let me use whatever ducking words I want without trying to nicen them up, you arrogant, nannying pieces of shut. 

28. Please stop this man from possibly being the Antichrist.

29. Stop requiring me to have an X account to read the emergency updates that my government posts on X. I am in a hurricane. My house is in a swimming pool, and the swimming pool is in a tree. Emergency services are, for reasons I am not presently at leisure to explore, posting vital safety updates on X. When I try to read the relevant thread, the app tells me I can’t do it unless I create an account, something I would gladly do if a Kia Sorento were not flying at my face. I shall die peacefully here in my swimming-pool tree, knowing that at least I never had to talk to Grok.

30. I just unsubscribed from your email updates because I receive too many emails from you. You do not need to send me an additional email confirming my cancellation. I’m sure you mean well (I’m sure you do not mean well), but take a walk, buddy.

31. Also, when I click the unsubscribe button, don’t remove me from one made-up subtype of email update while keeping me subscribed to 17 other made-up subtypes. Let’s be real here. Your “marketing” email list is not any different from your “brand updates” email list, which is not any different from your “news and sales” email list. No one ever sat at their laptop thinking, “Wow, I’m sick of this company’s marketing emails, but I’d be crushed if I stopped receiving their brand updates!” No one is forcing you to act like this. Saint Teresa of Avila famously said, “If this is how you treat your friends, no wonder you have so few of them!” She was talking to God, but she could easily have been talking to the Banana Republic communications department.

32. Stop forcing auto-updates at the worst possible moments. So many of your products are premised on the idea that you know what I want at any given moment. The grocery list is supposed to pop up on my phone when I get to the grocery store. The thermostat is supposed to turn off when I’m away on vacation. Neither of these things happen when they’re supposed to, ever, but you clearly believe you have great context-divining powers. Why, then, can you not stop my work computer from flinging itself headlong into full-takeover auto-update mode at the exact instant when I start a major project? It is 2 p.m. on a Tuesday. Is this really the right moment?

33. Make it possible—oh, dear God, please make it possible—to find privacy settings without a nationwide manhunt involving floodlights and basset hounds. Do you think we don’t know what you’re doing? “Go to Settings ->Preferences->Other->Other Options->Stochastic->Non-Evidentiary->Experimental, then click Advanced, then click Desalination, click Both, then Both again, then No three times, then all you have to do is translate the page from Russian to English and voilà! You can turn off genome mapping.” I believe it was Saint Augustine who said that to have faith is to believe in what you do not see; he was referring to the Facebook privacy settings.

34. Reimagine in-car Bluetooth as something that does not make me yearn for the life of a peasant in the 14th century. You know what peasants in the 14th century never had to deal with? Their car automatically playing the song that comes first in alphabetical order on their downloads list, or their car automatically playing the most recently played audio from any app on their phone, or their car taking over their headphones even if their headphones are currently in use somewhere else, or their car requiring an arcane series of menu dives to change the connection from one phone to another. Admittedly, peasants in the 14th century did have to deal with the Black Death. They also never got to watch Paul Konerko’s SportsCenter commercial. It was called the Dark Ages for a reason.

35. To Mark Zuckerberg, specifically: Shut up about the Roman Empire. You are not the Emperor Augustus. You are a cunning dweeb who took amoral advantage of extremely weird and volatile social conditions to amass a degree of power that allowed you to destabilize a carefully constructed democratic republic that had stood for centuries. OK, when I put it that way, you do kind of sound like the Emperor Augustus. It’s not a compliment when I say it!

36. I’m shopping for shirts. A shirt I like comes in eight colors. I look at all eight. Now, when I click the back button, I discover that each color change counted as a secret page reload, so I have to cycle back through all seven additional colors before I can get back to the main list of shirts. How long would it take to fix this? Eight seconds? Did you use your own platform before you launched it? Again, it sounds trivial, but believe me: Emperor Augustus would have had someone’s head for this.

37-39. Please stop seeing every precious and beautiful aspect of life on earth as a commodity to be controlled and exploited for wealth. Now, see, this is a tough one. It’s so tough that I’m giving it three entries. It’s tough because I know you know you fucked up. You’re aware that much of the world has soured on you. You’ve seen a fleet of headlines like “AI Companies Know They Have an Image Problem” and “AI Has a Message Problem.” You’re aware that the loathing people feel for AI is making them look again at the other products you’ve inserted into every corner of their lives and realize with fresh disgust the many, many ways in which those products represent broken promises. They don’t work as they’re supposed to. They make life more frustrating, stressful, competitive, and alienating rather than easier and more connected. You’re using them to spy on your customers, whom you view as vessels of monetizable data more than as people, and whom you hold in increasingly palpable contempt. You see that we see this, and you’re surely hard at work on ways to fix the problem.

But this is where things get tricky, because I don’t think you want to fix the problem, not really. I think that, to you, “fixing the problem” means fixing the image that conceals the problem. I think you want to keep doing all the same stuff while selling us a better story so that we’ll let you get away with it. And that doesn’t fix anything at all. 

Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.

There are things in the world that are more important than money. The fact that you seem not to believe this, that you seem to think any motive beyond ruthless acquisitiveness is fake, dishonest, or childish, is the heart of your problem. Your attitude is not by any means unique to tech, but the scale of capital concentrated in the tech industry makes the attitude—this confusion of an adolescent will to power for mature, undeluded realism—uniquely treacherous. You can’t build products that serve humanity while viewing every human good other than your own aggrandizement as bullshit. Thus, tech’s internal problems can’t be fixed unless the people running the industry change their outlook on a deep level (unlikely) or are somehow outmaneuvered as wiser heads reform the market to deprioritize perpetual growth (maybe Paul Konerko is working on this?).  

Which means that fixing the problem, as usual, falls to us. The tech industry, which has been selling us maddeningly broken products for years, has itself become one of those broken products: another shiny app that doesn’t do what it’s supposed to and that will force us to invent work-arounds if we’re going to get on with our lives. (Meaning, in this case: If we’re going to continue to work, read, learn, listen to music, make movies, write, avert wars, and all the rest of what—apart from ID’ing tiny crosswalks—we think of as verifiably human.) I don’t know where the work-arounds start; the oligarchs have so much wealth and power, and so few people who could stand up to them are even willing to try. But this is why the pope’s encyclical is so important. Magnifica Humanitas positions a major world power, the Catholic Church, in moral opposition to big tech as it’s currently constituted; maybe more importantly, it serves as a focal point for everyone else, articulating an understanding of what’s happening in the world that we can rally around. Or argue with, or correct, or extend; in any case, it’s a landmark to navigate by. I wish I shared Leo’s optimism about the likelihood of real change. But we’re better equipped than a month ago, and that’s something.

40. In conclusion: Stop forcing me to download a dang app to use my air fryer! I WOULD THROW MY PHONE INTO THE AIR FRYER OVER THIS IF I HAD ANY WAY TO TURN THE AIR FRYER ON AFTER IT WAS IN THERE.

Misereátur nostri omnípotens Deus et, dimíssis peccátis nostris, perdúcat nos ad vitam ætérnam. 

Amen.End of article