> Finding stuff was a common problem 30 years ago too. The rate of change was much lower then leading people to memorize the interfaces better.

Rate of change has certainly increased but that's not really the issue at all; it's just that hostility and exploitation has increased. These days you can take any phone app with a search feature, then watch it jitter/freeze/crash or otherwise get weird when you try to use it in offline mode. Do I need to be online to search my music or books? Of course not, it's just substring search over the local title/author/metadata library (which should be easily possible regardless of whether the asset itself is even downloaded). Corporate wants the callback so they can spy/advertise, so just watch everything panic if the cord is cut. Corporate also has the cash/engineering muscle to create software that spies/advertises if and only if I actually have an internet connection, and gracefully degrade to some kind of sane non-mediated behaviour when I'm offline. But they'd rather fake offline-capability and then punish the user for disconnecting.

Search is the original and best place to stick mediated-experience hostility along the lines of "you will look at what I give you, not what you wanted to find", because the user has already kind of admitted they are lost and unsure. But in off-line mode, even loading the home-screen for apps like spotify/audible/kindle takes 5-10s, and with a lot of smart TVs changes boot time to like 30s+. Or consider something like a shuffle or play-next feature. My "best songs of 2023" list features lots of stuff that I don't recognize at all, because they force-fed me something, gave no way to downvote, then concluded that I loved it.

Users can perhaps leave behind social media, but if one is a hardliner about receiving any modicum of respect from the interfaces that you use, it's starting to look like you'd have to leave behind ALL media/technology. And this observation comes in what is still the very early days of ubiquitous useless "AI" being jammed into literally every interface everywhere. AI is/will be the new reason everything has to be online all the time, all actions tracked, all experiences mediated. Software companies, telecom companies, governments all benefit. Most users won't.

We can quibble about exact word-choice but the conspiracy is this: the status quo for software UX quality is so consistently and completely degraded everywhere that it's been normalized. To the extent that exploited users routinely make excuses on behalf of software & corporations to other users who think this is unacceptable. Maybe it starts as Stockholm syndrome where we sympathize with our captors just to continue to function, but often ends with more active participation.

> Oddly enough I don't blame the manufauctures. Us the consumer are willing to bend over and take this crap, so why shouldn't they shovel it to us?

Normalizing or evangelizing bad behaviour is participation, and as you say I guess staying when one could leave makes one complicit. This assumes choice though, or else it's just victim-blaming. As you also said, it's not often that we actually have meaningful choices for most technology.