An appliance used to be a machine. Now it's a bureaucracy

This point is key, I could name many devices that I own that are faulty or buggy when they left the factory, and or have short operational lives, and or whose ergonomic design is just terrible—unacceptably bad. This stuff isn't engineered, rather it's just thrown together. From my perspective the problem is of epidemic proportions.

Take software for instance, manufacturers have even trained the population at large to not expect it to work as specified when first out of the box, and that bugs a just a normal condition of the product.

But why is it that no one bothers to complain?

Perhaps after all we—the lay public—are really dumb and stupid in that we've actually let ourselves be so manipulated in recent decades.

Before we can fix the problem we need to know exactly how we were manipulated into this mess in the first instance.