If your job was to come up with greater enshittification for society, what would you do?
My ideas:
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Rental apartments where every wall has a screen with ads 24/7. You can pay cheaper rent to live with ads in every wall or you can pay a monthly subscription to turn off the ads (you don’t get to use the screens for anything else tho). After people get used to it we can start adding a little bit of ads even for the subscription users, just a little less.
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Movie theaters. This one is obvious, why did anyone think it was ok to give people access to uninterrupted movies just because they paid a couple bucks? We should include some ads in the middle of movies in the cinema duh.
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Water and electricity. Private utility providers should be able to require you to watch a certain amount of ads on their apps in order to deliver their services to you every month (you still also pay normally ofc).
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Alarm clocks. Smartphones should delete the option to pick a custom sound for alarm and instead wake you up with loud ads. Installing any custom alarm app should require root and we should lobby government to ban devices with alarm clocks which are not smart.
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Unified ad-watching score. Similar to credit score, you will gain points by not skipping ads, having the selfie camera turned on while watching an ad (to make sure you looking), having the microphone on to make sure it isn’t muted, etc. Every platform contributes to your score. They can use your ad-watching score to give you benefits or punish you as they please.
Please don’t give them ideas. If they could figure out how to beam ads to our brains when sleeping they would.
Night sky ads.
Why have all that empty space when you can make it look like Times Square?
You are right, we should be able to build a mega laser cluster capable of projecting ads on the surface of the moon.
Not the moon, that’s thinking too small.
It should be completely covering the night sky, making it bright as day with glorious capitalism!
Omg I would love this so much
Never again would you sit there, wondering what to spend your money on.
You’d just know because it’s beamed into your brain all night long!
That’s not horizon to horizon.
In Heinlein’s story “The Man Who Sold The Moon”, a businessman threatens to put a corporate logo on the moon … in order to get a rival company to bid higher to keep the moon un-logo’d.
Calm down, Satan.
deleted by creator
I can see why he’s no longer a friend.
Nice try Evil Corp
Kill it all with fire
Remember those mobile games where you can watch ads to get some gold and diamonds or simply pay for them with real money? Well, I can imagine a dystopian future where that logic has been applied to everything.
Wanna press an elevator button? Pay with shopping center diamonds or watch this quick ad.
Wanna try on this shirt before buying it? Ads. Is this made of cotton? Ads.
Take the escalator to the next floor? Ads.
Wanna check the info screen to figure out where you can find a restaurant in this shopping center? Ads.
Wanna unlock different parts of the menu? Ads. Wanna see the prices too? Ads. Allergens? Ads again.
Need to go to the toilet? Ads. Want some toilet paper? More ads.
If you encounter this literally every 30 seconds, spending some money on those shopping center diamonds suddenly becomes a very appealing idea.
On the outside of the mall you see a punk looking guy with a Molotov cocktail in his hand. You feel a sudden urge to join in whatever he is up to.
Anyway, if you want some more suffering and sadness, simply dump the first lines to GPT and ask it to take this dystopia to its logical conclusion. It could get pretty wild.
Want to put gas in your car? Ads. That talk and there’s no way to silence them.
Oh, no, wait, that one is real. Are they everywhere yet? I haven’t driven a car in several years. But I definitely remember that was real dystopian shit, similar to how I felt when I started getting ads in Windows.
Ad-based apps on your phone.
It’s been done already, you say? Not like this: the front-facing camera is used to detect eye gaze. A counter on the screen starts at 30 seconds and only counts down while you are looking at the screen. If you look away, the counter, and the ad, pauses. The app doesn’t continue until you’ve watched the entire ad.
That’s the next level of what turned me away from Spotify the very first time I used it years ago. Their ads would pause if you muted the audio or even lowered the volume too close to muted. Sure, I could take off my headphones, but it was a matter of principle at that point.
You have to watch an ad to crank your car.
Every time you bring your car to a full stop while it is running, an ad plays through your audio system and displays on your radio.
You have to watch an ad to make a phone call.
When your phone rings, it plays an ad jingle, call JG Wentworth 877 cash now.
When you send a text message or write a text post to an online system, an ad is injected with your text post so that readers in order to read what you wrote also have to read the ad.
If you have Smart lights or anything smart in your home, in order to use it you have to watch an ad.
In order to pay for something with a credit card you have to watch an ad on the credit card machine and click one of the choices that are offered to you.
Smart pillows that play hypnotic ads at you in your sleep.
Your electric toothbrush requires an ad to be played the whole time it is being used, and if you brush your teeth for less than the length of the ad, then they take a dollar from you.
Some guy comes to your house and screams logos and add quotes at you all of the time. If you try to get him to shut up he murders you and your entire family.
Replace the guy with a robot.
5 sounds fun to exploit. Could just record myself staring at the screen on a loop, then loop the audio back to input, leave it on 24/7 and reap whatever godawful “benefits” come from having a great ad watching score.
I for one, am severely disappointed that i do not have relevent and targeted ads to view, while i am filling out online applications for jobs. i also still don’t see ads when i put the same information again on a paper application, as part of their company’s interview process or when filling out the tax paperwork if i get hired and i haven’t gotten ads yet when applying for food stamps due to the job not paying anything close to enough to survive off of and you know, come to think of it, i have not once seen an ad on any of my termination letters or paychecks either. actually, that’s probably because i never get either of those, they just tell me to stop ringing the bell and hand them the bucket of cash or tell me to return the wendy’s uniform within a week or i get a $35 fine deducted from my last paycheck and that i’m no longer allowed on the property after what happened behind the dumpster but that’s another story, i digress.
they should have ads on cash too. just because some people only use plastic cards and NFC to pay for things, doesn’t mean everyone does. poor people have a right to be bombarded with ads from their choice of currency, even if it is for things they cannot afford. it is a grave injustice of equal rights, that when i’m holding a cardboard sign on the freeway onramp begging for change, the pittance of coins i’m being pelted with aren’t blaring slogans from tiny built in speakers. when i’m dancing at the topless bar, the greasy singles being crumpled up and thrown at me don’t even play ads that sync up with the song i dance to and never, not one fucking time has my song and dance been interrupted for an important advertising announcement, it’s only ever interrupted by the strip club staff telling me to leave and never come back and that guys can’t dance to ‘touch myself’ by the divinyls no matter how flexible they are. i digress.
this is sarcasm mixed with weak attempts at humor. nothing should be considered truthful or accurate however some might be based on true events which have been altered or exagerrated for effect. This message was brought to by typing and no AI was harmed or used in the making of this comment.
I’m reminded of a classic greentext.
PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE
Smart contact lenses and also smart built-in lenses that work like cataract surgery lenses.
These are given away free and basically make traditional optometry have to change to a lower volume higher cost model. We also outlaw lasik on the grounds that it is more dangerous than smart lense implants.
The smart lenses track you and interact with personalised location specific advertiser content at each surveillance point, allowing them to show ads directly to your retina.
“We’ve noticed that your eyes track boobs a lot, so here are some ads for better bras to reduce back ache.”
Or worse, glancing at boobs results in “horny women in your area” pop ups even if you were just bra shopping.
A transparent ad centred on your mouse cursor.
Noah, get the boat!
If this is the path of society, I’ll go live off nature completely off grid.
