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.
I have to imagine that the only reason we haven’t seen this happen yet is because the technology to do so hasn’t been invented yet.
But, assuming that somebody comes up with some sort of projector-like device that can actually do this… is there anything that would legally prevent it from happening? Like, are there any sort of international laws against advertising on celestial bodies?
Calm down, Satan.
Sitting on a plane and the screen in front of you plays ads the whole flight.
I always take out those paper ads that are attached to the top of the seat if front and turn them around so I’m not staring at them for a 5 hour flight.
I thought I was the only one. Fuck you Easyjet!
I just had a few flight with Air China and after the security film they showed sponsors for it. Thanks Intel for making sure we survive an emergency.
Abort abort abort abort abort abort abort
Getting some real clockwork orange vibes here.
If that ever happens, I would start bringing duct tape to flights, tape a magazine to cover the screen.
I remember having a conversation with a former friend a while ago, and he, as a guy who worked for a certain company that makes most of its revenue from delivering ads, spoke about requiring use of front facing camera and using eye tracking technology to ensure you’re actually watching the ads and not going somewhere else while the ads play. If you aren’t looking at the ad, it will play another ad afterwards.
He spoke about it as something he is looking forward to, since it would increase revenue. Pretty sure he was pitching this idea to his boss hoping to get a promotion.
I can see why he’s no longer a friend.
Nice try, Zuck
“This nuclear attack warning was brought to you in association with our partners at Squarespace.”
deleted by creator
Nice try Evil Corp
Stop this thread, and burn it 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.
Kill it all with fire
A MLM style whisper campaign app your friends can run where it actually listens in on the conversation and allows them to make money for dropping product mentions and recommendations to you and others during hang outs and in person conversations with the recording to tag and prove they actually mentioned it.
Cool we can turn this into a new gig work app. The uber of ads. You open up the app and pay people small amounts to name drop something in a conversation. You could pay like 50 cents per person to 200 different people in your area to name drop your small business, that shit would slap. Then we could start using this to make people say anything for 50 cents each time they say it so we can spread fake news and gossip. I like this version of the future so much.
A typing game like Mario Teaches Typing or Typing of the Dead except all the sentences are ad slogans or brand names.
Emergency phone lines have ads at the beginning of the call to help pay for emergency services (because the government won’t pay for them).
Revoke regulation that requires disclaimers on paid endorsements (in other words, you have no idea if someone is endorsing a product because they like it, or because they were paid to talk about it).
Digital piracy is now a felony on par with drug felonies.
Ad blocking is now digital piracy.
Copyright is now indefinite, applied retroactively. An agency is formed to pursue copyright infringement on behalf of deceased rights holders and defunct companies.
Criticism is no longer considered free speech if it leads to direct or indirect economic damage (“your rights end where mine begin!”)
Referencing or speaking about a copy-protected work in-depth constitutes copyright infringement. However, enforcement is up to the rights holder except in the case of deceased individuals or defunct companies.
The last three may seem tangential, but together it means companies can take action against you for talking negatively about their advertisements and products, regardless of how old they are. Now companies like Disney can use copyright to permanently erase things like The Song of the South or Walt Disney’s Nazi boner.
Advertising is allowed on voter ballots (the voting process can be expensive after all).
Politicians must publicly endorse companies which endorse them (it’s only fair). Failing to do so is considered a form of ad blocking.
Public schools may include advertisements in their curriculum to augment teacher salaries. There are no restrictions on how many advertisements are presented, how they are presented, or the extent of their presentation. Choosing not to present an advertisement that is part of the curriculum is considered a form of ad blocking. "You have to pay teachers somehow, and I’ll be damned if it comes out of my pocket".
I could probably come up with more, but this is making me depressed.
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.
Even better. The countdown resets if you look away
Faaaaaak Please delete this before they see it!
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.
Two videos for you to watch:
Hyper-Reality, a PoV short film featuring an overqualified gig worker in a world of ubiquitous, ad-laden and heavily enshittified AR. https://youtu.be/YJg02ivYzSs
This Euro-News article which features a Murdoch-owned advertising agency trying to get train windows turned into bone-conducting acoustic transmitters so weary travellers are forced to listen to ads as they resr their heads. https://youtu.be/1KZATgg7bJo
