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.
Nice try Evil Corp
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!
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?
Sometimes when I’m shopping, I leave a piece of paper explaining my work/thoughts/etc. in the shopping cart before returning it.
“This nuclear attack warning was brought to you in association with our partners at Squarespace.”
Motion activated cemetery headstones.
Make money for your family, after you’re gone! If you get 1 million visitors, you get 1000 dollars a month! Just need to train a bird to swoop by every few minutes, and you’re living the life!
Oh, sorry, your cost of plot rent is now $1500 per month.
When people start to live in space, we can ration oxygen to the occupants, force them to view ads to live or pay for subscriptiom
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.
If technology wasn’t an issue: Dream ads. Naked at school? Calvin Kleins got you covered.
Futurana, eh?
We all had commercials in our dreams but you don’t see us running off to buy brand name merchandise at low low prices.
A transparent ad centred on your mouse cursor.
The thing is. Any advert I hear is typically for a product I will never purchase. And TBH even if it was a category of thing I might purchase, the fact that I’m being assaulted by an advert means I am guaranteed not to purchase that thing.
Calm down, Satan.
Nice try EA, but you’re not getting my golden ideas for free.
Brain implants that steal your thought patterns, which then get fed into some artificial intelligence that can create the perfect ad for your to see, which then gets directed straight into your brain with the same implant so you’re pretty much forced to buy it. Maybe they can straight up alter your thoughts directly so you want to buy something, skipping the need for ads.
Oh wait… I’m probably just describing what Elon is up to in the long run.
Don’t be silly. Elon is going to anonymize the data extraction first, categorise you into one of five badly defined groups, and then beam that shitty group product back into your brain.
Open source housing units when?
when houses become free, land/freeholds will be the new hustle. Cappies gotta cap.
Why do we need custom backgrounds for our phones and computers? That’s free space that could be ads. Especially good if clicking/tapping on the background causes a full screen, unclosable, unskippable ad. Because a misclick is definitely showing interest in the product.
Browser load times. Slow that down a bit, and you’ve got enough time to pop an ad in between every page load.
