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.
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 Evil Corp
I’m reminded of a classic greentext.
PLEASE DRINK VERIFICATION CAN TO CONTINUE
A transparent ad centred on your mouse cursor.
Noah, get the boat!
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.
If this is the path of society, I’ll go live off nature completely off grid.
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.
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.
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.
If technology wasn’t an issue: Dream ads. Naked at school? Calvin Kleins got you covered.
Futurama, 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.
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.
The medical field is ripe for some intrusive ads to boost revenues! Possibilities are endless:
Ad-supported hearing aids (“this conversation will resume after a quick message from our sponsors!”)
Pacemakers - want to watch an ad for 100 more free heartbeats?
Surgery - this will leave a visible scar, but how about we make the cut look like the Amazon logo ?
Implants - click the nipple and watch an ad to re-inflate the left breast for 10 more days
