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.
I would auction shelf space at my mega chain grocery store to large brands. The highest bidder would have the opportunity to buy up all the shelf space in order to bury any potential competition. The bidder could create 100s of different labels of essentially the same goddamn product, in order to maintain the illusion of choice, maximize consumer confusion, and thus maximize the time a customer spends thinking about the shelf-dominant brand, for some otherwise dead-simple purchase, such as toothpaste.
Ummm I think they already do this…
Ads etched into glasses. Maybe tiny screens if that’s possible.
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.
It’s disgusting how many things people can still do without being exposed to advertising.
Loudspeakers: Imagine how many speakers there are in the world, and how often they’re not playing anything. All loudspeakers should always play ads if not utilized for anything else.
Edit: I went hiking last weekend, and while out there the silence was deafening. Out in the wild, where it’s relatively quiet, we’d only need to place speakers every few hundred meters to efficiently broadcast ads to hikers and such.
Nice try EA, but you’re not getting my golden ideas for free.
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.
If you go the NASCAR route, it’d make it way easier to find out who bought your politicians. And which pharma company bought lunch for your doctor last week.
Sometimes when I’m shopping, I leave a piece of paper explaining my work/thoughts/etc. in the shopping cart before returning it.
Have groups of quadcopters/does fly down streets over cars stuck at stoplights and show ads and/or play ads at them.
You could wait for the light to go red, then form up in a wall over the crosswalk to show the drivers waiting down the street your ad. They’re just going to be looking at the stoplight anyway, so that’s free eyeball time, right?
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.
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.
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.
“This nuclear attack warning was brought to you in association with our partners at Squarespace.”
deleted by creator
Escalator commercial break. Stops the escalator until the ad is done.
“this escalator is temporarily stairs. You’re welcome.” -Mitch Hedberg
The real one to worry about is stopping the elevator for an ad break. You’re trapped now bitches!
If only I had paid for quick walking.
One ad break between each floor or pay for direct lift that is a killer idea.
