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.
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.