If your job was to come up with greater enshittification for society, what would you do?
My ideas:
-
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.
-
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.
-
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).
-
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.
-
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.
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
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://piped.video/YJg02ivYzSs
https://piped.video/1KZATgg7bJo
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Good bot.