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.
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.