If your job was to come up with greater enshittification for society, what would you do?

My ideas:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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).

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  • MrFunnyMoustache
    32·
    7 months ago

    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.