I’m drinking boxed wine tonight but I accidentally set the box in a puddle of water on my kitchen counter and the bottom of the box fell apart, so I had to just take the bag out and realized boxed wine is really just bagged wine. So now there’s just a plastic bag of wine sitting on my table and for some reason that felt a bit cyberpunk to me, you just buy a big bag of booze when you want to get fucked up in Mega-City 1.
I have a programmable AI that controls my house for me. I can personalize to my preferences completely. I cannot afford my prescription toothpaste that has slightly more floride in it.
This one haunts me. The hardest part about living under a society where the ability to profit is the primary objective is mourning for all the wonderful and amazing things we could be accomplishing if the objective was to actually give people better lives.
militarized police that only exist to protect corporations and their government dogs
app slave operated burrito taxi
A military parade thanking its sponsors including Coinbase(crypto company)
Billionaires and pop music stars fucking off to space for fun on a whim, while the rest of us try to figure out how we’re gonna eat next.
We get close to Elysium every day
Puppygirl Hacker Polycule.
They put the punk in cyberpunk.You’re basically fucked if you don’t have a smartphone nowadays because it’s like your wallet/keys/money/bank/email/notepad everything in one. And yet at the same time it spies on you and spams you with notifications and ads.
Overall the necessity and ubiquitousness of our tech but it’s also hostile to the user and almost inescapable.
My car insurance provider didn’t mail me an insurance card, I need to have their app on my phone, but I forgot to reinstall the app after I switched to a newer phone. Of course I got pulled over and couldn’t provide proof of insurance. By the time I downloaded the app again the cop said “we’re past that” and I had to go to the court house to prove I had insurance at the time of the stop.
So convenient!
That cop was a complete cock, but we’re way past that (with cops).
I bet the app spys on your location data to judge how you are driving/get an excuse to increase your rates.
Yup! I did one of these a year ago, against my better judgment because we really needed the discount.
Had to give the app unrestricted permissions, had to run it for 6 months straight, and it kept a running list of “incidents” ranging from crashes and hard stops all the way to slightly fast turns and even driving at more risky hours of the day.
Luckily, my agent is a family friend so he gave me the lowdown - this one lets you view the reports, and you can mark any negative incidents as “I was a passenger” and clean up your record as you go. So when the 6 month period finished, I had an absolutely impeccable score, basically the best you could possibly get.
You also don’t get any discount at all until a year after the start of the program, so it was all in the understanding that eventually some day we’d get the discount. Also this company does some discount for length of service, so we would be getting that as a discount when renewal comes.
My insurance just renewed with the new discounts a month ago. After all that, here’s the big savings:
cw insurance company fuckery:
Price went up about $10/mo (roughly 10% of the original price).
That spoiler-tagged ending lmao
Yeah seriously. I suppose I should have said it only went up by that much, as I assume it would have gone up way more otherwise (despite having no claims or additional coverage between those times).
If you live in America look into switching whenever your coverage needs to renew. Elephant insurance is a pretty good one that doesn’t advertise as much so it’s not as well-known.
Yeah we go through an independent agent, so in theory they are shopping around for us on every renewal. I will ask them to look into that one though, so thanks for the tip.
3d printed guns maybe
drones
I went to a show yesterday, expecting to pay at the door. The people running the ticket counter had no physical tickets and were not taking cash, but said “Can you log in on Facebook? That’s the best way to do it.”
It must have been important to be able to reserve a specific seat in an auditorium that had 4x as much capacity as the crowd that attended.
Fake guardrails are the biggest annoyance of mine.
I had a coupon for a free smoothie so I decided to go use it at a place close to my house.
Partner wanted a chocolate banana smoothie so I asked for one and the dude at the desk was like “we don’t have that”.
They have 30 items on the menu with chocolate and another 30 with bananas! You have the items there! Fake rules like that turn my brain to mush.
In Colombia we went to a restaurant and my partner noticed they had no vegetarian options so we asked and the owner was like “I’ll make you something don’t worry.” And he did! Plantains, rice, eggs, beans! Best meal I had there!
I used to work at a pizza shop and we didn’t make calzones, someone came in and asked for one and I offered to make it and my manager said we couldn’t because the computer didn’t have a menu item for a calzone. I tried to tell him it’s the same ingredients as a medium but he started getting pressed so I dropped it.
Capitalism
You know those drink dispensers that can mix fifty flavors in any combination you want? Closest thing to replicators IRL.
And the most cyberpunk part about them is that they started cool like that, hey mix any combo you want from this huge list, but now it’s basically: yeah you can have plain coke, cherry coke, or vanilla coke. You can have plain root beer or vanilla root beer. Here’s about 6 other drinks with 1 extra flavor option each.
It feels like the tech was too much work to keep clean (also true of all other soda fountains), so they canned any interesting interactions pretty quickly.
Feels like it should have a flashing neon sign hanging about it banging on about “over a million flavor combos!” but with the last part perpetually turned off and dropping sparks on you and into your cup during the process.
Went to an amusement park and they had bar codes on the bottom of the cups so you only got one refill every 15 minutes. I hope those machines die
Yeah the machines are going away in most places too. They were just too good for a failing society like ours.
boxed wine is really just bagged wine.
don’t call it that
Americans think goon is a weird slang for wine, but also think Dick and Randy are just ordinary first names.
There was a pro baseball player named Randy Johnson and its one of the funniest names ever
Dick Butkus
we shouldn’t call ourselves that either
It was called that long before gooning got the new meaning
“In my day we called them Space Bags.”
Climate change
One of the things that comes to mind is ads everywhere, a lot of the time in cyberpunk fiction there’s like holographic ads and video billboards and stuff and ads targeted towards individual users, long before that became viable IRL. That scene in Minority Report where the ad talks to the main character as if it knows him was still in the realm of scifi 23 years ago, but now it’d be totally possible.
