Reminded me of Phillip K. Dick's "Ubik", where the door refuses to open for free:

The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."

He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."

"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."

...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.

"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.

The unbelievable part is that he could find the contract.

... especially while locked out.

If I recall right he was locked inside, not outside.

That was the most kafkian aspect. How could he earn more money to pay the door if it locked him inside?

In another instance, the door also didn't want to let him in without paying.

A little late, but here's the rest of the quote. He was locked in.

From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.

“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.”

Why? I can pull up most of my documents from past few years on my mobile phone. And that’s not even fiction.

I can almost hear the HN posts about how they actually agreed to the EULA

DaaS

If your fridge were really smart it would infer both your household’s disposable income and technical acumen based on its location and overheard conversations then tailor prices, failures, and replacement policies accordingly.

Isn’t that already in place in a more benign form? Many appliances come out under multiple brands with different skins, badges and prices. This also applies to bigger purchases like cars.

Of course it does that. That feature was debuted around 2024, and was present in most mainstream household appliances by 2029.

If it were real smart it would make you believe you are not technically able to refute its argument about needing maintenance.

Ah yes, the KantKooler 2000: Can you really be sure the chicken is thawing if you've never eaten chicken a priori?

There's a real "banality of evil" aspect to this: we are building the infrastructure of a future hellish totalitarian dystopia to get people to click annoying ads and to squeeze tiny amounts of revenue from customers.

Just make us meat batteries and plug us into the Matrix already.

Which is a part of The Matrix story that doesn't make sense...

It would've made more sense to say that they were using the human brains as CPUs, so conciously the humans were living in society, but sub/unconciously they were performing calculations for "the machines".

Which would open up an interesting plot, if the machines' (AI) "consciousness" ran on our brains and they didn't have their own hardware CPUs, would that make the humans the machines? Or would the program be seen like a computer virus?

> It would've made more sense to say that they were using the human brains as CPUs

That was apparently the original plot before studio executives decided it would be too difficult for audiences to understand.

https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/19817/was-executiv...

This doesn't really seem to indicate that was ever the plan. There is an offhand mention of a different plan, a Neil Gaiman story that I've read and has to do with aliens and is very different, and a novelization that doesn't actually exist.

Originally, in earlier versions of the script the humans were used as CPUs. IIRC the studio made the Wachowskis change to using humans for power generation.

what do you think motivated that change?

They didn't think audiences were ready to view the brain as a computer.

I disagree, but 20+ years later I don't think it would even be an issue, what with all the `people only use 10% of their brains` nonsense movies that have come out.

So they could have a dramatic scene where Laurence Fishburne can explain the situation by holding up a Duracell looking battery.

> Which is a part of The Matrix story that doesn't make sense...

Yes, it makes zero sense. Just burn the food, if you even need to use food at all.

Seems stupid to have a matrix with pain and suffering. People would question our existence less if it were all candy and backrubs.

Agent Smith addresses this in the first film. "Did you know that the first Matrix was designed to be a perfect human world, where none suffered, where everyone would be happy? It was a disaster. No one would accept the program, entire crops were lost. Some believed we lacked the programming language to describe your perfect world, but I believe that, as a species, human beings define their reality through misery and suffering."

What if we define ourselves by suffering? Entire crops will be lost.

1984 imagined a horrific world where the government forced you to install listening devices in your home.

Meanwhile in 2020 we purchase them ourselves because we don’t want to flip light switches.

Brave New World is probably a better dystopian comparison than 1984.

More "oppression-by-comfort" than "boot-on-face-forever".

Every time Orwell's 1984 is mentioned on the Internet it gets this exact followup comment about Brave New World. Not saying it's wrong, but this is just some kind of law of internet discussions.

IMO, that's because the world is headed toward a techno-dystopia that lies somewhere between 1984 and Brave New World.

ghostcluster's law.

Postman's Law.

Oppression by comfort comes first, oppression by boot comes second after you decide the comfort isnt worth it.

It's much cheaper that way. If most fall in line in exchange for comfort, you don't need to pay for nearly as many boots on faces.

Until you have robot armies you don’t need to pay, period.

I've heard it put this way: the dystopia we're building is Brave New World unless you truly get in the way, in which case it rapidly becomes 1984.

That's why the message from Fahrenheit 451 was more apt to 2020: It's not the government that creates a dystopian future, it's us.

The government at least ostensibly needs a warrant to access your communications to a smart device. Mandatory government surveillance and opt-in convenience products are not on the same plane.