I have an ongoing fascination with Amazon Dash buttons. They are little Internet Of Shit items you can stick to a wall or any other surface and push to order One Specific Product. For example, pressing this button:
will immediately order six tubs of Hasbro™ Confetti sprinkles multi-coloured Play-Dough™ to be delivered to your house at the next post.
They’re simultaneously
Deeply dystopian/absurdist, in that ‘Straight out of a satirical near-future scifi novel’ way we all love so much
I’m not going to lie here, really oddly or maybe not-so-oddly alluring to someone who is very disorganised and struggles to keep on top of daily life skills
Somehow still weirdly broken, even for that – eg the one for toilet paper can’t be used to order a normal amount of toilet paper; you have to order 48 rolls at a time. And I have never, ever been able to form a model in my head of a person who runs out of Hasbro™ Confetti sprinkles multi-coloured Play-Dough™ so often and so urgently that they need a button to push as soon as it’s getting low. I want to be clear here that you can’t order regular Play-Dough™ with the button; it is only the confetti sprinkles variety. Yet presumably someone must have bought one of these at one point. I want to find that person and ask them a lot of questions.
Other things you can order with an Amazon Dash button:
Mentos
Organic Raw Virgin Coconut Oil
“Eyebrow cleanser”, which I didn’t know was a thing until just now
in contrast to star trek, the more i learn about the star wars universe, the more i wish i hadn’t. every new tidbit of information feels like the franchise spiraling further out of my reach, it’s like world-unbuilding
To all the young people who are here today, there are now more eligible voters in your generation than in any other, which means your generation now has more power than anybody to change things. If you want it, you can make sure America gets out of its current funk. If you actually care about it, you have the power to make sure we seize a brighter future. But to exercise that clout, to exercise that power, you have to show up. In the last midterm elections in 2014, fewer than one in five young people voted. One in five. Not two in five, or three — one in five. Is it any wonder this Congress doesn’t reflect your values and your priorities? Are you surprised by that? This whole project of self-government only works if everybody’s doing their part. … if you thought elections don’t matter, I hope these last two years have corrected that impression.
i’ve been sitting here for like 5 minutes trying to think of a caption but i absolutely cannot think of anything funnier than this collection of images
okay i just had a bad epiphany but corporate interest’s influence on the internet is going to become so much stronger now that generations that are internet naturalized have grown up and starting working as “social media consultants”. advertising is going to become so much more subtle, manipulate your behavior to a greater extent, and completely pervade every aspect of our lives the more we rely on the internet for everything from entertainment to social validation.
what im saying is its scary that corporate twitter accounts are getting good at twitter. to have the same avenue a human would to express themself. its like, an extreme anthromorphism of a brand, and that brand representing a corporate interest, and successfully passing itself off as a sentient entity on twitter, thats really weird to me.
like this is so fucked up. it doesnt immediately read as an advertisement, conceptually it executes the levels of irony and deconstruction that usually make for successful memes in this genre or whatever. its almost subverting itself, but ultimately it still succeeds as an advertisement. it makes me sick. for every misfire of corporations trying to relate (pepsi protest commercial), theres another company getting better at it
i think about this every time tumblr loses it over @dennys shitposting.
we’re well past the point of accepting the idea that corporations have personalities. that should alarm us. but we like those personalities, so it doesn’t.
fivepercent 