Micropayments: rolled out by Amazon in California in 2022, after changing all their driving staff from employees to independent contractors. Amazon vans now monitor package delivery rate and adjust driver compensation on the fly, like a cab fare box running in reverse. Auto accidents skyrocket as Amazon drivers literally race to make their quotas, and after a massive ad campaign funded by Amazon, Californians pass a proposition requiring immigrants to have to get two driver's licenses before they can drive.
If it was snow crash they'd replace all their trucks with skateboard couriers
Yeah the opening chapters are basically the exact same thing except with harpooning skateboarders and mob bosses
Like a lot of things, whether this is good or bad depends entirely on how it's used and who the intended beneficiary is.
Explaining a problem out loud often helps solve it, I know some of my coworkers can easily resolve an issue that might take me hours to fix myself, and deciding whether to ask for help (and who to ask, and how to ask them...) is frustrating as well. In theory, this could remove a lot of headaches from my day-to-day work. If I'm the one being interrupted and asked for help, so long as that's not constant (either interruptions are infrequent, or I'm only "on call" once a week or something), I don't mind helping coworkers troubleshoot.
I could see something like this being fine in a worker-owned environment. The problems (it can be turned into an inquisition, if you're fired in that inquisition you lose the ability to put a roof over your head and food on the table, it's likely to stay in place even if everyone hates it, someone else is pocketing all the benefits even if it works great) have more to do with capitalism than with this as a management idea.
DVD by post was fucking awesome because you could just rip the entire disc including all the extra features and mail it back the next day
Yes, but counterpoint: those legal streaming services are great too, because since they've gone mainstream the piracy scene has been flooded with absolutely stellar x265 releases pumped from the same services - a quarter of the filesize, all subtitles included in the file, and very often bonus and extra features are also included in the uploads.
As if, 30 years from now Amazon still had to pay humans to work on packing lines. Zillionaire Bezos will just have bots work for free, while President Barron Trump (D) gives you just enough to buy enough to eat with Prime (if you're lucky enough to be upper middle class).
