Granted. Virtual reality and augmented reality technology quickly becomes extremely cheap to buy and easy to acquire. Soon, cybernetic implants become available so that a person doesn't even need a headset to experience virtual reality.
Within a few years, the implants are commonplace and easy to acquire all over the world. Children are implanted from a young age.
Because virtual reality provides such a strong dopamine hit, people stop trying to live their lives in the real world. Every single person starts to live fantasy worlds in virtual reality. And everyone is very happy.
The birth rate plummets, and within a couple generations no new humans are born.
Granted. From now on, everything you decide to do turns out to be a monumentally bad idea, which you execute flawlessly before even having time to think through the ramifications.
Granted. Anyone else that ever reads your post title (even if they just scroll past) has something bad happen to them for as long as this post exists. You’re aware of it everytime it happens and instantly know the full extent of the damage you’ve caused in other people’s lives.
Granted. Everyone from twitter, facebook, reddit and tumblr now hang out here exclusively. Lemmy adapts to the new audience over time. Some of the larger instances add monetisation and advertising in order to offset costs, and then they fall to greed. Corporations try to buy instances to turn into business ventures and dickwads try to turn smaller instances into investments. Lemmy becomes exactly what it was created to avoid.
The Monkey's Paw
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