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.
Granted. Because you didn't specify online social network, all human interaction now can only be done through Lemmy.
People can't make phone calls. They can't talk to each other face-to-face. If you're standing in line at the airport, security is done exclusively through automated systems. If you need tech support, it must be done through Lemmy.
The federated system cannot support that must traffic efficiently. So Lemmy periodically defederates, meaning your Taco Bell order can take six weeks or more to go through. Surgeries are now impossible, because doctors are not able to directly talk to support staff. Human population plummets.
Eventually, all electronic systems start to break down. Lemmy begins to fail, and all of humanity is doomed to individual isolation.
Granted. You'll have a nice sandwich, but not now. You'll never know when the good sandwich will come. Is it the next one? In a year? And when you get a good sandwich, will it be your last one.
Enjoy the anxiety.
alternate ending: You don't know if you've already had it. Maybe that decent sandwich was the good one, and no other sandwich will be as good. Until you get that better one, after which maybe THAT was the good one
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. 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. 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. You love the next year. We all do. Then, as the clock strikes midnight, and we welcome in 2025, we all feel a strange disturbance. We feel dread and fear, and we realize we’ll never be happy again. 2024 was the last time we’d ever experience happiness, and we wasted it by going to our jobs to pay for rent.
Granted. You now experience the death and loss of every relationship that would succeed or fail in your life. All relationships end, even successful ones, and you get to experience every ending, with every potential partner you ever meet.
Granted. You know the outcome before you get involved, meaning before you even establish contact. Everyone you cross paths with is potentially a relationship with an outcome you now know, as a result you have a natural emotional response to each one without any of them actually happening in reality. Any exposure to people becomes unbearable, merely going outside carries the risk of having the worst possible outcomes imaginable become part of your headspace, constantly. This dumps you into a permanent state of neurosis and paranoia, you start isolating yourself from anyone and then become incapable of functioning mentally and emotionally. Of course no one believes you and after your family gets involved, you are forcibly committed to a mental institution where there's an unending stream of worst possible outcomes for you to know.
The Monkey's Paw
Oldest