Brilliantly Bad Weekend Edition
Airbnb for toilets, dystopian sci-fi as a business model, Apple goggles get wacky and more!
Mike’s List of Brilliantly Bad Ideas
1. New app is like Airbnb, but for toilets
A shitty new app called Flush lets businesses like restaurants and hotels charge up to $10 for non patrons to use their bathroom. Like Airbnb, the service is reputation-based. Businesses can rate bathroom users and turn down prospective users with low reputations. If you end up with a low rating, urine trouble in the future toilet sharing economy. As with all things, this already happened on a Larry David vehicle (it’s basically George Costanza’s iToilet app from the Seinfeld reunion episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm).
2. Ernest Cline is now building his ‘Ready Player One’ dystopia
A company called Futureverse launched Readyverse Studios, co-founded by Ready Player One novelist Ernest Cline, as well as Shara Senderoff, Aaron McDonald and Dan Farah. The company is partnering with WarnerBros Discovery. Their first product will be The Readyverse, which will have a virtual world called “Ready Player One.” The company plans to “bring the Ready Player One franchise to the metaverse across web3.” Klein said that the venture would “lead us into the next chapter of our collective future… a future that would make Wade Watts and James Halliday proud.” Never mind that the “metaverse” from science fiction is always a dystopian nightmare. In fact, Ready Player One depicted a dystopian nightmare, where the real world goes to hell because everyone is addicted to a virtual reality fantasy world privately owned by a billionaire. After warning us about the horror of a virtual-first world, why would Kline want to build one? (Answer: Because he wants to be the billionaire.)
3. Apple doesn’t know what to do with its Vision Pro headset screen
The most unusual feature of Apple’s Vision Pro VR/AR goggles is that the outside of the headset has a screen, which in demos last summer Apple used for showing a creepy computer-generated view of the user’s eyes. So Apple filed a patent for showing all kinds of potential information on the screen, including depictions of what the user is doing or signs like “do not disturb.” Weirdly, Jony Ive is on the patent, and he doesn’t even work for Apple anymore.
Mike’s List of Moments
1. Average apartment rent of the moment: $3,510 per month. (This is the average rent near Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, in Silicon Valley, up 19% because of Google’s back-to-office mandate.)
2. Office space vacancy record of the moment: 36.7% in San Francisco. (This is the result of many companies in San Francisco not implementing back-to-office mandates.)
Mike’s List of Shameless Self Promotions
2024 will be ‘The year of AI glasses’
Big workplace changes are coming in 2024. Are you ready?
Read ELGAN.COM for more!
Mike’s Location: San Salvador, El Salvador
(Why Mike is always traveling.)
I tried looking for the nearest bathroom using FLUSH. I tried several versions of my local address and each time was directed to bathrooms in Nigeria.