Advertising

The age of obsequious computing might just as well be called the age of obsequious advertising. Advertisements are everywhere; not only out there in the world, on the sides of buildings and vehicles and on your PDA, but even in places you would consider private, such as your bathroom and your closet. They have become one of the main defining features of the human-made world. Only the wealthy manage to escape this constant bombardment, since exposure to ads offsets the costs of Universal Basic Income and provides many city dwellers with a well-enjoyed little bonus in credits at the end of the day.

The interior walls and exterior surfaces of apartment complexes in the sprawls and projects are typically festooned with ads, both moving and static. Public bathrooms and terminals of all types, not to mention the vehicles which frequent them, are likewise covered in ads both inside and out.

Your PDA brings you software and notifications wrapped in advertising banners, games and gimmicks, which can be avoided by paying for the “premium” version of the same service. Sure, they can be annoying, but ads also offer opportunities to enter sweepstakes, contests, and gamified labor contracts.

''“The elevator was lined with telemetric paint. Waiting to reach the eighteenth floor, I was immersed in a 3D commercial for the latest live-streaming VR program, “Cats in Boxes.” For the entire thirty seconds of my elevator ride, I experienced what it was like to be a Cymric Panther, poking its paw through a hole.”'' - Adrian McCauley

AI Advertising
AI Advertising is one of the most lucrative and visible industries in the ubicomp world. Today's most engaging ads are DataWake-aware, meaning they can track a lot of your recent movements and behavior, in order to present you with products or services calculated to appeal to you at this moment. These “living ads” are mostly location-based and are most commonly found in shopping malls, tourist destinations and marketplaces (“Welcome back, Jayne! I notice you were looking at the new line of colormatch pheromonals…”), but they may also be housed in specially-designed bots, the most annoying of which emulate characters from children's popular entertainments.

Many ads are not only smart but physically interactive, encouraging you to speak or gesture to interact with them. You might flip through a virtual catalog by turning the holographic pages with waves of your hands, or play a trivia game to get a free carton of NutriNoodlesTM credited to your account.

Many public dataspaces (from small interactive panels to massive billboards and the courtyards of malls or parks) simultaneously display different data to different people.