Valued users!
We understand that over the past 250-odd years, you have come to rely on the services provided by the U.S. of A.: postal delivery, representative government, edible food, clean water, lifesaving vaccines, and no kings—ever, guaranteed. Well, 250 years of free is enough. Now we demand $TRUMP coin.
Was America perfect before? Hell, no! Some of these features arrived pretty late for some of you, and for that, we used to be sorry.
We were so excited to reach 340 million free users. But now it’s time to streamline our product so that it appeals more to paid subscribers, and that means some changes for everyone else. We are adding a lot of features no one asked for that will make your experience worse and also cost a lot of money! Freedom isn’t free! Nor is it, exactly, the freedom you’ve been used to! Yes, that is the National Guard in your city. We know that you didn’t request it; it’s just a new feature we’re rolling out, possibly for 30 days, possibly for even longer!
You were pretty vocal about what attracted you to America in the first place: personal liberty, economic opportunity, something called the American dream, and, of course, the perennial threat of gun violence. (That last feature developed over time, but it seems that our users are pretty attached? We offered you many opportunities to opt out.) But we knew what was really keeping you here: inertia, and the challenge of finding an alternative that sells decent breakfast burritos. We are banking on that going forward.
We hope the difficulty of switching to another provider will keep you here while we slowly remove all the features that you came for and replace them with AI-generated slop. We are also changing a lot of our graphic design to extract any remaining soul from our product. (We saw how well that went for Cracker Barrel!) This comes with branding updates too! Instead of a Nice, Friendly Place Where You Can Work Hard and Have a Better Life, we’re now That Place With More Than 60,000 People Currently in ICE Detention. Sydney Sweeney’s jeans are running the Department of Homeland Security.
Don’t worry. Our new CEO does hate a large portion of our current user base, but he’s not totally ignorant of the culture here. He is very excited to bring back some things that past users described as “great,” such as Depression, Recession, and White-Shark Attacks. It was also his brilliant idea to add the features of autocracy—State Control of Business, General Encouragement of Groveling, Masked Men Who Yank Your Neighbors Into an Unmarked Van to Whisk Them Off to a Gulag—to our core democratic product.
You heard it right: The government you knew for Weather Data and Medical Research is going all in on Despot Whims. This costs money, so bedrock features such as Separation of Powers, No Troop Quartering, and Due Process are being phased out, even for premium subscribers. We are also getting rid of most of our Health and Science. But you can have a career in ICE.
We are retaining some features for premium users. Want rule of law? That’s premium. The right to run your company without government interference? That’s a paid feature now. An explanation from the Supreme Court as to why it just ruled against you? Maybe!
Why is this happening now? Simple. You all know the classic process of enshittification, as coined by Cory Doctorow, from your experience with the tech products that touch every aspect of your life. First, you have a product that everyone enjoys, and then, when someone decides that that product needs to make a profit, everything about it gets gradually worse and worse until the whole thing is ruined. This is why, whenever you open America’s homepage, an unwanted video starts to play. Instead of the medical recommendation you were looking for, there is a man with one weird trick, whom doctors hate! (He is the health and human services secretary!) All of the articles are now written by AI, except Article I, which has disappeared entirely.
Why are these changes necessary? They aren’t! Can you opt out of them? No! Tariffs, a share of Intel, and a weirdly conciliatory attitude toward Russian President Vladimir Putin are now the default for all users. Also, everything that used to be free now isn’t: speech, assembly, and petition, to name just three. Eggs now cost $800—both because they are very expensive to produce and because we are trying to make the dollar worthless.
What happened to my free press? Sorry! That’s paywalled.
We have gotten rid of the people responsible for making gradual improvements to America, and our new team wants to see exponential profits for shareholders. It’s unclear who these shareholders are, exactly! We thought all of us were, but it might just be our CEO? The executive mansion definitely seems fancier than we remember, and he has a new private plane.
You can still keep using America, and depending on your version, it may remain functional for some length of time. But if you’d like to subscribe to our premium product, there’s no better opportunity than right now! Please hand $5,000,000 in unmarked bills to our CEO. He may spare you.
The post Apologies: You Have Reached the End of Your Free-Trial Period of America! appeared first on The Atlantic.
