In his horrifying and Clark Ashton Smith-creepy Ubik, 1 Philip K. Dick (PKD) invents or at least discovers the chatbot. The protagonist is Joe Chip; G. G. Ashwood is a business associate, accompanied by a potential employee Chip has agreed to interview. The AI, the door, cannot, by definition, be a protagonist, but I have helpfully underlined its tokenized outputs:
Back in the kitchen he fished in his various pockets for a dime, and, with it, started up the coffeepot. Sniffing the — to him - very unusual smell, he again consulted his watch, saw that fifteen minutes had passed; he therefore vigorously strode to the apt door, turned the knob and pulled on the release bolt. The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,’ the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” A knock sounded on the door. “Hey, Joe, baby, it’s me, G. G. Ashwood. And I’ve got her right here with me. Open up.” “Put a nickel in the slot for me,” Joe said. “The mechanism seems to be jammed on my side.”
PKD has built the world our AI rent-seeking oligarchs are building: A world where every possible transaction, no matter how trivial, is intermediated by AI chatbots and throws off revenue to AIs that oligarchs own.2
What should we call such a world? I suggest that, in PKD’s honor, we call such a world “dicked.”
With our vocabulary clarified, let’s proceed to what a large corporation dicking its users at scale would look like today. This is a Reddit thread from 2022; the writers speaks of “templates” and “robots.” In 2026, these virtually steam-powered technologies would be replaced by AI, absolutely no question.
Here, rent is collected by imposing floats on users helpless to resist. However, as soon as you’ve interposed an AI chatbot that you own between the user and the delivery of a some object of desire, the sky’s the limit! You don’t want to leave all those nickels just lying on the ground, right? Perish the thought!
On the happy assumption that the actual firm involved has mended its ways3, I have regomised their name to “Big Corporation”:
I used [Big Corporation] for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. [Big Corporation] flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for “at least 120 days”
It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine… I hear you… no problem. a transaction multiple times the size… sure. I get it. However, A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. [Big Corporation] provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues.
That’s not a bug. IT’S A FEATURE. Call center hell is a fine use case for AI.
There are reports of [Big Corporation] continuing to add “30 days” to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. [Big Corporation] is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant’s large transactions.
Well, that’s what the algo is for. Again, a fine use case for AI.
They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and “Fraud prevention” To hold your money indefinitely.
You cannot call [Big Corporation]. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different “agent” (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history.
Yes, AIs have problems with context. In this use case — call center hell — that won’t be a problem. It will be a solution!
There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response.
Again, [Big Corporation] gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call . NO ONE you can talk to.
Today, the “robots” will be AI. And:
If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue.
It only seemed prevailing in 2022. Now it’s heading towards universal. Of course, If Big Corporation really wanted to smear their cake with icing, they wouldn’t just mess around with floats. They’d dick all their users by charging a nickel for every exchange with an AI chatbot4.
At last, Customer support would become a profit center!
One way to view DOGE, and the glibertarian cesspit from which it emerged, is that their goal was and is to dick all recipents of government largesse in exactly the same ways that the user above was dicked (except for themselves, of course). But perhaps that’s not ambitious enough. Imagine an utterly dicked world where you can never reach a human civil servant, but you still pay a nickel every time you try. Imagine the homeric laughter among the political appointees as the consultants make that pitch!
NOTES
1 Review with plot summary (fan); review with theory summary (Guardian).
2 PKD does not flesh out the money flow involved; of Chip’s nickel, a cut no doubt goes to his condo association, ka-ching; the balance flows into some oligarch’s pocket, ka-ching. In Ubik, a chatbot’s “___ cents, please” is in fact a running gag; Chip had his dime for the coffee machine, but not to open the refrigerator door (five cents) or pour cream (dive cents). And so on. Chip is also not going to be sued by the door, but whoever’s collecting rent on the door; the condo association, or the AI’s owner, a blind spot not only for Chip, but for PKD.
3 It could be argued that Big Corporation mended its ways after pressure from the Joe Chips of this world (“consumers”). All that means is that the number of oligopolists in that space is suboptimal.
4 Dicking would begin during the second phase of Doctorow’s enshittification cycle (abusing users) and become florid and, well, ubiquitous during the third phase (abusing everyone).
Comments
Search my shelf, no Ubik … and no recollection of reading it. Hopped on the web and ordered a copy from one of the ubiquitous resellers (some of who are smoking crack based on prices). Anyway, $4.62 later, I now await delivery and look forward to one of his yarns. Honestly? It’s been quite a while because he was never a favorite.
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Even more frightening than The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
Some of my favorites are The Game Players of Titan, Martian Time Slip, and Now Wait for Last Year. All these at the height of his conceptual if not literary powers, and before he lost his mind with VALIS.
I have a hardbound copy of the Library of America’s Philip K. Dick: Valis and Later Novels (2009) I’d be glad to donate to The Jackpot if you want to email me a suitable mailing address. I promise to send the book only (no fan letters or flash drives).
Thank you for featuring a true prophet of the modern age. Admittedly P.K Dick’s work is of varied quality. He had a vicious speed habit and was often broke and furiously sending out work to publishers to pay rent or suffer knowing looks from the pet store cashiers who knew he was buying Horse meat for himself. Also, female characters are often one dimensional. His ideas, however, were far ahead of his time. Two truths I have gleaned from his work are that empathy is what makes us human and that that which you love has within it that which you hate, and vice versa. A real life example of that is Arnold Schwartzenegger. Some of his movies credit Dick for the story such as the one based on “We can remember it for you, wholesale” but others are very clearly written by people who absorbed his corpus such as the Terminator franchise. Without Dick’s work I suspect Ahnold would never have been the superstar then governor he became. And Dick would have hated his ‘leadership’. His own work brought forth a Governor he would have despised.
As usual with movies, his books are far deeper than the movies made from them, especially “Bladerunner” which was based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” and leaves out 3/4 of the concepts. I will not spoil anything except to mention that in showing empathy and sparing Harrison Fords life at the end, Ruger Hauer’s (sp?) droid character proves that he is more human than many of the humans in the story. Read it. There are also 5 volumes of his short stories of which many are great.
Re. Herbert’s Dosadi Experiment (which your article about I read later away from the internet so could not comment and am doing so now). The most interesting thing to me is that the prison planet, Dosadi, is so polluted and hellish that the Human and ‘Frog’ people there have evolved to become exceptionally fit specimens due to all the stresses they have endured for generations. The elite master planet people harvest their bodies and transfer their own consciousness into them to have eternal life in bad ass bodies. To me it is an analogy to the recruitment of ‘lower class’ people to become the functionaries of the ruling establishment. Peter Dale Scott has observed that “ruling classes exhaust themselves” and need infusions of capable people to perpetuate their domination. Think J.D. Vance vs. George Bush jr.
I see this development, in many senses of the word, of predatory AI as an impetus to the resurrection of the old Anarchist Bomb Throwers. No matter what level of surveillance is achieved by our “Overlords,” there will always be gaps in the “Armour of the Gods.” Think Saint Luigi. A Confraternity of Humanist Saints is quite possible. One very important rule for such organizations would be that there be absolutely no “organizing” via electronic means. Luddism has its uses.
Stay safe. Stack deep.
> no “organizing” via electronic means
Like Van Riper in Millenium Challenge.
Hard to imagine. And would computers have to be avoided entirely? That said, for all of hujman history up until a few decades ago, that was how all organizing was done. So you may be on to something.
Never read it, eBay to the rescue!