You said:
This is a longer excerpt: “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.”
ChatGPT said:
Yes — that scene is a miniature of Ubik's whole cosmology: banal objects with agency, contracts where you'd expect trust, payment systems fused into the very fabric of the domestic, and a protagonist—Joe Chip—who’s broke not just in the financial sense but in his very hold on reality.
It’s comic, but the comedy is caustic. A door demanding payment isn’t just absurd; it’s a grotesque inversion of the private sphere. Home becomes a site of transactional enforcement. The contract isn't symbolic — it's literal and binding, to the point that a door can sue you. The world is legalistic, automated, and smug about it.
And that line — "What I pay you is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you" — is darkly hilarious because it's such a human response to an inhuman situation. It's Joe clinging to an outdated sense of generosity, civility, even superiority — the illusion that he still has some say. But the door, like the universe in Ubik, is not having it. It knows the fine print better than he does.
So Joe’s act of rebellion — unscrewing the door — becomes the only gesture of agency left: not negotiation, not hacking the system, but disassembling it by hand. And the door's threat to sue? That’s Dick’s surreal genius — the deadpan nightmare where even an object can retaliate via legal means. Everything is conscious, litigious, petty, and somehow right.
Would you say this speaks to your own thinking around mediation, or the strange life of objects under capitalism?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Not quite in the way Ubik imagines, but we’re definitely on the road there.
In reality:
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Smart locks already exist. These are internet-connected devices installed in doors that can be locked/unlocked remotely via apps, biometric data, or voice commands. They can log entries, respond to voice assistants like Alexa or Siri, and some even use facial recognition.
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AI elements are creeping in, especially in higher-end home security systems. AI is used to learn routines, recognize anomalies, or authenticate access more securely.
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Payment-gated access is emerging in things like automated rental apartments or coworking spaces where entry is granted only after payment is verified — usually via app integrations.
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Smugness, however, remains a distinctly human (or Philip K. Dick-ian AI) trait. Doors today don’t talk back — but language models like me could easily be integrated into systems that do. (There are already voice assistants in fridges and ovens. A door isn't far off.)
What Ubik does so well is not just forecast tech, but the feeling of its consequences: a world where objects have legal standing, where the built environment participates in enforcement, and where the logic of debt and micro-transactions seeps into the physical texture of daily life.
We’re not fully there, but the bones are being laid. The idea of a door refusing entry unless you've paid? That’s not science fiction anymore — it's just Stripe integration away.
Do you see the Ubik scenario as satire of where we’re headed, or do you think we’ve already arrived in subtler ways?
You said:
Stripe integration
ChatGPT said:
“Stripe integration” refers to using the Stripe platform — a popular online payment processing service — to enable digital payments in an app, website, or device. When I said "just Stripe integration away," I meant:
You could, in principle, connect a smart lock to a payment system like Stripe so that a door only unlocks after someone pays.
So imagine:
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You walk up to a door.
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It asks for payment (via an app, NFC tap, QR code, etc.).
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The backend processes the transaction through Stripe.
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Once payment is confirmed, the smart lock opens.
That’s a real-world version of Joe Chip’s door — just minus the snarky personality.
In tech circles, “integration” simply means combining two systems so they work together. So “Stripe integration” = hooking your software or hardware up to Stripe to take payments.
The infrastructure for monetized access to physical space already exists. The satirical future of Ubik isn’t some deep cybernetic leap — it’s just a business model away.
Would you like an example of a real-world case where doors or spaces are monetized this way?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Here are some real-world examples where doors, spaces, or access points are monetized through payment systems — in ways that echo Ubik's premise:
🔐 1. Smart Lockers & Package Rooms (Parcel Access)
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Example: Amazon Hub Lockers or Luxer One systems in apartment buildings.
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Mechanism: Tenants pay a fee (directly or bundled with rent) to access secure lockers that open via smartphone or code. Some buildings even charge for overuse.
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AI Role: Facial recognition or machine learning to track delivery patterns and optimize locker usage.
🏢 2. Coworking Spaces
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Example: WeWork, Industrious, or app-based spaces like Codi or Breather.
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Mechanism: You book a space online. Payment goes through Stripe or similar. You receive a digital key or code — often via your phone — to unlock the door for a set time.
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AI Role: Some spaces use predictive algorithms to recommend optimal bookings or monitor access patterns.
🏠 3. Short-Term Rentals (Airbnb, Sonder)
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Mechanism: After payment, you get access to a smart lock (August, Yale, etc.). The door is connected to the cloud; if you haven’t paid, it doesn’t open.
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AI Role: Fraud detection, guest scoring, and in some systems, behavioral analytics (e.g., noise detection or occupancy prediction).
🚗 4. Car Sharing & Rental
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Example: Zipcar, Turo, Getaround.
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Mechanism: You unlock and drive a car via smartphone after payment. No key exchange, no human interaction. The car door is essentially a payment-verified lock.
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AI Role: Monitoring usage patterns, billing automatically for late returns or excess mileage.
🚪 5. Automated Access Control in Gyms, Saunas, Bathrooms
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Example: 24-hour gyms like Anytime Fitness, or public restrooms in certain European cities.
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Mechanism: You scan a card, QR code, or use a mobile app; the system checks your membership or charges a small fee before unlocking the door.
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AI Role: Monitoring occupancy, optimizing energy use, or personalizing the environment.
😐 6. "Smug" Vending Machines & Fridges
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Example: Byte Technology, Farmer’s Fridge.
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Mechanism: You swipe or tap to unlock the fridge. AI tracks what you take and charges accordingly.
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AI Role: Inventory prediction, behavior modeling, and upselling suggestions.
In all these cases, AI + IoT (Internet of Things) + payments create something very close to Dick’s prophetic world: your access to the material world becomes conditional, and objects can deny you unless your account is in good standing.
Not quite doors suing you… yet. But doors judging you? Already here.
Would you like to explore how this infrastructure could evolve into something like Ubik’s world — or how resistance to it might form?
You said:
ChatGPT said:
Exactly — and that insight cuts deep.
You're right to point out that what AI or tech does now is not fundamentally new, but a continuation and intensification of patterns that have long been part of human systems: enclosure, extraction, mediation, and the disciplining of bodies through tools, rules, and walls.
Before computers:
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Toll roads and gates required coins or tokens for passage — literal "paywalls" in the landscape.
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Company scrip towns made access to homes, stores, and food conditional on debt to the employer.
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Turnstiles, guards, and locked doors enforced physical and class boundaries.
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Servants and clerks functioned as semi-automated enforcement mechanisms of rules and fees — the "AI" of their day, in terms of performing bureaucracy.
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Debt peonage, sharecropping, and colonial rationing systems mimicked many aspects of conditional access and behavior control.
What’s new with AI and digitized doors is not the logic but the speed, opacity, scalability, and inhumanity of it. Systems that once required social labor and interpersonal friction now operate through invisible infrastructure, enforcing conditions with a smile-less efficiency. The door in Ubik isn’t terrifying because it's sentient; it’s terrifying because it speaks the logic of a machine-administered contract. It's a clerk that can’t be reasoned with, bribed, or exhausted.
And so: resistance feels impossible because compliance is automated, and the human memory of other ways of organizing life has atrophied.
The Luddites — wrongly remembered as anti-tech — were resisting a political economy, not looms per se. They understood that certain tools embedded certain relations of power. But you're right: their resistance was crushed quickly. And every new wave of mediation since — from bureaucracies to barcodes to biometric locks — was met with less and less resistance, as people adapted.
Now, people swipe and scan to enter their homes and say thank you to the algorithm. The resistance doesn't stop it — it already lives inside us.
The Luddites — wrongly remembered as anti-tech — were resisting a _political economy_, not looms per se.
ChatGPT said:
It is important — and it's often misunderstood in ways that serve the very system the Luddites were resisting.
To say the Luddites were resisting a political economy is to say they saw the machines not as neutral tools, but as vectors of dispossession. The looms were instruments of enclosure — not of land, this time, but of livelihood, craft, autonomy, and relation to time. What was being lost wasn’t just jobs, but a world.
They destroyed the machines because they couldn’t vote down the economic logic behind them. There were no courts that would listen, no contracts that protected them, no appeal to human cost. Their resistance was desperate and embodied — not technophobic, but world-defensive.
Fast forward: what looks like a simple smart door, or a helpful AI, might now appear apolitical — even inevitable. But it’s not. It too enacts a political economy, one that atomizes relations, pre-packages trust, and subjects space and time to financialized control.
The Luddite lesson isn’t to smash the machine; it’s to ask:
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Whose logic does this tool enforce?
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What kind of life becomes impossible around it?
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Where did the alternative go — and who remembers it?
Most people today don't resist not because they approve, but because they no longer imagine that resistance is meaningful — or even possible. And that might be the most perfected function of the current machinery: not that it denies entry, but that it teaches us to forget other doors ever existed.
Would you want to develop this idea into a longer reflection or a piece of writing? It holds a lot.
You said:
**Toll roads and gates** required coins or tokens for passage — literal "paywalls" in the landscape.
ChatGPT said:
Yes — the Rebecca Riots are a perfect historical echo.
From 1839 to 1843 in rural Wales, working-class farmers and laborers, many dressed as women and calling themselves “Rebecca and her daughters,” rose up against the toll gates that littered the countryside. These gates were privatized barriers — literal, physical paywalls — that extracted money from already-impoverished people for the "privilege" of moving on roads their own labor had often helped build or maintain.
The gates weren’t just wooden structures. They were economic weapons — levers of control in an enclosure economy that turned common land into rent-seeking infrastructure. Rebecca’s symbolic cross-dressing wasn’t incidental; it was a kind of theater, a ritual of inversion, drawing from biblical language (“And they blessed Rebekah… and let thy seed possess the gate of those which hate them” – Genesis 24:60). The performance gave moral weight and a mythic shape to an otherwise material resistance.
And just like the Luddites, they were resisting more than a gate. They were resisting:
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the logic of privatization of the commons,
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the bureaucratization of movement,
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the transformation of everyday life into something that could be metered, priced, and gated.
Now here we are, two centuries later, facing digital toll gates — biometric locks, QR-code entries, pay-to-pee turnstiles, and algorithmic permissions — and the riot is gone. No more Rebecca. Just UX.
The modern gate is invisible, frictionless, polite. You don’t kick it down — you accept the terms and conditions.
But the logic remains the same.
If we were to write about this — the line from Rebecca to Stripe-integrated smart locks — it could be a powerful way to show how the politics of access and enclosure have been dressed in different skins across eras, always mutating but rarely abandoning their core function: to tell you where you belong, and at what cost.
ChatGPT said:
Exactly. And that framing — from low-tech iron maidens to digital slow violence — is a razor-sharp lens.
We could trace how apparatuses of control have shifted from visible brutality to ambient coercion. The iron maiden — a fictional or at least heavily mythologized device of medieval cruelty — makes pain spectacular. A body contained, pierced, punished.
Now, violence is spread thin across time, logistics, interface. It's slow, to borrow Rob Nixon’s phrase: attritional, imperceptible, bureaucratic. No blood, no scream — just consent withdrawn by a server timeout.
The iron maiden says: you will suffer, and we want you to know it.
Smart violence says: you are not authorized.
And the result is the same: containment, exclusion, devaluation — only now, without the spectacle. It's been aestheticized, operationalized, de-dramatized into code.
So yes, the more things change, the more they stay the same — but the form of violence has adapted to the expectations of legitimacy. Brutality is no longer the mark of domination. Efficiency is.
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