When people picture a slide into cyberpunk drabness they usually think of drones humming overhead or endless biometric checkpoints, yet China keeps offering cornier, more intimate indignities. Lately a string of short videos has circulated showing public restroom stalls where the roll of toilet paper is locked behind a small grey box. On the face of the box is a QR code. You scan it and the screen offers two choices. You can pay roughly seven cents per strip, or you can sit through a thirty-second advertisement in exchange for a pitiful allotment. The whole point, from the advertiser’s side, is that you will look at almost anything while perched on the pot. Between the floor tile and a shampoo commercial, the shampoo wins every time.
A traveller who left the phone at home on purpose, hoping to starve the algorithm, learns quickly the costs of such a blunder. No code, no paper, which leaves negotiation with a stranger in the next stall. Now the favor is not just a square of tissue. It is either thirty seconds of someone else’s time or seven precious cents. If the stalls are empty and the battery is dead, the remaining options shrink rapidly. The moment is absurd, but the stakes are real.
Predictably, the official line explains the dispensers as a fix for “wasteful behaviour.” Older citizens who lived through the worst decades of scarcity still hoard anything free. Security cameras catch pensioners spooling meters of paper into plastic bags for later. Locking the roll and metering it by digital release is pitched as a cure. Yet every measure breeds a workaround. If the lock is flimsy, vandals pry it open. If the enforcement is tight, citizens shrug and slip a travel pack of tissues into every purse or backpack. Many already do. Some venues have given up stocking bulk rolls entirely because the entire batch disappears within an hour.
But tissue from the convenience store is engineered for softness, not for the narrow Chinese plumbing designed for nearly dissolving one-ply sheets. Wet wipes marketed as “flushable” catch in the bends of older pipes and suddenly the new crime prevention gadget becomes a maintenance drain for the whole building. That hidden cost passes back to whoever owns the lobby, and eventually to whoever shops there, whether they ever use the stalls or not.
Scale the idea out and you are left with a subscription economy of toilet paper. Five squares for watching an ad probably works for most people. Anyone with any sort of emergency will need to go through several ad cycles like a five-year-old waiting for the next cartoon segment. The urgency of a public restroom visit makes the forced advertisement even meaner than usual. Pulling out the phone in a stifling porta-potty while the timer counts down is a strange new form of penance. The cyberpunk future turns out to lean less toward chrome skylines and more toward billing you by the sheet whenever biology interferes with commerce.