MSCHF’s 'Tax Heaven 3000' Is a Dating Simulator That Also Files Your Taxes | Hacker News Reader

MSCHF’s 'Tax Heaven 3000' Is a Dating Simulator That Also Files Your Taxes

yahoo.com

172 pointsdoctoboggan42 comments

> Hi there! Iris here~

> It’s always been a dream of mine to meet that special someone…and file their tax return. Join me and we’ll search for deductions while searching for love!

> But be careful! We’re not alone. Corporate tax filing services like TurboTax are (by dint of extensive lobbying) predatory, parasitic bottlenecks that deliberately complicate the tax filing process in order to make it unnavigable by ordinary people. They feed us their poison so that we buy their medicine!

> Most wealthy countries make tax filing free, if the burden of preparation is even passed along to individuals at all. TurboTax actively seeks to backdoor the regulatory structure that could otherwise seek to rein it in. And it works! The villainous corporation that controls the government from the shadows is a sadly mundane reality. It’s the most boring industry imaginable.

> TurboTax, per its own internal documents, is built on the “Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt” that ordinary people have about their taxes. Against this, we pit free software instead built on parasocial desire for intimacy and benign horniness! If TurboTax is Dark UI, TH3K is Pink UI, the nightcore of tax software.

> Videogames are, at the end of the day, pieces of software–ontologically akin to Microsoft Word. All of TurboTax’s cutesy loading animations are fake graphics; TH3K simply makes the fiction the point. For some reason the game-to-real-life interface has tended to remain in the purview of corporate metaverse fictions. TH3K is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS.

> Come on, let’s get started! I can already tell I’m going to like you ♥ And remember, ~~if you die in the game you die in real life~~ if you file your taxes in the game, you file your taxes in real life.

( from https://taxheaven3000.com )

This is a profoundly difficult to read, it hurts me, psychically

Reads just fine to me. Why do you say that?

It is by far the worst thing I’ve ever seen. It’s also hilarious.

lol, right?

MSCHF are absolutely brilliant. I've been following them for 5 years and I truly believe they're the best art collective around. This is another word class troll.

Truly a "follower"

A $10 million funded "art collective".

Yeah ...

Since when is "art collective" and "unfunded" mutually exclusive?

Oh, please, there is a VAST difference between "funded" and "funded with $10 million".

Something that most people think of as an "art collective" maybe has $100K per year sloshing through it--and that would be a pretty successful one. One that has $1M sloshing through it would be outstanding.

A $10 million funded "art collective" is a rich person's playground or tax dodge.

> A $10 million funded "art collective" is a rich person's playground

Rich person's playground is like the definition of art going back thousands of years. Its still orthogonal to whether or not something is an "art collective" or not.

First reaction:

This is beautifully deranged.

> Suitable for singles without dependents

Perfect.

...

Second reaction:

It'd be cooler if this "art collective" were a little less corporate though. Collaborations with Nike and Patek Philippe? A lot of their work looks like it's about milking money from celebrities. Like it's the "I am rich" app, but in sneaker form. Was hoping for something a little more organic.

I guess that's exactly how this stuff works. It's playful with a little edge but not too much -- perfectly calibrated.

Their "collab" with nike, was one way (nike wasn't in on it). They had to destroy the shoes they created by order of the courts.

Yeah the more I learned about these guys the more I told them to go fuck off and unsubscribed and removed their app and forgot about their drops.

They sell crap. If you've bought any of their crap you would know they sell crap.

Can you elaborate? What did you learn and what crap did you buy?

I mean surely the art collective behind wacky shoes and WD-40 cologne will make sure my SSN and other personal information is safe once I put it into the game? Surely.

It’s possible that this game is just filling out numbers in the PDF for you and you can fill out your personal info manually, sign it, and mail it in. If it’s trying to do E-file for you, then yeah I would be scared.

Other services efile for you, why would this be any different

this service is a joke

It’s a conceit, not a joke. It’s serious satire.

Becoming an "Authorized IRS e-file Provider" is a significant hurdle that is not necessary to producing a real, mailable, tax return.

It's certainly a convenience, and most serious software would try to include it, but I don't think MSCHF are going for convenience. The Yahoo headline and article uses the word "file" but the video doesn't.

Thank you, you're the only one who's provided a reasonable answer instead of "it's a joke"

If they actually got this certified, it would be the ultimate troll!

I don’t know that the artists actually want people to file their taxes in the game, but for the critique to land you do actually need to be able to use it to file. That means asking for an SSN.

OTOH, it's not like Big Serious Organizations Run By Grownups have a great track record vis-a-vis data breaches either.

That's.... a much more valid point than it should be.

Furthermore, they've actually got a more direct and much more persistent motivation to exploit your personal information for all its worth.

In general the conventional narratives on personal security are completely backwards. If some drive by attacker gets your credit card or social security number and uses them to defraud someone else, your rights are well represented by the system and you have plenty of recourse. Whereas if some commercial surveillance advanced persistent threat gets your personal data accompanied by a boolean field in their database saying that you agreed to "terms" saying they can abuse it however they want, there is literally nothing you can do to stop them in the US. Furthermore the underground lists of CC/SSN your semi-private information made it into will eventually be considered stale and forgotten about, while corporate surveillance databases are forever.

Wait, I've never heard you cannot reverse the permission you've given some commercial entity to contact you.

Sure, I guess technically there are some narrowly-scoped abuses you do have the means to stop, so my "abuse it however they want" bites off too much (like for example they can't legally use your address to show up at your house and murder you either). But for the most part no, you have very little say in what is done with your personal information once other parties have a copy of it.

Intuit will not use your social security number to bankrupt you. Neither will MSCHF, but I doubt their encryption is that good

That's a straw man. And financial surveillance companies certainly do aim to use your personal information to extract as much value from you as possible - selling you crap you don't need today, higher insurance rates tomorrow, and so on.

I trust an "art collective" to treat my personal data like the radioactive waste it is more than the bigcos.

I think it's just a local game, it prepares a return but doesn't file it. Doesn't seem like there's much danger.

The developer comment on the itch.io page indicates that it can be played offline. You can also input a falsified SSN to the game and change it on the resulting paperwork if you desire.

Same liminal space as the game I've been making, but this is honestly better. Outstanding. I've been making a text editor where you type into a mechanical typewriter as a tentacle monster, outputs .txt files. Hoping to add mod support so people can eventually send and receive emails from it, as a tentacle monster.

https://twitter.com/LeapJosh

Tax Heaven 3000 is now my recommended tax solution.

Yeah, sure, why not. There's no reason for this to exist and yet, there's also absolutely no reason for it to not exist.

The creation itself is a level of performance art.

I'm thinking there's got to be a demographic whose most appealing characteristic is the size of their tax return who might actually go for a real dating app based around filling in and sharing tax returns :D

That's hilarious, I miss this kind of Japanese "Erotic Visual Novel" Dating Sim, they're pretty hilarious. Not like something to get attached to or really even find sexually gratifying. Its fun to compare to the purpose of the "stat building" to how my own dating experience has panned out.

I recently looked into it and most of the studios in Japan collapsed, so its kind of a lost art. But they're being resurrected by Jast, need more creators though.

I'm fairly sure that if it did state taxes, too, I'd actually use it.

what stage of capitalism is this?

End stage CAPCOMalism

This is a secret hidden level.

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