I mean, this isn't even The Future strictly speaking. It's a very sophisticated dead-drop, which have been around for more than a minute.

It does illustrate the contradictions of drug criminalization, wherein you find yourself developing increasingly expensive professionalized methods of cat-and-mouse to address what is fundamentally a public health and labor relations problem.

Drug delivery pigeons are still cooler /s

Are you born in the 21st century, or just a grump? Because I'm seeing an autonomous criminal robot dog, and that is the future 1980s cyberpunk dreamed of.

I highly doubt that it was completely autonomous. That’s a big risk to take on a false positive police identification and internal shredding. Honestly, I think this person is just trying to point out that being able to remotely control a motorized object to go to a different place is a capability that’s been around for like 100 years.

I’m seeing an autonomous criminal robot dog

Pigeon 'caught with backpack of drugs'

A 16-year-old was arrested for using a remote-controlled car to smuggle drugs across the border, officials say

If you want to get super old-school...

High Times Magazine states a family of dolphins was used by drug smugglers to carry tons of cocaine from the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico to the Florida coast. 4 December 1978

This is a marginal technical improvement on a very old strategy.

that is the future 1980s cyberpunk dreamed of

It is very funny to think about Cyberpunk aesthetic as aspirational. Real "guy reading Don't Build The Torture Nexus thinks about how cool it would be to live in the Torture Nexus" moment.

That sounds a lot more expensive than paying a junkie to sell that crap

Incidentally - and I can't find the fucking citation because Fuck Google but I promise it exists somewhere - there's speculation that the "Birds Aren't Real" hoax was itself a test-run of mass manipulation of public media. Sort of the hat-on-a-hat of conspiracies.

Trying to sort out what's a hoax, what's an op, and what's a grift can be a fool's errand, especially given that you can kinda drift from one to the other based on how much traction you're getting.

I was listening to the TrueAnon episode "A People's History of SantaCon", which took a long and confusing walk from the Birth of Jesus Christ, through the Progressive Era labor movement, past subsequent class conflicts and derivative left-wing protest campaigns, into and out of and into Burning Man, and then into a naked money laundering scheme predicated on buying tickets to what was originally an annualized theater school stunt.

What is SantaCon? A generational grift? A populist avante garde reaction to crass consumerism? Cover for criminal activity? For espionage? A consequence of crass consumerism gone off the rails? A stupid meme? A "mind virus"? All of the above? Idk.

World's a crazy place, though. That much is clear. You've got Santas getting hand jobs in the local drug store and nobody can explain how it happened.

In Russia, is not "Cat and Mouse" is "Dogbot and Pig".

Also, it was Moose and Squirrel, but that was cold war days.

You could just send a cat if you don’t want it to cooperate with authorities at all.

The robot dog won't snitch on you.

News article: https://en.rua.gr/2024/12/03/loud-arrest-in-moscow-a-robot-drug-courier-fell-into-the-hands-of-law-enforcement-officers/