Not the Onion

Image of a “good guy with a gun” trying to stop an active shooter; asking everyone running past him if they have change for a dollar as with increasing urgency, he keeps trying to smooth out and feed a crinkled dollar bill into the machine that keeps spitting out.

Edit: the dystopia flows through me - how bout it becomes subscription based so if you’re on the lowest paid plan you have to watch a 60 second promo spot for season 62 of “Congress Candy Crush Smackdown” or transfer ownership of 10% of your genetic sequence to Disney-Boston Dynamics for their “Real Boy Initiative”, or agree to enable Server mode on your “Nestle Neural Chocolate Chip” to contribute 10% of your brain’s processing power to their distributed “Metabolism Enhancement Network” where subscribers can customise their own metabolic rate, preferred tastes and even allergies.

It becomes SNL adjacent when the shooter also needs to refill on ammo, but he’s not a member for this particular vendor - so his ammo dispense-rate is glacially slow and not without strings attached. He can wait it out and eat a “compliance wafer” per round dispensed, or he can speed it up after “correctly” answering questions about FAANG (after the big 5 companies merged post Project 2025 and effectively took control of the world population and their minds) - he can switch his neuro-wave thought chip to the machine’s provider on the spot, or provide the names and addresses of five dissenters who are unaligned with the values of the one true religion, Capitalism.

lol