Despotic Vending Machine Demands Tribute in Exchange For Rice Snacks

There are plenty of things I’d do for free food. Dress up as a cow? Sure. Dress up as Spiderman? Even better. But kneel on the ground, raise my arms in the air and “bow to the almighty one?”

Eh, I’ll think about it.

Proving the human disposition to submit to our technological overlords, Australian food company Fantastic Snacks, along with ad agency Clemenger BBDO, has created a completely free vending machine to dispense its “Fantastic Delites” rice cracker snacks. Its only request, in lieu of the spare change in your pocket, is you do whatever the machine asks you to do.

Simple enough, right? Press a button about a hundred times, get a free snack. It’s so easy a grandmother could do it, and does. But soon the machine, dubbed the “Delite-o-Matic,” gets demanding. Would you press the button a thousand times, it asks hordes of random passerbys. 5,000 maybe? Would you dance like a chicken, do push-ups or start a conga line? Apparently people would, and feel ecstatic enough afterward to jump around, pump their fists and raise their glorious prizes up in victory. All that for a box of chips.

Granted, the Delite-o-Matic never asks for a blood sacrifice, but the whole set-up seems oddly Big Brother-esque. Is there an O’Brien sitting in a dark room somewhere judging whether or not these tributes are worthy? Could this be the beginning of the robo-pocalypse?

Test how far you would go for a box of chips with the Virtual Delite-O-Matic, and watch others dance like the robo-slave monkeys they are in the official video, here:

[Via Adweek]