Someone showed up to that shop with a gun! This reality is so stupid it would be funny, except people can get hurt.
Or Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory Jones helped spread about Hillary Clinton, a child sex ring, and a random pizza shop in Washington D.C. Nothing in Grand Theft Auto could hope to be as ridiculous as Alex Jones, who claimed for years the Sandy Hook school shooting was fake. Other GTA radio jokes include: Vaccines cripple our kids, Americans should speak English, the government is reading your thoughts, evolution, "so-called experts." Satire always has a grain of truth, but do these things really work as jokes anymore? What was once passed off as fringe ignorance or idiocy now gets spread daily across social media, where conspiracy theorists have been able to cultivate huge audiences of true believers. The joke is also just passé in a world where plenty of people think COVID-19 is a Chinese bioweapon or somehow caused by 5G radio waves. Healthcare in America was bad in 2013, and it's bad today, but the true depths of its badness have become more and more apparent in recent years, as people create GoFundMe pages to pay for life-saving operations, and even the Democratic party balks at embracing universal healthcare. "I'm tired of this healthcare bullshit too! Some liberal doctor going to tell me I have diabetes? I call bullshit! Goddamn liar," says the first caller to the "Truth Seeker" program. If Grand Theft Auto remains contemporary, an attempted larger-than-life reflection of these modern times, it would have to go full-on Saints Row ridiculous to outdo reality. We don't know when and where it will be set, but it's a little hard to imagine the enormous success of GTA 5, and especially the insane money-maker that is GTA Online, not guiding the direction of GTA 6. Rockstar hasn't come out and said it's making a new Grand Theft Auto yet, but it's inevitably coming. So what the hell can Rockstar do with its next game? How can GTA 6 satirize a world that's thoroughly mad? And the same goes for almost everything that's happened in the seven years since Grand Theft Auto 5 came out.
A button that says "stalk" is so much more innocent than the actual ways social media affects us today. That's just the mundane reality of day-to-day life in 2020, without getting into the PTSD that content moderators develop looking at horrible shit on social networks, or how they end up succumbing to conspiracy theories. We know tech companies view our personal data as a product and that social media can do bad things to our mental health.
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