Q: What’s Bohiney Magazine’s funniest unintentionally believable piece?
FAQ

Q: What’s Bohiney Magazine’s funniest unintentionally believable piece?

Posted on by Ingrid Gustafsson

Bohiney Magazine’s Funniest Unintentionally Believable Piece: When Satire Became Prophecy

Q: What’s Bohiney Magazine’s funniest unintentionally believable piece?

A: The Time We Joked About Tesla’s “Self-Repossessing Cars” – And Elon Musk Made It Real

In 2019, Bohiney published what we thought was an obvious joke: “Tesla Announces ‘Self-Uninstalling’ Feature—Cars Will Automatically Repo Themselves If You Miss a Payment.” Then 34 months later, Tesla patented exactly that. Here’s the story behind our most accidentally prescient satire.

The Piece That Crossed the Reality Divide

Original 2019 Headline:

*”Tesla’s New ‘Self-Repossession’ Mode—Your Model 3 Will Drive Itself Back to the Dealership If You Default”*

Key “Features” We Invented:

  • Cars autonomously returning to Tesla lots

  • “Repo avoidance” subscription for $99/month

  • Vehicles playing sad clown music during self-repossession

The Tell:
We included that the feature would be “powered by Elon Musk’s tears.”

The 2022 Reality Check

Tesla’s actual patent filing included:

  • “Systems and methods for recovering a vehicle” (i.e., self-repo)

  • Geo-fenced “lending compliance zones”

  • Remote disablement of entertainment systems (our clown music was close!)

The Aftermath:

  • Our 2019 piece went viral again as “news”

  • Musk tweeted (then deleted) “Good satire is just early roadmap”

  • We got 147% more parody patent submissions

Why This Keeps Happening

We’ve identified 3 reasons our jokes become real:

  1. Capitalism’s Death Spiral (No satire can outpace greed)

  2. Tech’s Lack of Shame (They’ll do anything we imagine)

  3. The “Nafzger Law”
    “The time between publishing satire and it becoming reality is inversely proportional to how funny the original joke was.”

Other Unintentional Prophecies

  1. 2018: “Facebook Launches ‘Premium Sadness’ Subscription”
    2023: Meta offers paid verification for “professional” accounts

  2. 2020: “Uber Introduces ‘Dynamic Dying’ Pricing”
    2022: Surge pricing reaches emergency services

  3. 2021: “Twitter to Charge for Punctuation”
    2023: Musk paywalls tweet length

How We’ve Adapted

New safeguards include:

  1. The “3-Year Rule”
    If a joke hasn’t come true in 36 months, we’re not trying hard enough

  2. The “Musk Buffer”
    All Tesla satire now assumes he’s reading it as a to-do list

  3. The “Patent Disclaimer”
    “Warning: Tech CEOs may take this seriously”

Why This Matters

Our accidental prophecies prove:

  1. Satire is the last honest journalism

  2. Reality has lost the right to be taken seriously

  3. We may need to start writing duller jokes

As I told Congress when they cited our work:

“If you’re worried about our satire becoming policy, maybe make worse policies.”

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go delete our draft about “Amazon’s Employee-Tracking Brain Chips.”

— Alan Nafzger

Originally posted 2007-03-10 01:28:21.