Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
I never appreciated Futurama when I was younger. At the time it felt like worse Simpsons but in the future. But later on I realized it’s a really good critique of our contemporary society disguised as the future looking back on us with Fry standing in for the audience. Some of the jokes are funny because they’re so biting.
Thank god that at least google, fb, amazon etc. are trying so hard to improve our advertising experience as much as possible. Where would we be if the ads directed at us were not so personalized....
We have gotten to the point where the simple (and arguably essential) task of individuals learning about what the economy is producing is degenerating into a societal gangrene. No, this is not all the handywork of Zuck and the "don't be evil" company. All the conditions for their "success" have been engineered in the previous decades of the adoption and scaling of TV tech: The captive population of couch potato, oversized "consumers", the behind the scene rat races of "brands", the ever so inventive and smart adtech people (you always need talented and willing accomplishers to dehumanize a situation).
It goes deeper: why is forced consumption such an existential need that must be serviced at all costs? Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...
One can only hope that digital information systems will at some point switch from being part of the problem to being part of the solution...
Problem is there's a finer line between persuasion and coercion than people appreciate. Use guys with guns to sell white powder and you're a bad guy. Place chocolate at kid height at checkout and you're a business guru.
> Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...
Panem et circenses. Even the old Romans were already masters at keeping a populace from rioting and a society from collapse.
We're just lucky that most developed countries have eradicated executions. But to make up for the lack of public spectacle that a hanging or quartering was, we have taken up mass sports events (soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket) and blatant consumerism instead...
You make this sound like a boring dystopia, but everything you say about our society is also the case for 1955, only more so. They didn't have adblockers or sponsor block. They didn't have audiobooks (probably available from your local library to) or anything but radio when driving. They had significantly fewer choices and had to endure radio with ads playing whatever they were told to play.
Meanwhile the population today is the least bound to the couch it has been in half a century (modulo a pandemic).
And, shocking to some, most people are not an empty shell inside, although they have desires and things they want.
Don't complain about ads the next time you stand in line and whip out Instagram rather than an ebook.
I think it's because if we as a society decided what we all have now is enough, we would have a few good short years until everyone realizes we aren't producing more things and we aren't improving things and we've been left behind economically. In this system, you can't afford to stop and smell the roses because next year, someone else will come and bulldoze the field the roses were planted in.
Without the promise of ever rising profits, the capitalist class will panic and do god knows what. Their need for not just profits, but increasing profits is insatiable. Trying to force products on consumers for manufactured reasons is probably not even the worst crime done in the name of profits.
They are kind of doing it already e.g. I hate when ads exploit classical music for trivial purposes. Whenever I hear Libiamo ne' lieti calici now my mind instantly fills with pizza ads. And once an association is made, it doesn't go away. Ads attach themselves to positive memories like parasites. Whenever you think back to your first kiss, a nice family moment, a cherished memory of going out with friends – here they are.
This is something that I had been venting about for years to anybody I met.
There's that (Coca-Cola I think) ad that ends up with teenagers watching the sunrise after a party night, they sit on a roof in what I remember could be suburban California.
The ad was in the style of All I need from Air.
These are very delicate and precious moments when you are a teenager.
But now it's Coca-cola telling people how to feel. For a whole lot of people now sitting on that roof, that communion moment with your friends, has been stolen by Coca-Cola. That's not something spontaneous and personal and intimate anymore, they stole that moment, branded it and spat it back on screens and minds. They are feeding on our souls.
It's more subtle and devilish than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlpZRK2Yfd0 which just tells you how to have fun (just a manual to fabricated happy times: be young, muscled, on a beach with one of those air canons that makes you levitate) or association to songs. It's tied to a moment in space and time, to an experience.
> It's a request for the rights to use my song, "Another Brick in the Wall II" in the making of a film to promote Instagram.
> So it's a missive. It's a missive from Mark Zuckerberg, to me, right? Arrived this morning with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money. And the answer is, "Fuck you. No fucking way."
On the bright side, smart speakers aren't even a little bit essential, so it's easy enough to just not buy them if this starts happening. I don't think the value proposition of an always-on device connected to a vast advertising network is very high to begin with. Throw in subliminal advertising and you'd have to be very... dedicated... to want such a device.
If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs and phones that are plugged in at night. Those are much harder for people to give up.
Maybe somebody will jump in with pod beds that hide us from our devices at night. Like a giant active noise cancelling headphone cup to sleep in. Smart enough to let us hear little things like fire alarms or panicked screams, of course.
You underestimate what people will sacrifice in order to be able to say "Alexa, what's the weather like today" rather than pull out their phone and open the weather app which is probably faster to do anyway.
"But what if I have my hands full with stuff" they'll say. Well, will you really be able to remember what Alexa says about the weather if you're busy doing other stuff anyway?
All everyone can ever point out as advantages of smart speakers are these tiny, minuscule, increases in convenience. Is it really worth building a gargantuan ad-serving data hoarding surveillance network to gain those small conveniences?
Screw that stuff. My minor convenience is more important than the consequences of the surveillance economy!
> I don't think the value proposition of an always-on device connected to a vast advertising network is very high to begin with
This is more of a hacker perspective though. All my non technical friends have been seduced by offers of either Alexa or Google Home. Because in my region, they are commonly sold at a huge price discount with almost any medium to large purchase. EX: Buy a laptop - Google Home at 50% off
> If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs
My mom LOVES being able to search for content using Alexa on the Firestick remote, so this is the most terrifying and likely possibility by far
> If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs and phones that are plugged in at night. Those are much harder for people to give up.
Well, yeah, but having a TV in your bedroom isn't necessarily the best idea for quality sleep anyway so get rid of that.
Then you can always plug your phone in to charge somewhere else in the house, or stick it inside a Faraday box[0] with just enough of a hole to fit the charger cable in.
I've recently switched to a dumb AF clock radio alarm because I got tired of my iPhone alarm going off silently at random (one of the most annoying and long-standing bugs in a device I've ever encountered).
It gets annoying having to do all this stuff just to avoid ads but it also becomes just part of your daily routine.
[0] Faraday boxes are pretty cheap. I recently picked up a nice looking one for about £15 from Argos, though not specifically for my phone. It'd be pretty easy to drill a slot big enough to fit a lightning cable through if I wanted to though.
> a giant active noise cancelling headphone cup to sleep in
This sounds like hiring big aggressive monkeys to fend off small troublesome monkeys. Edit: I mean, how do you protect from this headphone doing exactly the same thing?
I think for most people, myself included, the risk just isn’t very high. And ads just don’t bother me either. I’m not pro advertising, but I’m fine dealing with them in many contexts.
Once subliminal ads start then I’d probably turn the devices off. But for now this ranks so low on my list of concerns to be a non factor.
Smart speakers aren’t necessary, but they’re exceedingly popular. History tells us that advertisers can and will exploit the popularity of a convenient but optional device to push ads.
And word to the wise; don’t sleep with a phone in your bedroom. It’s really bad for your sleep hygiene.
I want to believe that, but the success of Ringo doorbells tells me people are ultimately lemmings. Advertise long enough and eventually they'll be worn down.
"Facebook is always listening to you!": I assume that many researchers have attempted to figure this out by snooping traffic from the app. It takes a bit of technical skill to do this. If there was any strong sign of this, I assume it would have come out by now. Maybe there's a super secret
bit of code that bypasses Android's microphone controls, does speech-to-text and intent processing so efficiently it doesn't cause much battery drain, then holds the data and transmits it back to Facebook using steganographic techniques?
"Smart speakers are playing messages while I'm asleep": Anyone could buy a $30 audio recorder and just let it run all night. Also, anyone might be a light sleeper or wake up at the wrong time and discover this. How would this even be possible to hide?
Also linked in the article, scientists have experimented on communicating with Lucid dreamers (low-tech version of Inception), asking yes/no and simple maths questions.
The researchers asked 158 questions of the lucid dreamers, who responded correctly 18.6% of the time, the researchers report today in Current Biology. The dreamers gave the wrong answer to only 3.2% of the questions; 17.7% of their answers were not clear and 60.8% of the questions got no response. The researchers say these numbers show the communication, even if difficult, is possible
The scientists questions were incorporated into the lucid dreamers dreams:
One dreamer reported math problems coming out of a car radio. Another was at a party when he heard the researcher interrupting his dream, like a narrator in a movie, to ask him whether he spoke Spanish.
This sounds like a click bait article intended to make people start complaining about 'big advertising' - with no real substance.
Yes subliminal suggestion works and smart speakers could be used to do it but subliminal advertising is illegal in most of the world (in the UK since the 1950s) and although there isn't direct legislation in the US it is effectively banned by precedent.
Horrific. If anyone on HN uses or works with adtech you should think about the consequences of what you are building. It's only ever gotten worse. You have a social obligation to stop.
Calm down, Adam Curtis. I see zero evidence here that researchers can in fact implant anything in someone's dreams. Well, except by playing 3 hours of Tetris. The video "documenting" Coors' effort is a joke ad by Coors bemoaning the fact they can't get into the Superbowl. This is just a bunch of shady researchers trying to gin up some publicity for the !!!!terrifying power!!!! of their work (p = 0.048, one-tailed).
Yeah, the article and letter seem to make a huge jump from companies throwing together tongue-in-cheek advertising campaigns about dreams --- the Burger King "nightmare burger" ad campaign was literally just a burger with a green bun that got them media coverage? --- to smart speakers playing subliminal messages. I guess it's their field, and maybe it's very jarring to them to see advertising even approach it from a distance, but this is almost a parody of the "open letter signed by scientists" trope.
Honestly, with the amount of ads we see, i really want the shit to hit the fan, and have someone hack the huge ad providers.
I'm talking about literally dumping their whole databases, with all the private data, from "John Smith, interested in bibles and butt plugs", "jane doe, cookbooks and 20inch dildos", "bobby bobberson, marriage help books and a gold necklace" (that his wife didn't get)... Only then will some people get aware that having ad providers stockpile all that personal data is bad, and blindly clicking "i accept the terms and conditions" should be something regulated and not just uninformed consent.
With speakers it's even simpler.. just hack them to play some heavy metal at 3am, and you're done.
Its fascinating how the entire industry is built around demand generation and the competitive nature of the industry has made it so that advertisers have had to dig deep into human psychology to understand what makes people want things.
It takes a long duration of stimulus to influence our dreams and even after the influence, the dream can be in any shape.
They had people play tetris for three days straight and only 60% dreamed of it.
They plan on target specific sleep states specifically but that means that something has access to my brain waves and is allowed to make sound while I am sleeping?
I am all for more research into dreams but advertisers? Even if they get something there is no way to actually roll it out to consumers...why then?
Why external speakers? Is easier to play them back in the phone!
I tell you how it will start. A company finds out the way subliminal message can help people to be better. They release an app, it works! They promise it will always be free. After a few years they sell it for 100 million to Facecook, Facecook keeps it free for a few years untill they find a way to make money. Voila!
This kind of shit is just another example of why OSH is so important. Anyone who thinks we can convince people not to adopt a technology like this at scale is absolutely kidding themselves...we MUST develop functionally equivalent, affordable, and sexually appealing open alternatives that make privacy the easy, automatic default
Unfortunately, this won't happen. People aren't buying smart speakers because they're necessities. They are responding to the constant badgering from Amazon, Google and Apple to buy them. They'll use gimmicks like "Alexa, look up [trending event]" and convince people it's the only acceptable way to search for information about something.
A privacy-focused equivalent wouldn't do nearly as well because it wouldn't be pulling any of these tricks.
I listen to podcasts every night while I'm asleep and haven't noticed any residual effects of this despite what's been playing. Although I do own a Simba mattress, use Audible, and have a VPN account...
Is there any context here beyond a fever dream of privacy advocates and sleep researchers? Has Amazon/Goog ever even said they wanted their smart speaker to feed ads to people while they were sleeping?
[+] [-] IvyMike|4 years ago|reply
Fry : Well sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games... and on buses and milk cartons and t-shirts, and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams, no siree.
[+] [-] hangonhn|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beebeepka|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FridayoLeary|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Milner08|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] failwhaleshark|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] streamofdigits|4 years ago|reply
It goes deeper: why is forced consumption such an existential need that must be serviced at all costs? Because without the promise of a consumerist bliss always around the corner all the internal frictions, deep dissatisfaction and social fracture lines come to the fore...
One can only hope that digital information systems will at some point switch from being part of the problem to being part of the solution...
[+] [-] aerique|4 years ago|reply
-- one single political party in the Netherlands that does not get enough votes
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mschuster91|4 years ago|reply
Panem et circenses. Even the old Romans were already masters at keeping a populace from rioting and a society from collapse.
We're just lucky that most developed countries have eradicated executions. But to make up for the lack of public spectacle that a hanging or quartering was, we have taken up mass sports events (soccer, baseball, basketball, cricket) and blatant consumerism instead...
[+] [-] tomjen3|4 years ago|reply
Meanwhile the population today is the least bound to the couch it has been in half a century (modulo a pandemic).
And, shocking to some, most people are not an empty shell inside, although they have desires and things they want.
Don't complain about ads the next time you stand in line and whip out Instagram rather than an ebook.
[+] [-] ryan-allen|4 years ago|reply
[0] https://thoughtmaybe.com/the-century-of-the-self/
[+] [-] polishdude20|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] idownvoted|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
Without the promise of ever rising profits, the capitalist class will panic and do god knows what. Their need for not just profits, but increasing profits is insatiable. Trying to force products on consumers for manufactured reasons is probably not even the worst crime done in the name of profits.
[+] [-] Red_Tarsius|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] johnchristopher|4 years ago|reply
There's that (Coca-Cola I think) ad that ends up with teenagers watching the sunrise after a party night, they sit on a roof in what I remember could be suburban California.
The ad was in the style of All I need from Air.
These are very delicate and precious moments when you are a teenager.
But now it's Coca-cola telling people how to feel. For a whole lot of people now sitting on that roof, that communion moment with your friends, has been stolen by Coca-Cola. That's not something spontaneous and personal and intimate anymore, they stole that moment, branded it and spat it back on screens and minds. They are feeding on our souls.
It's more subtle and devilish than https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nlpZRK2Yfd0 which just tells you how to have fun (just a manual to fabricated happy times: be young, muscled, on a beach with one of those air canons that makes you levitate) or association to songs. It's tied to a moment in space and time, to an experience.
[+] [-] pdkl95|4 years ago|reply
https://boingboing.net/2021/06/14/facebook-asked-pink-floyds...
Pink Floyd's Roger Waters:
> It's a request for the rights to use my song, "Another Brick in the Wall II" in the making of a film to promote Instagram.
> So it's a missive. It's a missive from Mark Zuckerberg, to me, right? Arrived this morning with an offer of a huge, huge amount of money. And the answer is, "Fuck you. No fucking way."
[+] [-] kzrdude|4 years ago|reply
All to save our mind's focus.
[+] [-] Tycho|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filchermcurr|4 years ago|reply
If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs and phones that are plugged in at night. Those are much harder for people to give up.
Maybe somebody will jump in with pod beds that hide us from our devices at night. Like a giant active noise cancelling headphone cup to sleep in. Smart enough to let us hear little things like fire alarms or panicked screams, of course.
[+] [-] skummetmaelk|4 years ago|reply
"But what if I have my hands full with stuff" they'll say. Well, will you really be able to remember what Alexa says about the weather if you're busy doing other stuff anyway?
All everyone can ever point out as advantages of smart speakers are these tiny, minuscule, increases in convenience. Is it really worth building a gargantuan ad-serving data hoarding surveillance network to gain those small conveniences?
Screw that stuff. My minor convenience is more important than the consequences of the surveillance economy!
[+] [-] Magodo|4 years ago|reply
This is more of a hacker perspective though. All my non technical friends have been seduced by offers of either Alexa or Google Home. Because in my region, they are commonly sold at a huge price discount with almost any medium to large purchase. EX: Buy a laptop - Google Home at 50% off
> If it succeeds even a little, though, they'll bake it into our TVs
My mom LOVES being able to search for content using Alexa on the Firestick remote, so this is the most terrifying and likely possibility by far
[+] [-] bartread|4 years ago|reply
Well, yeah, but having a TV in your bedroom isn't necessarily the best idea for quality sleep anyway so get rid of that.
Then you can always plug your phone in to charge somewhere else in the house, or stick it inside a Faraday box[0] with just enough of a hole to fit the charger cable in.
I've recently switched to a dumb AF clock radio alarm because I got tired of my iPhone alarm going off silently at random (one of the most annoying and long-standing bugs in a device I've ever encountered).
It gets annoying having to do all this stuff just to avoid ads but it also becomes just part of your daily routine.
[0] Faraday boxes are pretty cheap. I recently picked up a nice looking one for about £15 from Argos, though not specifically for my phone. It'd be pretty easy to drill a slot big enough to fit a lightning cable through if I wanted to though.
[+] [-] praptak|4 years ago|reply
This sounds like hiring big aggressive monkeys to fend off small troublesome monkeys. Edit: I mean, how do you protect from this headphone doing exactly the same thing?
[+] [-] bambax|4 years ago|reply
Smart enough to sell access to the highest bidder. I will have a normal bed in a normal bedroom with nothing plugged in while I sleep, thanks.
[+] [-] mr_sturd|4 years ago|reply
Then all ads will start with panicked screams and fire alarms.
[+] [-] kenjackson|4 years ago|reply
Once subliminal ads start then I’d probably turn the devices off. But for now this ranks so low on my list of concerns to be a non factor.
[+] [-] ashtonkem|4 years ago|reply
And word to the wise; don’t sleep with a phone in your bedroom. It’s really bad for your sleep hygiene.
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zaphod12|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nick238|4 years ago|reply
"Facebook is always listening to you!": I assume that many researchers have attempted to figure this out by snooping traffic from the app. It takes a bit of technical skill to do this. If there was any strong sign of this, I assume it would have come out by now. Maybe there's a super secret bit of code that bypasses Android's microphone controls, does speech-to-text and intent processing so efficiently it doesn't cause much battery drain, then holds the data and transmits it back to Facebook using steganographic techniques?
"Smart speakers are playing messages while I'm asleep": Anyone could buy a $30 audio recorder and just let it run all night. Also, anyone might be a light sleeper or wake up at the wrong time and discover this. How would this even be possible to hide?
[+] [-] sydthrowaway|4 years ago|reply
There’s got to be a stop to this madness.
[+] [-] ptha|4 years ago|reply
The researchers asked 158 questions of the lucid dreamers, who responded correctly 18.6% of the time, the researchers report today in Current Biology. The dreamers gave the wrong answer to only 3.2% of the questions; 17.7% of their answers were not clear and 60.8% of the questions got no response. The researchers say these numbers show the communication, even if difficult, is possible
The scientists questions were incorporated into the lucid dreamers dreams: One dreamer reported math problems coming out of a car radio. Another was at a party when he heard the researcher interrupting his dream, like a narrator in a movie, to ask him whether he spoke Spanish.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2021/02/scientists-entered-p...
[+] [-] helsinkiandrew|4 years ago|reply
Yes subliminal suggestion works and smart speakers could be used to do it but subliminal advertising is illegal in most of the world (in the UK since the 1950s) and although there isn't direct legislation in the US it is effectively banned by precedent.
https://smallbusiness.chron.com/laws-subliminal-marketing-69...
[+] [-] foxes|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fogihujy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dash2|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mycologos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julianpye|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajsnigrutin|4 years ago|reply
I'm talking about literally dumping their whole databases, with all the private data, from "John Smith, interested in bibles and butt plugs", "jane doe, cookbooks and 20inch dildos", "bobby bobberson, marriage help books and a gold necklace" (that his wife didn't get)... Only then will some people get aware that having ad providers stockpile all that personal data is bad, and blindly clicking "i accept the terms and conditions" should be something regulated and not just uninformed consent.
With speakers it's even simpler.. just hack them to play some heavy metal at 3am, and you're done.
[+] [-] pm90|4 years ago|reply
Its fascinating how the entire industry is built around demand generation and the competitive nature of the industry has made it so that advertisers have had to dig deep into human psychology to understand what makes people want things.
[+] [-] kalado|4 years ago|reply
It takes a long duration of stimulus to influence our dreams and even after the influence, the dream can be in any shape.
They had people play tetris for three days straight and only 60% dreamed of it.
They plan on target specific sleep states specifically but that means that something has access to my brain waves and is allowed to make sound while I am sleeping?
I am all for more research into dreams but advertisers? Even if they get something there is no way to actually roll it out to consumers...why then?
[+] [-] mPReDiToR|4 years ago|reply
I use Sleep As Android. It has a "lullaby" feature. It has "lucid dreaming" prompting. It has (allegedly) good REM detection.
Add those features and one large donation from an ad company... Wait, I see a lynch mob heading towards me.
[+] [-] scoutt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] quijoteuniv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wly_cdgr|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rchaud|4 years ago|reply
A privacy-focused equivalent wouldn't do nearly as well because it wouldn't be pulling any of these tricks.
[+] [-] petercooper|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply