Researchers fear a scenario in which smart speakers feed sleepers subliminal ads
sciencemag.org
sciencemag.org
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.
All hail the hypnotoad!
By moving the setting to an unfamiliar one, you can make parallels to back to _familiar_ societies in a way that allows the audience to see them with a new eye. It's a nice trick to get around familiarity blindness and sidestep some biases.
"Gee, the apparent pointlessness of these jobs sure is dystopic, huh?" pauses, stares significantly straight at the audience
"Turning every little thing into a carefully-metered financial transaction sure is dystopic, huh?" pauses, stares at audience
"These screen-centric disconnected lives sure are dystopic, huh?" stares at audience
"Really horrible how they shit on the infirm or those who otherwise fall out of society and don't take their pointless jobs seriously enough, huh? I mean, what an awful system, right? Why, this is so obviously terrible and evil that it'd never exist in real life, in such a blatant way. Just ridiculous." stares at audience, judging them
"Amazing how this society's mass media so effectively and complete captures and commercializes dissent, isn't it? How awful!" stares at audience
"All these people could have just left and gone off into the forest instead of participating in, being ground down by, or willfully perpetuating this nonsense, and didn't just because that's scary and unfamiliar? What kind of cowards and/or monsters must these people be?" stares loooooong and hard at the audience
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...
-- one single political party in the Netherlands that does not get enough votes
See anti-productivism, anti-extractivism, anti-capitalism... Or as some writer once said, approximately, "Progress is the myth that says full ahead is always the right direction, ecology is the discipline that teaches us it's a complete disaster"
That'll work out just fine, I'm sure.
> Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better.
Literally 99.8% of the population is housed and fed.
But saying economic growth (however you define it) is the problem, means that economic shrinkage is a solution. I'm not so sure about that. I'm also 100% convinced the problem isn't economic growth, but pollution and other ways of exploiting nature that form part of the problem. But saying that lacks that edge.
?
> Literally 99.8% of the population is housed and fed.
You obviously live in a bubble. In USA or France, there's millions of people living below the poverty line despite residing in the richest nations on Earth (that are so rich because they are pillaging every other nation there is through neocolonial schemes).
There's countless homeless folks and even more mishoused folks and persons forced to live in bad conditions despite there being millions of empty apartments...
> economic shrinkage is a solution
Economic shrinkage is the only solution is you want the next generation to have drinkable water. All scientists agree we can't go on like that, it's not exactly rocket science.
> the problem isn't economic growth, but pollution and other ways of exploiting nature
It's entirely correlated. There is no economic growth without extractivism. Hence the degrowth movement: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Degrowth
Partij voor de Dieren is a Dutch party. That's the 'bubble' I live in.
> There's countless homeless folks
In France, there are 140,000 homeless people. Also 0.2% of the population.
> extractivism
Your condescension is very visible behind your neologisms.
> Hence the degrowth movement
Saying "consumerism" is bad for the environment is rather a different statement from "economic growth is the problem".
> > stop trying to measure what cannot be measure > That'll work out just fine, I'm sure.
> ?
Well, for starters, you can't measure happiness, well-being of humans, animals or plants, air quality, etc. And when there are countless homeless folks, you can't even measure that.
IMO, some approximate measure of your goals, with a sensible flexibility and understanding of its biases, is good enough to steer away from the worst consequences of your policy. But go ahead, base your policies on gut feelings. We all know where that ends.
Anti-productivism is not about not producing anything at all, but rather admitting we can take other angles to the problem before extracting as many resources as we can and polluting as many water streams as we can just to produce more bullshit that's gonna end up in the trash soon.
That there's people starving is arguably not a bug of the capitalist system, but rather a feature. If you desire another outcome, expropriate the owners, dismantle the police and organize into autonomous communes.
Humans once operated like this. We were violent, suspicious of one another and traded from time to time. Most people died violent deaths or starved. (Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune on the promise of improving its wellbeing by taking your’s stuff.)
Also, I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York.
What's your source? Some people argue the exact opposite. Personally, i don't believe in human nature but i believe in the power of cultures to shape our lives, so the two situations are entirely possible in my view.
> Absent any police force, I can take command of my commune
That's not how it works. It's precisely when there is already power and privilege that a police force is established, to protect those, not the people. When there is less authority/privilege in a community, there is no police force: the people arm and defend themselves directly (popular self-defense).
> I can’t autonomously grow good avocados in New York
Is it a bad thing? I'm not entirely against some goods crossing some distances for some reasons, but of course you couldn't eat avocados in NY everyday.
What good does eating avocados bring to yourself and your community, compared to the social/environmental damages caused by huge monoculture of avocado and transport of it over long distances using fossil fuels?
Or do you believe that if you were raised like a tiger in the wild, you would think and behave exactly like a wild tiger?
As you say, it’s controversial. The data I’ve seen popularly summarised and responded to [1] agree that rates of violent death stayed stable or decreased from when we abandoned nomadism until the present.
> When there is less authority/privilege in a community, there is no police force: the people arm and defend themselves directly (popular self-defense)
Authority doesn’t require a font of honor. It just benefits from one. Power exists in a vacuum, and can mobilise people with the promise of a better life. For example, if my commune made dumb decisions and ruined its crops while the neighbours didn’t. (Or for taco night.)
> What good does eating avocados bring to yourself and your community, compared to the social/environmental damages caused by huge monoculture of avocado and transport of it over long distances using fossil fuels?
It brings me pleasure. It also brings me pleasure to know I’m not trashing the planet, but sometimes those desires intersect. Separately, if if my cultural awareness is small and local, I may care less about my long-term effects on faraway places.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...
The Apartment issue is perverse incentives (housing as "investment vehicle", and not everybody wanting to live where the Market assumes they want to).
The funny thing is, from the advertiser's point of view, they think they are solving both these problems by reaching out to that poor uninformed consumer to pull their attention to what it is they need. It completely discounts the tendency for natural damping of aggressively constant stimuli as an adaptive response. It also discounts the enormity and disturbing nature of the infrastructure implemented to further that pursuit.
Nonetheless the fact remains that we have consistently produced more than enough food for everybody for half a century and so far have refused or failed to distribute it equitably
This is an observation, not a value judgment, I don't have an answer to the question "could it be any other way"
The simple fact that when someone gets a bicycle, car, washing machine, electricity, plumbing, a phone, or whatever they value and if it helps them take better care of their family (or even themselves), that counts as growth.
The problem is unsustainable growth, ecological destruction, etc. Of course effective measures (carbon tax, emissions regulations, consumer protection/advocacy, right to repair, open patents) are needed to ward off mindless "VC funded" enterprising/consumerism/gadgetism and waste.
But as you say, the problem isn't economic growth in itself, but the fact that our entire (debt-based) economy is predicated on eternal growth. Eventually, every population reaches a steady-state equilibrium with its environment (even an artificial environment such as "the economy"). The hyper-focus on economic growth and our dependence on it causes all kinds of sustainability problems, whether it's ecosystem diversity, climate change, or any similar long-term problems.
As long as we don't have a sustainable economic system, the other problems can't be solved.
If you don't have economic growth, then tomorrow cannot be better then today. But that is a very different question to "should we cut down more rainforest?"
You've got the cause and effect backwards, and it's exactly what lobbyists for the problem areas want: arguing against economic growth is pretty trivially a bad idea, but they want you speaking in the abstract because it does useful things like not have you saying "the burning of fossil fuels is unsustainable" and "we need to tarrif unsustainably sourced palm oil" because then you're dangerously (to them) close to actually lobbying for an effective solution.
The idea of "we need to end economic growth" implies an extremely broad ranging, aggressive, authoritarian imposition on people's freedoms - requiring so much logistics, infrastructure and coordination as to be practically impossible.
Or you know, we could just fund the EPA and BLM, and employ auditors for sustainable sourcing requirements for overseas importers...
It's a meta-optimization problem. Like the problem of figuring out how to spend our "remaining" carbon budget best to minimize suffering both short and long term.
Economic growth is measured in gross domestic product. The total of goods and services produced in a given year.
So as efficiency increases, you actually need to consume more to achieve the same growth since your production costs decrease.
The problem with this whole thread is that economic growth can come from multiple sources. Increases in efficiency are a very positive source of sustainable economic growth with major environmental benefits. Slash and burn farming or strip-mining is temporary economic growth that will leave the future impoverished.
That's why everybody here is talking past each other.
Untrue, just look at Europe before and after the Bubonic Plague.
You see massive economic collapse, but people are better off.
Well, the people who are still alive are better off.
If there wasn't, then worker conditions would not have improved because there would not be more demand for goods then there was workers to make them.
Then a recovering (growing) population meant that the previous level of economic activity was reached.
This is why some misguided people think that war is good, and it's "necessary", and that "we are overdue". But that's a complete fallacy. Those years have been lost. Yes growth was drastic, but that's hardly any consolation. Just like with COVID19. Yes, mRNA and other new vaccine vectors and tech grown a lot, but the whole economy went to shit otherwise. (Even if the recovery was again fast and even somewhat unexpected, because this time states stepped in and provided okay-ish fiscal and great monetary interventions.)
No, that's not how it works... these "great reset" theories are nice, and might even make some intuitive sense, but the actual years of the plague were (almost) completely lost (especially economically), sure the recovery seems great on a graph, but the graph would have been (in most of the cases) even higher by then. (Yes, indeed the next generation enjoyed better relations with feudal lords, because labor was scarce. But usually - when people are asked whether they would enjoy a bit better wages or keep their relatives and extended family alive, they somehow opt for the altruistic option.)
The fast recovery soon regresses to the mean rate of growth (as dictated by the general technological progress).
Growth mostly comes into contemporary discourse when people talk about investment or when people use it as a swearword.
There's no real dependence on it. Yes central banks target 2% inflation (US Fed uses the PCE deflator), because it is comparatively the easiest/simplest. Targeting "full employment" is just as important. If there would be nothing to improve, build, no one would have any unmet need, nor anyone would trade anything, then sure, we would not see growth nor debt, but for the foreseeable future growth is a useful indicator for how much debt is okay.
Healthier <> economy growth
The economy does not shrink because you make a process more efficient.
(1) Earning that money is still growing the economy, and (2) even a zero-interest bank account is growing the economy (you're just not seeing any remuneration for your part in that) - and (3) even if you took the money home and destroyed it, since you're still working, you're providing a very useful deflationary function since it means someone else can print more money safely (and once again you're helping grow the economy, just yielding your output to a third party).
Also irrelevant anyway from point 1: you're still working to make money, thus you're growing the economy.
What county are you referring to? This is not the case in the US [1].
The only thing which is neutral here is if you literally just do nothing with the extra hours you take not working.
That's unlikely: if you take up a hobby you'll be buying supplies, if you spend it helping out family then you're improving their opportunities etc.
"The economy" is defined by what is legible in the financial system. In this example, that is working for a wage. Time spent on other endeavors is not reflected in such accounting (sure, money spent on those activities is obviously still part of the economy, but said money is only part of what is spent on them). Time spent on other endeavors is therefore not "growing the economy", except in some pathological sense of trying to shoehorn our entire existence into economic terms.
Time spent with family or on hobbies certainly does make society better though, despite not being economic activity or "growth". In fact, this is exactly what opponents of the growth-worship philosophy are aiming for.
No it is not, this is categorically wrong.
Simple question: does a barter-based tribe have an economy? Yes.
The company doesn't get money (didn't sell the bottles) -> pay less salary for some employee (that didn't operated the machine for that bottle) -> that didn't spent that money because he got a cheaper water
The idea that people would just sit around creating things for altruistic reasons is a utopian pipe dream.
Constantly seeking material growth isn't perfect but it provides more positive aspects than negative ones.
You're benefiting daily from that growth and your modern lifestyle (in 1st world countries) is far above what people enjoyed even half a century ago.
Unfortunately destruction is a necessary evil. There's no way to improve society while simultaneously avoiding any ecological change. Unless you're suggesting we all go back to some sort of nomadic lifestyle?
Ok, innovate a way to ship items across the world while keeping them from spoiling, getting damaged and make it so they're received in a timely manner. I'd also like to see how you can feed an entire planet with 1st world standards and not farm the way we do.
Just a hunch but my guess is you'll be no where near as efficient or viable as you think you would. I'm gonna place my trust in experts and not arm-chair internet activists.
The only reason you're even able to sit around and consider things like this IS because we've innovated to the point that your base needs are met without you having to lift a finger.
So, yes we should always strive to be better but you also need to take a few moments and realize the sort of advancements it took to put you in a position to consider issues like packaging/factory farming instead of where you're going to get your next meal or drink of water.
I'm at work right now, as I am for at least 24% of the hours of my life.
Not even close, where are you getting that from?
> Unless you're suggesting we all go back to some sort of nomadic lifestyle?
US car culture is the first thing I’d put on the chopping block. The US military and billionaires as a class are the two highest polluting entities on the planet. Lots of additional gains to be had there.
I would classify very little of our wonton destruction of the environment as “necessary evil”.
> You're benefiting daily from that growth and your modern lifestyle (in 1st world countries) is far above what people enjoyed even half a century ago.
I wonder if all the men who have lowered sperm counts agree with you…
Seriously? I'm not gonna do your work for you but look up reforestation efforts, ozone hole closing, re-population of once devastated animals, pollution etc. I mean you'd have to be completely ignorant or purposely seeking a specific agenda to miss this stuff. Are you suggesting nothing has improved in the last 50 years and we're on a continuous decline?
>US car culture is the first thing I’d put on the chopping block. The US military and billionaires as a class are the two highest polluting entities on the planet. Lots of additional gains to be had there.
What? This such a lame political response devoid of any better alternatives. Show us numbers and propose an alternative that's better.
Please show us the sources that billionaires and the US military are the highest polluting entities on the planet. That's obvious bs propaganda.
>I wonder if all the men who have lowered sperm counts agree with you…
Your measure for whether we're doing better than the past is sperm count? Huh?
You seem to be suffering from something recently coined progressophobia. I get there are problems but this strange denialism and refusal to admit we've progressed at all is not only wrong, it's harmful to society as a whole.
I do though.
US Military: https://qz.com/1655268/us-military-is-a-bigger-polluter-than...
Billionaires: https://www.gq.com/story/billionaires-climate-change/amp
You said largest so you were wrong. Try again.
The second link is absolutely laughable. Gee large industries create more carbon footprint! No shit, that has nothing to do specifically with billionaires. Try getting your news from somewhere else other than GQ.
GQ and QZ aren't legitimate scientific sources bud.
The halcyon past never existed. If we want things to get better we need to move more complex not simplified for the sake of aesthetics and sparing ourselves from having to use our thinkmeats.
I mean, the negative aspects are pretty significant with the whole climate change and mass extinction going on. To make up for that we get cat videos and iPhones?
Do me a favor and look up the average live span before the advent of electricity.
Stop presenting a false dilemma by pretending all we've gotten out of our progress is iphones and cat videos. I think you know that's not true at all.
You're right and that's why I specifically said it's a net gain and not that there were no negative aspects to it. Constant economic growth pushes innovation, yes there are downsides just as there are with anything.
For example, competition is when you keep millions of empty apartments to make sure everybody struggles and will pay more and do whatever you say to find a place to live. Competition is also when you teach children in schools that they should not copy because it's cheating.
Advertisement is also not "telling anybody". It's paying other people to tell in your place about stuff they wouldn't want to talk about otherwise.
How do you abolish desire?
1. Create fear of the thing that would otherwise be desired. Associate it with badness. This is a slow but relentless form of operant conditioning, which can be done entirely using words and stories.
2. Create substitute and symbolic objects of desire, in order to redirect effort. The purest of these is money.
However, with reference to say the East India Companies, history has established that bands of guys with guns is also a path to being hailed as a business guru.
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.
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.
> Don't complain about ads the next time you stand in line and whip out Instagram rather than an ebook.
I can think of nothing more boring or dystopian than Instagram.
> And, shocking to some, most people are not an empty shell inside, although they have desires and things they want.
Happiness levels in the US are at an all time low:
https://worldhappiness.report/ed/2019/the-sad-state-of-happi...
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...
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Committee_on_Public_Informat...
But what's in the Coke?
Whisked or rum?
Now my line is that this scene is strong, it has meaning. But it doesn't need Coca-cola for that. The product diminishes the experience, it taints it. Next time we get on that roof, what do we make of ourselves ? But as another poster commented: "what's in the coke ? Rhum or whisky ?" :).
The real disaster of the TV-age was that we didn't have the internet to allow enough dispersal of the tools and technology to mute ads on demand, or distribute key-frame data for spotting ad breaks.
What we do today with things like ublock origin is pretty incredible and very effective.
In the marketplace of ideas, you actually need competition and competition means we need to be pushing back on ads always.
All to save our mind's focus.
It's common for local bands to form and dismantle/replace advertisements. See for example the international campaign there was during COP21 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-34958282.amp
In many places across France, we have workshops every week to draw/paint some posters. Then we go on the streets, open the ad panels and replace their ads with our message.
All it takes usually is a 6mm hex key (allen) in which you drilled a hole.
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."
Not that it's ok at all, but is he known for other antisemitic displays/rhetoric? Or is fighting against Israel's apartheid and denouncing that politicians are sold to billionaires now antisemitic?
I'm really not OK with the "jews = money" trope which is a marker of far-right conspiracy theories and is growing more and more popular in the public discourse, at least here in France (especially since Dieudonné was repressed precisely for holding such bigoted views). I'm also really not OK with colonization and apartheid and the State of Israel. I'm not jewish but a lot of left-wing jews are on the same page.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27488742
The link posted was to the viral video of Waters making the comments:
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.
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
The propaganda must get through.
Then all ads will start with panicked screams and fire alarms.
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?
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.
POTS
inb4 companies start putting LTE/WiFi antennas inside wall chargers, if this happens buy an "usb condom"
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.
"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!
Sorry, couldn't resist.
[1] - https://www.weather.gov/
[2] - https://www.liveatc.net/
Really when people talk about nefarious smart speakers, they are really saying “Google, Amazon, Facebook.”
It is possible to have a smart speaker that isn’t spying on you or trying to sell you stuff.
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.
And word to the wise; don’t sleep with a phone in your bedroom. It’s really bad for your sleep hygiene.
"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?
Besides the sleep staging link in the article, what about monitoring your fitbit to know your current sleep phase, and would turn off the ad when it sensed you waking up.
There’s got to be a stop to this madness.
The YT ads are obviously dealt with through an adblocker.
Loved the concept though.
On Android, check out https://vancedapp.com/. On iOS, the largest similar jailbreak project just shut down due to being bullied. Good work, jerks.
Here's a bookmarklet (you must create and edit an existing bookmark with the contents below, else you will get an error) that will pop out a YouTube video on iOS into a PiP video when run. Simply click on the Bookmarks while on the YouTube page and select it.
This allows you to play the videos in the background by swiping the PiP player off to the side.
Disclaimer I do not remember where I got it, only that it seems to work for me.
javascript:(function()%7Blet%20v%20%3D%20document.querySelector('video')%3Bv.addEventListener('webkitpresentationmodechanged'%2C%20(e)%3D%3Ee.stopPropagation()%2C%20true)%3BsetTimeout(()%3D%3Ev.webkitSetPresentationMode('picture-in-picture')%2C%203000)%3Bcompletion()%7D)()
They have their own repository [0] which has faster updates.
[0]: https://newpipe.net/FAQ/tutorials/install-add-fdroid-repo/
It ah the same UI as youtube, but no ads.
It has an adblocker but also SponsorBlock, which is amazing. It skips all the annoying tedium of YouTube videos (intro, self promotion, sponsors, credits)
I couldn't go back to Youtube without adblock and SponsorBlock.
I use both on iOS Safari.
Of course all above is just my opinion.
And for some reason, I can't pay for Youtube from my country.
edit: apparently up to 20% of time can be spent on ads (12 minutes per hour), can't find anything about frequency though.
And SponsorBlock. Because I don't care who is disrupting the genital shaving wallet repair toolkit.
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...
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...
Subliminal: 1. inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception. 2 : existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness
The article is there to raise awareness about the problems in the advertising industry, and one effect is that no one can claim they didn't know.
We should all consider the consequences of what we work on shouldn't we?
The fact that other people don't isn't a counter argument...
Mostly. I actually have some very old books lying around - with advertisement for various, non existent products in them. But gladly I have not seen any open advertisment in any modern book.
It's like why most people in real life don't say "hey, I'm open to sexual intercourse, just in case you were wondering".
Some kinds of information are simply not desired at all times.
Somewhere along the line I think marketing people found themselves singing to the choir of intrusive ads, just as devs find ourselves singing to the choir of Agile (with a capital A) and whatever else might fancy those on top.
It was honestly hilarious - I was HW just across a door - but at the same time frightening when you think about how much this new media permeates our society.
P.S.: Having already lost the war with my daughters from a previous marriage, we are fighting tooth and nail with this one regarding technology access. But boy, even for 2 grown ups it is really hard to fight a kid in this war.
The permeation you experience has been happening for a long time, only now you notice it, because the world she wants to emulate is borderline alien to you.
Don't worry, most of the times, it is a phase.
That too was just a phase :)
Is this my "get off my lawn" moment?
That's a human thing. Has been happening for centuries.
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?
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.
The interesting bit is that if you're part of Brave New World's society, it's not a bad place... it's just stuck in time. There's an original series Star Trek episode where they ask the question: can they disturb a society which hasn't progressed for centuries; their answer was yes. I have mixed feelings about that, but I certainly wouldn't like to see humanity to stop evolving, dreaming, building, and if we keep this up, we might just will.
Your average person reads a dystopian novel and finds it frightening because they can follow the author's extrapolation from the present to the fictional setting. Advertisers and other immoral beings read a dystopian novel (well, they probably read the Cliff's Notes) and think, wow, he's right, I bet people would put up with that sort of thing if we pitched it right!
A privacy-focused equivalent wouldn't do nearly as well because it wouldn't be pulling any of these tricks.
This means that no company with a sensible legal department would try this. However, a fly-by-night startup might try to do it in a way that's hard to trace back to them. In that case, I'd be suing the advertisers, rather than the hard-to-find software company. And I'd be adding CFAA claims.
This just seems like academic mania fueled by media-driven mistrust of BigTech and has no basis in the reality of business-customer relationships
Until we’re able to disable lobbying in politics ads will always be an issue. This is just another bastion to be invaded by this.
That way they get my money without needing to advertise to me and without needing to produce any products or pay salaries, and I get to live a calmer life.
— Richard Stallman, 1986 https://www.gnu.org/gnu/byte-interview
“But we’ve proved it again and again, that if once you have paid him the Dane-geld, you never get rid of the Dane.”
— Rudyard Kipling, 1911, Dane-geld
15 years ago I was working at my college's IT helpdesk. The majority of students that brought in their machines told me they didn't use their computers for anything besides MS Word, AIM, Flash games and DVDs.
Of course there were the art students with Adobe troubleshooting issues, or Econ students with STATA questions, but 90% of the time the computer was an entertainment-centric device.
15 years ago Microsoft wasn't dictating moderation rules and content for these.
And that is just native apps. You can publish whatever app or game you want on your website, and the server for that site can be a simple Raspberry Pi in your home.