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.
I remember an interview they did with some of the writers, and they were talking about how they included certain items (eg. room-size computers) to be silly and anachronistic, but others (eg. dvd players) to help relate things to current times. They said that when they were writing the final seasons, the team couldn't tell which items in the earliest seasons were supposed to be relatable and which were supposed to be silly.
A _lot_ of sci-fi in general is social commentary and/or recreational sociology.
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.
Black Mirror's Fifteen Million Merits is entirely an exercise in this.
"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
Most stories are in general, but sci-fi in particular looks at society, politics, and their relationship to technology. Sci-fi frequently addresses issues of wealth inequality. I'm always amazed at how many people didn't realize Blade Runner was a critique on Reganomics.
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....
Turns out Google’s AI is directed towards advertisers to guess how to make them pew the money the most inefficiently possible ;) Seriously those ads are inefficient for the immense majority of small shop owners.
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...
That makes no sense. Every time an economic activity happens that helps people growth happens.
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.
"When a measure becomes a goal, it seizes to be a good measure."
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.
Again, this is not what economic growth is. Any efficiency improvement, any self-improvement, anything, is economic growth.
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 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.
> Well, the people who are still alive are better off.
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).
The growth was the recovery of the population. the shrinking is not the growth phase, that's the recession. initially there were not enough people to work, to produce, to care for animals, to plant seeds, to harvest, to clean the ditches, to fix roofs, etc.. waste was enormous, crops spoiled, there was no demand and no supply, markets collapsed.
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.)
But people wouldn't be cutting down the rainforest if they weren't rewarded for it. If we patch each problem as it comes along, we're spending a lot of political will on the problem.
The human race, consisting of 6+ billion people, can do more then one thing at a time.
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...
If economic growth is something so natural that it needs to be actively suppressed for it not to happen, why do we need aggressive, harmful growth drivers like planned obsolescence or the ever-growing pervasiveness of ads that this thread was originally about?
That's the whole point! We don't! We have to actively fight planned obsolescence and other useless ways of inefficient growth. But due to the short term optimization of states, society, people, and businesses, it's what happens nowadays.
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.
There's no real hyper focus on growth. There are plenty of important/powerful/influential people who loudly and clearly say that it's just an artificial measure, we must look at the real problems. Health, education, poverty, etc.
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.
Then how do you have all that money? And where are you keeping it?
(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).
Eventually you work less so you never earn that money in the first place. This may involve saving up first so you have more economic bargaining power, or it may involve collective action to reduce working hours across the board.
My only point in referencing saving is that it is one path to achieve the bargaining power to actually work less, against employers who inherently want to occupy your entire life. I'm talking about having saved up enough to be comfortable working less - after which you can turn your reduced spending into reduced working. An alternative avenue that doesn't involve saving at all is collective action, which is how we've gotten down to a 40 hours per week standard.
"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.
It's identical to if you destroyed it. It just adds some risk that you might suddenly mobilize it (hence one of the reasons it's actually illegal for individuals to store large amounts of physical cash for long durations).
Also irrelevant anyway from point 1: you're still working to make money, thus you're growing the economy.
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
its the defining issue of our times and there is some of nuance: First, there is room (imho) for conventional growth in many parts of the world. Its insane that people go starving, without shelter or water while others throw away truckloads of food - because of "xyz". Then there is the branch of "personal growth" that is decoupled from material consumption. Getting every functioning brain to fully develop its faculties through education quickly translates into economic growth. I suspect that if we address these two opportunities the "materialist growth imperative" will cease being relevant
its all linked. you can't just gift stuff without destroying much of economic organization and ownership concepts etc. you can't get local production going without owning the problem of corrupt local elites (which most likely you educated in your own image) etc...
You're right, it's a complex web of incentives, power (im)balances, sociopolitical inertia, legalisms, etc
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"
I totally agree. Economic growth in the developed world need not be more than population growth plus a little bit extra for genuine quality of life improvements
The fact that there's starving folks and throwaway-food, and more empty apartments than homeless persons, is an argument against growth... at least on a global level. In a system based on private property, where a piece of paper determines ownership and speculation determines production (instead of actual needs), production is necessarily harmful.
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?
> What's your source? Some people argue the exact opposite
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.
What does it mean that you don’t believe in human nature? Surely there has to be some baseline that’s based in genes and hormones and so on (that we’re not yet sophisticated enough to precisely define, of course). Obviously nurture plays a huge role as well.
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?
The apartment and food issue is actually a consequence of rigid logistics. Stuff doesn't just magically move. Yes. Food is thrown away. Why? People aren't buying it. Why? Not enough buying power/willingness to do so/capability. People are not naturally static. They have urges. They have tastes/desires etc. Industry is however, static.
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.
The issue might be that growth used to be a pretty good proxy for wellbeing, but once the measure was established it became the target. Some dude's law, escapes my mind.
> it provides more positive aspects than negative ones.
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?
It's not a zero sum game. We can live perfectly comfortable moved without a lot of the stuff have, or doing things slightly differently. Some things we as consumers wouldn't even really notice, like better insulation standards.
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.
One of the problems is ecological destruction which has increased with economic growth. I would argue that because growth is so unevenly captured by those at the top, a very high gini coefficient is another problem.
You mean how clean things were in the industrial revolution? And how eglatarian it was under feudalism? Or back when slash and burn was the only agriculture? Back when we were causing mass extinctions with pointy sticks and still having a population in danger of extinction?
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.
All of the things you list are other great examples of problems caused by economic growth. That’s my point, to suggest growth comes “for free” or that there are no externalities, is to ignore all of human history.
We've reversed a lot of that destruction in the past century.
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?
Not absolutely, but it can be a hell of a lot better than it is. We don't, for example need to have such a lot of disposable packaging, we don't need to farm the way we do etc
>We don't, for example need to have such a lot of disposable packaging, we don't need to farm the way we do etc
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.
>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.
I'm at work right now, as I am for at least 24% of the hours of my life.
> We've reversed a lot of that destruction in the past century.
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.
> If the US military were a country, its fuel usage alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, sitting between Peru and Portugal.
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.
Why would you say that? It sounds like classical ecologist rhetoric. Stop producing shit, stop trying to measure what cannot be measure. Just make sure everyone is housed and fed and suddenly things are better. Sounds like a better and more serious political program to me than any other political party i've heard lately. But hey i'm an anarchist so "fuck capitalism" has always been my program, it's just not what we hear from political parties usually ;)
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"
> 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.
>> stop trying to measure what cannot be measure
> That'll work out just fine, I'm sure.
?
> 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
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.
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.
It appears to me that the line is quite thick if you want to draw it between guys with guns and chocolate on a shelf. One of those situations is pretty transparently more coercive than the other.
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.
Such ethical standards can only be altered on a big scale through relentless struggles. Abolish competition and advertisement, and suddenly a lot of things will start to be ok in society. Yes a lot of people will loose their useless job, but that won't be a requirement to have a place to live anymore, and both individuals and society will be better off.
Competition doesn't mean "having ideas" or going separate ways. "Competition is a rivalry where two or more parties strive for a common goal which cannot be shared" (wikipedia).
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.
What are the limits to this abolition of competition? How could you possibly eliminate all zero sum games? Watching toddlers ‘compete’ makes me believe competition is very human and a natural extension of 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.
That's not how ideas work, except in a capitalist system. New ideas about how to better run the world are not allowed because they compete with private interest of the ruling class. The same is true in pretend-communist States like the USSR, which are just State-capitalist systems, not actual communism (where communism is according to Marx abolition of class, property and privilege... none of which were abolished in Leninist States).
> 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.
A movie scene played out repeatedly- “A person dying and his last moments aka for a cigarette”. There are so many of these that go back to manufacturing consent.
I feel like this speaks more to the lack of enough of an ad-blocking movement though.
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.
I don't get this. Sure, what you describe sounds like a precious moment. But why is it "stolen" if some company films an ad featuring a similar moment? I assume you wouldn't have the same reaction if you saw two real teenagers doing this, or even saw it fictionalized in a movie financed by some production company hoping to make money. What is it about seeing it in an ad that crosses a line?
As a teen (and an adult) Coca-cola certainly was not a prescriber. Anything they'd show in their ad would be immediately and correctly understood as fake and an attempt to get in. Action, reaction. Most (and my friends didn't care) would get over it but the moment is tainted by the brand. Everyone has a different line not to cross though.
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 ?" :).
Fair enough, I think I just lack this feeling that Coca-Cola taints something by association. But I suppose if Blackwater filmed a series of commercials in my neighborhood, I'd be unhappy with that association too, so I think I get the logic now.
I wanted to take that annoying Coke ad that played in movie theaters (remember movie theaters?) showing a glass filling up, and ending with "Aah", and make a parody version that ended with someone barfing.
> 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."
Off topic, and I realize this was not at all your point/belief, but it's quite incredible that the article is brining up this quote from Roger Waters as an example of his 'anti-semitism'...
I'm no fan of him and i'm not knowledgeable, but from a quick search the only thing antisemitic i could see from him was using on stage a pig with a david star and a dollar sign (sigh).
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.
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.
My experience is that people remember advertisements but they don't remember even what category of product was being advertised let alone the brand. But my social circles might not be typical.
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 think this is 99% caused by advertising in itself. One of the oft-forgotten facts about ads is that they can not only influence you to choose between competitors for irrational reasons, but they can very often influence you into buying something that you didn't need at all. In fact, this is often the primary purpose, as Amazon for example profits more from you owning a Siri speaker than they do from you not owning a smart speaker at all (since part of their stock price will be influenced by the size of the overall smart speaker market, not just their slice of it).
Alternatively you could buy Apples homepod, I can't imagine they want to torpedo their brand so completely that your homepod won't be broken by then anyway.
Serious question since I've never owned a smart phone. Do they not come with a browser? If they do, you can look up your zip code on weather.gov [1] and then expand it to show more details, then bookmark the result. The URL will remain the same for that zip code. At least for the U.S. that is quite accurate. Does the E.U. have a similar site? If you want to hear the weather, then you could bookmark ATIS [2] for your area. Can you launch an app or a bookmarked page using built-in support for voice commands on smart phones?
> 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.
The phone part assumes that you can safely sleep without the possibility of receiving alarm calls from your loved ones, which isn't true for the vast majority of people. If one of my loved ones suffers some accident over night, I want to be woken up by emergency services and be available to help.
you can build a faraday box with some aluminum foil, 2-4 layers are enough (you can test it by trying to call the phone inside it, if it rings you need more layers).
inb4 companies start putting LTE/WiFi antennas inside wall chargers, if this happens buy an "usb condom"
> 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, anyone might be a light sleeper or wake up at the wrong time and discover this.
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.
On an Android phone you can use firefox, ublock origin and youtube in the browser, too. It also supports playing in a floating window (fullscreen the video and then switch app from firefox to something else).
I noticed this is starting to be less effective. Now and then an ad creeps through the protection barrier. First time it happened to me was exactly at the moment I was demonstrating someone that I really do have an ad-free internet experience :/
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.
You can do background play in Safari iOS by switching to desktop mode, press play, lock the phone and then click again to play from lock screen / outside safari. Alternatively friendly does also background play.
This is tangentially related, but Google has been blocking iOS native PiP mode on YouTube on iPhones on the website.
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.
Yes. The answer is to use Patreon and sponsorships for the most part to guarantee an income as opposed to the fidgety monetisation on YT, and to use an adblocker like uBlock Origin to get rid of the YT ads.
On Android, check out https://vancedapp.com/. On iOS, the largest similar jailbreak project just shut down due to being bullied. Good work, jerks.
Yeah it's called YouTube Premium. Think like a Netflix subscription but for YouTube. Google probably A/B tested different versions of YouTube to see which one generated more YouTube Premium subscribers. It turns out that the higher $$$-generating code (i.e. driving Premium subscriptions) is the one that bypasses Safari's adblocking engine.
Guaranteed no ads injected by YT, but don't forget that already most popular YT content includes ads inside the video, as a small bit of informercial style content somewhere in the middle of the video.
No ads at all. Now, wanna know what antitrust means? It means changing your YouTube policy so that instead of competing with just some random hobo PeerTube, they now compete in the same space as Netflix, HBO, and Amazon Prime. It means an entrant to compete with YouTube must now be a mega corporation.
This is why I pretty much stopped using mobile internet on my phone outside of looking up stuff on maps or maybe wikipedia. The mobile web is unusable now on iOS. I have a ~5 inch long screen, most websites give me an inch of readable space between the banner ad and the massive autoplaying video ad consuming the bottom of the screen, and the footer ad. All of them have the tiniest close button imaginable, even using my index finger can lead to fat fingering it and clicking some ad that instantly takes me to some entirely unrelated app on the app store instantly, or fakes a popup notification that my device is compromised. Even if I do manage to successfully hit close, another ad pops up in that space a few seconds later. Its like the internet before ad blockers in the early 2000s, full of malware in the ads.
Brave on iOS is just a wrapper over Safari's WebKit and JavaScript runtime. Apple bans all competing rendering and JavaScript implementations from the App Store, forcing browser developers to develop skins over Safari.
Perhaps some alternative front-end for youtube might be useful to you - for example invidious. It has no ads and has several other improvements over official youtube front-end.
That was absolutely predictable. Just my own anectodal evidence: through my life, ads always became more present, never less. No matter if i.e. ad-financed TV (they started with a single block of 4-5 ads in the late 80s in a standard 90 minute film) to sports (just check a video of a soccer game of the 80s to the how much white space was left on their shirts) the internet etc.
Also works as opposed to donating to individual Patreons and such. I still don't like a cut being taken by YT because I disagree with their business practices though. Sponsorships are the future of online media creation, I guess.
The YT ads are obviously dealt with through an adblocker.
Yes, exactly. They don't make you pay for it, they offer it for free. So I choose not to pay for it. Besides I don't complain about their ads, I simply don't watch them.
YouTube Premium is only $12/month. People act like it’s crazy to spend the price of an appetizer on an entertainment platform that they use tens of hours a month.
If watching on desktop get adblock/unlock origin. I recall Google has a setting to stop personalised ads or clearing my preferences or profile or something, anecdotally I feel I see less ads on my TV. I also try to avoid watching YouTube on my TV, dns level ad blocking doesn't work
FWIW I have a pihole running on my local, but my Samsung TV still shows YT ads because I cannot disable cdn.samsung.com or the TV will not work, and I think the ads are being served via this domain to my TV....
Connect your own media center. I use an RPi 4. It can play netflix and youtube in Kodi, for example. Admittedly there are many minor compat issues, of course.
Get yourself a Nvidia shield. It has no advertisement build in and even can turn on and off the host TV. Also, I would advise you to disconnect your smart TV entirely.
I just have an RPi 4. The protocol that can turn off and on the tv there is just called CEC and you can make simple scripts with cec-client to trigger it. (Kodi also already uses it.)
I have an Nvidia Shield, and ran PiHole for a bit. It didn't block youtube ads for me, but might be regional ranges not being blocked. Eventually I stopped using PiHole since it broke some payment processors at times, and there was no easy way for family members to temp disable it and it became unmanagable.
I'm getting 3 ads for short (3 minutes) videos, and a dozen for 1 hour videos. Last time before I ditched the Youtube app, many of the ads can't be skipped and some of them were actually two successive ads.
And for some reason, I can't pay for Youtube from my country.
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.
This isn't technically subliminal advertising though. Subliminal ads are just brief flashes that you're unaware of consciously, but still register on a subconscious level. If the consumer was awake presumably they'd be acutely aware of an advert playing because they'd hear it. The 'trick' is that the ad is played at when the person is asleep - other than that it's a normal (although presumably quiet) advert. It seems current laws would stop that.
subliminal ads are anything that your´ perceive (hear/see) but are not conscious of, hearing adverts while you are asleep - when you are not conscious are the same.
Subliminal: 1. inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception. 2 : existing or functioning below the threshold of consciousness
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.
Aren't we all part of some problem one way or the other. You could make the same point to a Programmer in the Banking Industry who is unaware that he is literally creating a predatory interest calculation for a debt scheme by writing code.
Did it need any more data points? It's fairly incredible that it is legal that we are being bombarded 16 out of 24 hours per day with sponsored messages in one form or another. The only medium that is still inviolate is books.
Not so inviolate. There are a number of companies (usually high end designer brands; think Prada and jewelry) that commission authors to make books featuring their products. This has been going on for years, but I don't know the efficacy. Then again, no one really knows the efficacy of any kind of advertising.
"The only medium that is still inviolate is books."
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.
Isn't it what it's supposed to be? I mean, their purpose is to persuade me do something that I otherwise wouldn't want to do (usually, to buy some product). How is this not hostile to begin with?
I'm a big critic of marketing, but marketing is supposed to do a lot of stuff. Perhaps persuasion of the form you have experienced is the worst they could do. First of all it should understand a market in order to help build a fitting product, and afterwards it should educate people that might stand to benefit from it, about the existence of said product and the benefits.
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.
Advertising used to be benign things like alerting farmers to an improved plowing technology in a trade magazine. Then companies realized they could get away with selling an unneeded/worse/disposable product if they just outright lied about it, and took advantage of the goodwill the public had towards advertisements to reap profit.
Nah, it's worse than that. Bringing morality into it would actually be better; it'd be easier to understand and rally against if companies were doing this because they were "evil". But they aren't, they're just greedy and want money.
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.
I think they can, but it's not directed as such yet. I mean how often have you had a catchy ad tune or catchphrase stuck in your head? like the McD's whistle / catchphrase, or EA Sports, or the really catchy sex phone line tune, or 0118 999 88199 9119 725... 3
There were people like you 20 years ago that dismissed how absurd it would be that people would willingly buy company microphones connected to the Internet and put them in their houses.
Sure it sounds ridiculous if you frame it like that. A prediction from 2000 that, by 2020, you will be able to control your house with your voice and can ask your computer assistant about the weather doesn't seem so absurd. People have been talking about this type of home automation since the 50s. The hot mics connected to the internet are just an implementation detail, people actually care about capability.
I have an 8 yo that _really_ wants to do videos.
Just this morning, she helped her mother cook the meal, but she wanted to roleplay as if she was recording a YT video like the ones she watches.
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.
Kids want to emulate what they see, especially in "fun" entertainment. My grandfather wanted to become a circus clown. My dad talked about western-style indigenous Americans. My He-Man/GI-Joe-drenched childhood was filled with dreams of becoming a warrior/soldier. And today the heroes of "fun" entertainment are YouTubers and Twitch streamers.
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.
Our 13 year old has the youtube culture ingrained as well, with a lot of things he feels like he should voice his opinion even if nobody asked, or he comes out with some BS that he knows nothing about, but instead of going "I don't know" he'll just say it with confidence. I'm sure that's a youtube thing, because silence and not having an opinion won't get you those dank views.
I think it is both. We laughed a lot, but also realized that what our dreams show us are sometimes just 'ads' for a life that society expects us to live.
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?
Brave New World is set 400 years after the Ford T-Model. A 100 passed since; 1/4th of that book has already become true.
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.
We've already got Fahrenheit 451's "Seashells" in the form of the AirPod--your constant companion, even when you sleep!
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!
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?
If any electronic device tried to do this to me, I would sue. I would be furious, and I would not settle for a small amount. I'm definitely not the only one who would react this way; I expect this reaction would be fairly common.
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.
Years ago I attended a seminar by Wilson Bryan Key about Subliminal Advertising. I purchased 2 of his paperbacks and read them. Things that people laughed off as "overly active imagination" and "you're seeing things that aren't there" now seem to be a common fear. If you don't recognize when you are being manipulated, or you don't believe you can be manipulated, IMHO - you are a prime target. Ref: Media Sexploitation: Key, Wilson Bryan, also Subliminal Seduction: Key, Wilson Bryan.
Besides paid advertisements, what other uses are there? Like propaganda? Let's say your totalitarian regime wanted everyone to love the dear leader even more. What are you going to do about it when you accidentally discover that the smart speaker is subversive? Or maybe a group of hackers wants to convince millions of people that buying the latest bitcoin fad/WSB meme/NFT is a sound financial decision? Are we one vulnerability in Alexa away from this?
This is so absurd. Does anyone seriously think that these companies would get away with advertising to you in your sleep without your consent? Even if it's opt-in, what possible reason would they use justify it that would get people to give their consent? If they have a good enough reason to get people to sing on, who cares?
This just seems like academic mania fueled by media-driven mistrust of BigTech and has no basis in the reality of business-customer relationships
I've been listening to books while I go to sleep for 20 years. Not intentionally, really, it's just that I put books on text to speech to help me get to sleep and then they play all night. Sure, a rare sometimes the vague themes of a story might get integrated into my dreams and I'll remember it when I get up, but it's a very rare rare.
Is there an amount of money I can pay monthly, which gets put into a pot and distributed to various companies?
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.
“It's a gigantic social phenomenon. People find ways of getting money by impeding society. Once they can impede society, they can be paid to leave people alone.”
Seriously no smart speakers in my house (unless count my smart phone). Devices are creepy and honestly not really innovative. Honestly I am shocked when I find households with them in multiple rooms .. each to their own I guess.
They've been trying to do that with learning for literally more than a hundred years now. I'm totally cynical about it. Furthermore, it's not like we're not already bombarded by ads every day.
I wish these researchers would stop giving our future overlords ideas - unless it’s a Machiavelli situation where they’re angling for a job in the new world order, in which case, well played researchers
I think people underestimate the degree to which the general population is susceptible to mass manipulation following the recent death of personal computing.
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.
How so? Google only reviews apps published on their store. You can upload an APK anywhere, for anyone to download and use on their own device. iOS is obviously more locked down, but globally, Android has greater market share.
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.
You won't have to. Eventually these speakers will have long-range parabolic microphones so one set up on a neighbour's patio will pick up sounds from your house.
If this would work we‘d all have speakers on while we sleep to learn languages, quit smoking etc. it doesn’t though so the scenario is just fearmongering.
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.