Don’t let Facebook sell your mind

Facebook is planning ads in VR based on its tracking of your online activity. Here’s why that’s even worse than placing ads in your dreams.

A coalition of sleep researchers recently published an open letter opposing ads in dreams. "Our dreams cannot become just another playground for corporate advertisers," the researchers said. They called on the Federal Trade Commission to extend policies banning subliminal advertising to ads designed to appear in dreams. 

Why the letter? The Coors beer people claim to have applied techniques developed by “a leading psychologist” to stimulate the running of Coors ads in people’s dreams while they sleep. The so-called Targeted Dream Incubation system involves a subconscious-stimulating film, followed by an “an eight-hour soundscape” to be played during sleep. 

The idea, clearly a publicity stunt, is on its face a bad idea. Anyone devoted enough to put in the work to get the in-dream ads would clearly find it easier just to buy the beer. Anyone that motivated to be persuaded is already persuaded. 

More to the point, injecting advertising into dreams is a revolting prospect, which most people would oppose on principle. It’s just intuitively wrong. 

But isn’t that more or less what Facebook is planning? 

Facebook announced this week that they're about to start testing ads inside Oculus Quest virtual reality games. The first game to get ads is Blaston from Resolution Games and two others not specified. 

The VR ads will be contextual, of course, with Facebook harvesting user data from Facebook and Oculus advitivy, as well as user interaction with third-party mobile apps. Facebook watches every move you make, register every millisecond your mouse pointer hovers over an ad or a Like button, every purchase, every video you watch, and from that choose ads that will target your desires and interests very specifically. At least, that’s the plan. 

The ads in Oculus VR games will appear as "standard boxes" with ads on them, but the company is seeking out new ad formats, no doubt as advertisements (billboards, posters, TV ads, etc.) within the game.

Which raises the question: Isn’t VR more or less a digitally guided daydream? 

Unlike, say, a movie, which plays on a rectangle “over there,” and which is “consumed” voyeristically — you’re watching the story as an outside observer, but you’re not part of it — isn’t a VR video game something that mainly takes place in your experiential mind? It’s not something you “watch.” It’s something you participate in and essentially experience as a kind of sustained hallucination or fever dream. 

While the first-generation ads that Facebook is planning are likely to be 2D billboard-style “posters” that you “observe,” there is no doubt that future “ads” will be full-immersion experiences. The clothing you see in paid advertising might be wearable by your game character. The car ad might be something you can experience driving in a future VR Grand Theft Auto as you drive around a city running over pedestrians before finishing them off with a baseball bat. 

It’s easy to imagine the use of subliminal cues and psychological triggers to make you feel thirsty, but after you experience Coors’ paid ad, similar tricks are deployed to make you feel like your thirst was quenched and your mind got a buzz. VR is virtual, but the experience and the feelings and the adrenaline and the dopamine is all real. 

Worst of all, VR ads will be based on a comprehensive psychological profile of you, personally, based on the extensive and invasive total tracking that Facebook does. 

In other words, we’re facing a future in which advertising will be based on psychological manipulation based on a detailed psychological profile, all experienced in an immersive dream-like medium that’s efficient at physically triggering brain chemistry. The effect is compounded when applied to children and teenagers. 

How far away is this scenario from advertisements inserted into dreams?

I think it goes further than the dream scenario, in part because players will be monitored for their reactions to the ads, which will feed even more data into the personalization engine. 

So why is the dream scenario unacceptable but the VR scenario perfectly OK? Why are we all slouching toward a future where Facebook, of all companies, can enable brands to maniupulate our consciousness on an unprecedented level?

Hopefully other VR plaforms and game creators will come up with monetization schemes that don’t involve this kind of psychological manipulation. 

Don’t count on Facebook to do the right thing. The company has consistently demonstrated their willingness and desire to manipulate human psychology and human behavior for money. 

Because if you think this won’t be made possible by VR technology and strongly tempt advertisers, you’re dreaming.