You don’t need to jump to brain-machine interfaces to get dystopia. We can get to ugly places with what we already have in high-end hardware.

Meta is intending to place itself as the leader in VR technology — it has by far the most capital, talent, and intellectual property invested in the domain, of all players in the industry. Meta is an advertisement company — it makes its income by selling targeted advertisements, and by knowing its audience eerily well. Meta will certainly want to (and already is starting to) include eye-tracking hardware in its headsets. We already know they quantify the time spent on individual posts while scrolling through timelines to measure interest and engagement — but eye tracking data is the ultimate measurement of attention. Imagine having advertising clients automatically bet in real-time for milliseconds of your gaze time. Imagine how disgustingly exploitative and overbearing an advertisement system that optimizes gaze heat maps would get. Meta absolutely wants this — and they want the monopoly on VR because this means complete dominance in the advertising word, if VR becomes a significant part of our lives in our future — which us Meta’s bet. They will want to enforce a closed ecosystem that strips us of our ability to watch unwatched. Their ability to sell our attention will be unmatched.