The new ads for Facebook Home are propaganda clips. Transforming vice into virtue, they’re social engineering spectacles that use aesthetic tricks to disguise the profound ethical issues at stake. This isn't an academic concern: Zuckerberg's vision (as portrayed by the ads) is being widely embraced – if the very recent milestone of half a million installations is anything to go by.

Critics have already commented on how the ads exploit our weakness for escapist fantasy so we can feel good about avoiding conversation and losing touch with our physical surroundings. And they’ve called out Zuckerberg’s hypocrisy: “Isn’t the whole point of Facebook supposed to be that it’s a place to keep up with, you know, family members? So much for all that high-minded talk about connecting people.”

>Think off-camera and outside the egocentric perspective framed by the ads.

However, the dismissive reviews miss an even deeper and more consequential point about the messages conveyed by the ads: that to be cool, worthy of admiration and emulation, we need to be egocentric. We need to care more about our own happiness than our responsibilities towards others.

Let’s examine the most egregious Facebook ad of them all: “Dinner” (in the video above). On the surface, it portrays an intergenerational family meal where a young woman escapes from the dreariness of her older relative’s boring cat talk by surreptitiously turning away from the feast and instead feasting her eyes on Facebook Home. With a digital nod to the analog “Calgon, Take Me Away” commercials, the young woman is automatically, frictionlessly transported to a better place: full of enchanting rock music, ballerinas, and snowball fights.

But let’s break Zuckerberg’s spell and shift our focus away from Selfish Girl. Think off-camera and outside the egocentric perspective framed by the ad. Reflect instead on the people surrounding her.

[#contributor: /contributors/593245c658b0d64bb35d09bd]|||Evan Selinger is a Fellow at the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technology who focuses on the collisions between technology, ethics, and law. At Rochester Institute of Technology, Selinger is Associate Professor of Philosophy and is affiliated with the Center for Media, Arts, Games, Interaction & Creativity ([MAGIC](http://magic.rit.edu/)).|||

Ignored Aunt will soon question why she’s bothering to put in effort with her distant younger niece. Eventually, she’ll adapt to the Facebook Home-idealized situation and stop caring. In a scene that Facebook won't run, Selfish Girl will come to Ignored Aunt for something and be ignored herself: Selfishness is contagious, after all. Once it spreads to a future scene where everyone behaves like Selfish Girl, with their eyes glued to their own Home screens, the Facebook ads portend the death of family gatherings.

More specifically, they depict the end of connecting through effort. Because unlike the entertaining and lively Chatheads the ad recommend we put on our personalized network interfaces and Home screens, we don’t get to choose floating family members. It’s a dystopian situation when everyone matches our interests and we don’t feel obliged to try to connect with those folks: people with whom it’s initially difficult to find common ground.

So why doesn’t the “Dinner” ad depress us? Well that’s where the clever propaganda comes in – the ads give Selfish Girl special license: Everyone else behaves responsibly except for her. Moreover, her irresponsible behavior doesn’t affect what others do.

>Selfishness is contagious.

This same exceptionalism pervades “Airplane” (video below). Here, the Home-obsessed main character doesn’t turn off his phone when a stewardess instructs him to do so. This defiance may seem like harmless self-absorption, a stand against the seemingly ridiculous rules behind airplane technology that will surely resonate with Facebook’s target audience. But that’s only because the commercial limits the self-centeredness to one person. What if everyone on board behaved as Zuckerberg's ads instruct? No plane could depart on time.

In yet another example of clever propaganda – this time cloaked in self-effacing humor – “Launch Day” (also below) revolves around the same, problematic exceptionalism. It’s easy to be amused by Zuckerberg’s bearded employee, who focuses on his Home screen instead of his famous boss. But our positive response is shaped by the other workers who attentively carry the slack and don’t rat him out. Would the scene be so funny if organizations we cared about or invested in came to a grinding halt because nobody paid attention to their bosses and the work to be done?

So what, big deal, some argue about these ads. Unfortunately, the message of technological efficiency and frictionless sharing is increasingly being depicted as an appropriate social ethic beyond Silicon Valley. To stop the spread, we need to push back against its source, which isn’t the technology per se, but rather the depressing ethic its apostles and their commercials idealize.

>Exceptionalism: Everyone else behaves responsibly except for her/him.

This isn’t intended to be a “get off my lawn!” argument, though it is indeed old-fashioned to believe everyone deserves respect. Back in the 1700’s, German philosopher Immanuel Kantmade a big deal out of these ideals, asking what right we have to be self-absorbed while expecting others to rise above indifference.

My argument is that some convictions deserve to be innovation proof. In fact, these convictions are fully compatible with embracing social media, perhaps even making the most of its potential. Rejecting the ethic promoted in the Home ads doesn’t perpetuate the fallacy of digital dualism, the mistaken conviction that online and offline lives are largely distinct rather than interrelated experiences. Social media – including self-indulgent interfaces like Home – only gets in the way of us being genuinely responsive to and responsible for others if we let it undermine ethical effort in maintaining meaningful connections. It only diminishes our characters and true social networks if we treat Selfish Girl as a role model rather than a tragically misguided soul.

>“Get off my lawn!” ... Get off my Home!

Because selfishness spreads like a contagious yawn, the real hypocrisy of the Home ads is that if everyone embraced Zuckerberg’s ideology, only one type of social connection would remain: fleeting entertainment buddies.

The very second we become boring, the moment we make communication anything more than a self-satisfying convenience, we’d be abandoned by fair-weather friends. No explanation necessary. No apologies given. No attempt to blunt the hurt feelings. Just an easy check of the unfriend box. Get off my Home!

Wired Opinion Editor: Sonal Chokshi @smc90