Home in the Machine

[Written for The Note, the University of Nottingham Sociology Dept magazine]

On a sunny Saturday afternoon, in the summer of 2017, I entered my neighbour’s house without their permission, took control of their TV, and interrupted their four-year-old daughter’s cartoon, subjecting her instead to the YouTube stream of a violent game called Battlegrounds, in which 100 players shoot at each other until 99 are dead. Her mum was pretty pissed off. My reaction was one of surprise—because I did all of this from my own couch, accidentally.

The blame for this rather grievous transgression lay with Google’s ‘Cast’ function, which allows you to share your screen from one device to another. I’d shifted in my seat and unwittingly activated it. I only found out the result when a text arrived from my neighbour a couple of minutes later.

Cast is one function amongst a multitude of devices and software tools that comprise the ‘smart home’, a marketing label for the tech giants’ efforts to embed the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) into our homes. The IoT basically seeks to dissolve the remaining distinctions between online and offline, by filling the world around us with pervasive computing—sensors collecting data, processors working on it, and actuators turning the results into actions.

But how did my YouTube viewing end up in front of poor Rosie, and why should this be of interest to social scientists? My home invasion turned out to have only required that I had my neighbour’s WiFi password on my phone. I, as is not uncommon amongst neighbours, have babysat for Rosie, and in the Internet Age, after welcoming a guest into your home and offering them a cup of tea, the next ritual is often to get them onto your WiFi. So, when I accidentally pressed that Cast button, Google’s technology took a look at the world around it, identified access to a WiFi network with a ‘smart’ (read: Internet-connected) TV, and put 2 and 2 together to get 5. As far as it was concerned, a shared network meant a shared home—WiFi became a proxy for intimacy. This highlights something important: ‘smart’ technologies are socially stupid.

This leads us to the second question, which concerns sociological interest. Homes have long been a subject of sociological fascination. As the sites of many of our most intimate relationships, where we spend a great deal of our everyday existence, this is where much of our shaping as social beings takes place. The mundanity of our domestic experience belies the complexity of these spaces. The home is a deeply variegated site, criss-crossed by walls both physical and social, which compartmentalise the life which takes place within.

For example, in every room in a shared home, there exists a set of moral codes about who can enter, under what circumstances, and what they can do whilst there. These rules are informed by multiple, intersecting hierarchies, the most prominent of which are generational (primarily between adults and children), and gendered. In the social worlds we experience, the practices and relations we associate with home often extend outwards—into our street, our community, and our kin’s homes—this is how I came to have my neighbour’s WiFi password. Between homes the division of space is even more marked – doors and windows are reinforced with locks and alarms, and entry is restricted by injunctions—legal as well as moral.

The digital world operates very differently. The World Wide Web is a construct of seamless space and frictionless action—its transformative power, particularly in its early days, allowed the individual to go almost anywhere, be anyone, and do almost anything. This celebration of personal agency has little appetite for traditional hierarchies, which are seen to constrain the sovereign user. The design of smart home technologies—by the same class of software engineers behind the modern web—is informed by this ideology, seeking to liberate the user from their routines by rendering domestic practices as effortless as loading a webpage. Accordingly, all that was required to collapse the many walls between my sofa and my neighbour’s TV was a single saved password, and the press of a button.

Sociologically, we can see some very sharp tensions between the home as experienced, and the flat social topographies of these technologies. The designers of these technologies, most of them inhabitants of California’s Silicon Valley, are steeped in a libertarian tradition that is perhaps most famously captured in John Perry Barlow’s ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ (1996), a manifesto for a digital world free of hierarchies, in which individuals—freed of the constraints of space and society—interact as equals. These ideals are present in the peer-to-peer model of ‘Web 2.0’ (Gere, 2008: 212), and live on in bastardised form in the design of today’s dominant social media platforms, such as Facebook and Twitter, which compress all relations to ‘Friend’ or ‘Follower’ respectively.

Turner’s (2006) cultural history of Silicon Valley provides a salient account of how these ideas can influence domestic groupings. He locates the origins of this flat ontology in the American counterculture of the 1960s. Some of the most prominent figures in this movement, including Barlow, later became deeply enmeshed in the emergence of Silicon Valley, perhaps most visibly through their involvement in Wired magazine. This movement, distinct from the New Left emerging at the same time, explicitly rejected traditional politics and its hierarchical forms. Instead, it sought to turn its back on contemporary society (though notably not its technologies). By the late 1960s, these ‘New Communalists’, in Turner’s terminology, had retreated in their hundreds of thousands to self-sufficient communes where they could fashion their own societies. Turner highlights how patriarchal these ostensibly non-hierarchical communities became, following a ‘neoprimitive, tribal ideal in which men made “important” decisions while women tended to the kitchen and the children’ (2006:76). Turner concludes that in rejecting politics and hierarchies, the New Communalists left themselves without the means of negotiating the distribution of resources, instead inadvertently defaulting to the received norms of the world they were rejecting (Logic, 2017). They were trapped by the very thing they sought to escape.

For us, as social media users today, the problematic outcomes of this flattening have been labelled ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd, 2011), in which our many social worlds are thrown together. Here, though, it is not the New Communalists imposing a flat ontology on themselves, but rather their ideological descendants imposing it upon the users of their technology. Users not subscribed to this culture hence respond with strategies to reinstitute social demarcations (boyd, 2014).

The resolution of these tensions within the smart home calls for sociological engagement. In their hunt for personal data, and the profits that accrue with it, the tech giants are pushing their technologies into spaces they seemingly have little understanding of, or care for. Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg famously instilled a design ethos in the company of ‘move fast and break stuff’. The consequences of this fetishization of disruption have played out in recent months through the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Facebook’s history of aggressively breaching privacy norms came back to bite it. Whether or not we see a similar outcome with the smart home, its implications for domestic life demand our attention, for they are potentially profound.

Perhaps what is most troublesome, from the perspective of those of us who seek to understand what is underway, is that the nature of much of what is implicated—the local, the secret, the mundane—risks rendering it invisible to the broader viewer. When it became apparent that the fitness app ‘Strava’ had, in its publicly available dataset of billions of users’ exercise routines, revealed the location of secret military installations around the world, it was international news. Operating at such an intimate resolution, the smart home may fracture such unintended outcomes in a million personal anecdotes that remain untold, or if publicised, treated as no more than isolated curios. Sociology has the tools to tell these stories from the homes in the machine, and connect them to the worlds which created them.

References: 

Gere, Charlie. 2008. Digital Culture. 2nd Revised edition edition. London: Reaktion Books.

Turner, F. 2006. From Counterculture to Cyberculture. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Logic Magazine. 2018. “Don’t Be Evil.” Logic Magazine. January 3, 2018. https://logicmag.io/03-dont-be-evil/.

Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444810365313.

boyd, danah. 2014. It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens. New Haven: Yale University Press.