Abstract
ABSTRACT On its surface, the ‘smart home’ marks an effort to augment everyday domestic life to the benefit of its members, through the pervasive digital technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Through an analysis of the family-imitating group accounts offered by both Google and Amazon, as part of their smart home ecosystems, this paper identifies a project of constructing a new site for platform capitalism, in the form of the platform family, and its effort to pacify domestic life. The platform family is an engineered simulacra of domesticity, formatted to run on the smart home operating system, serving simultaneously as a vehicle for domestic consumption, and a vehicle for consuming domestic life. Drawing on sociology of the family, we contextualise this by showing how the home has long been a site of struggles between internal and external control. Addressing the reconfiguration of membership possibilities within the platform family, we show how it seeks to intervene in domestic life, by reshaping family's material possibilities and normativities. Looking past the technologies to the social forms they imbue reveals a project that is ultimately motivated by a desire to colonise the home as a site for platform capitalism. We conclude by highlighting the potential for resistance in this space and ask whether the homogenisation of domestic life attempted by these interventions is not fundamentally contradictory, in denying the very qualities that give family its value.
Highlights
The home has long been recognised as a protected space for family (Mallett, 2004)
One facet of the digital economy which prompted law makers to introduce the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) (Crabtree et al, 2016) is the emerging Internet of Things (IoT), a label applied to efforts to embed networked computing within everyday objects
Google and Amazon’s family accounts are presented as allowing for the integration of digital technologies into domestic structures. We suggest they are better understood as allowing for the integration of domestic structures into platform capitalism, in the form of the platform family
Summary
The home has long been recognised as a protected space for family (Mallett, 2004). as a site of care, socialisation, and consumption, it has drawn the attentions of outside institutions, attentions often met with resistance. For Google, the largest advertising company in the world, control of the smart home platform means ensuring supremacy for the numerous digital services they offer, including searches, video and mapping, and promises in the longer term a new means of presenting advertising to users For both companies, perhaps the greatest prize of all is data itself, generated through measurements of both the activities of humans and devices throughout the home, and their interactions. This reveals the smart home to be a project of “data colonialism” (Couldry & Mejias, 2018), by which the totality of social interaction is sought for capture and commodification
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