Modulation Harms and the Google Home
In the post below, Mark Burdon and Tegan Cohen reflect on their article, “Modulation Harms and The Google Home,” which appeared in a recent issue of Surveillance & Society.
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Picture this. You’re at home, sitting at the dinner table. A chair leg scrapes on the wooden floor. The aroma of approaching food glides through the room. The cutlery clicks and clacks. The chatter of family or friends surrounds. An intimate moment. A private setting. A space for free and easy communion.
The traditional home, the liberal idyll, provides a space apart for the individual, for the family, for small communities, from the populous. A physical space for intimacy, privacy and communion. In the smart home, the physical home is converted into a densely sensorised space where each candid and intimate moment, each quotidian activity, is recorded, stored and analysed. As more and more homes become ‘smart’, a pressing question arises: does automating our homes risk automating ourselves?
Does automating our homes risk automating ourselves?
To answer that question, where better to look than Google and its patented vision of the smart home? A home that uses vapour detection to detect the presence of food. A home that records audio signals to identify utensil movements. A home that learns the minutia of its occupants’ behaviour and routines. A home that gradually adjusts its occupants’ routine. A home that deters undesirable behaviours; crimes like mischief, inferred from children whispering or the use of foul language; drug taking or smoking, inferred from interaction with ‘undesirable substances’; and idleness, inferred from non-completion of household tasks. A home that dispenses alarms and punishments for such infractions, including by removing screen time for young miscreants. The smart home idyll.
We argue that the occupant of such a home place is vulnerable to new modes of control and power. In some ways, the smart home exemplifies the Foucauldian enclosure — a site for the exercise of disciplinary power, in which constantly visible individuals can be monitored and moulded. In others, the smart home reflects Deleuze’s vision of modulatory control. The occupant’s indifference or unawareness allows the smart home to continuously monitor and collect data, converting the data fragments into predictions, nudges and profit.
This convergence of disciplinary power and modulatory control give rise to new forms of harm — modulation harms — that arise from the ability of Google and ilk to prescribe (e.g., collect, segment, and predict) and to shape (e.g., design, influence, and normalise). These harms flow from the ability
of the smart home vendor to harness and direct flows of sensor data that continually and subtly modify the occupants behaviour and shape their understanding (and broader social norms) about the purposes and benefits of that behavioural modification. The smart home is therefore an enclosure to facilitate data collection for disciplinary purposes, and it is a conduit for modulatory control.
Our framework of modulation harms warn of the danger of an automated life where individuality and core social relations are predicted and prescribed in and beyond the sensorised home.
