With few exceptions, these visions of domestic life celebrate technology and its transformative power at the expense of home as a lived and living practice. The target consumer is implicitly the technically interested and entertainment-oriented male, someone tellingly in the designer’s own image. The smart house they envision is more like Le Corbusier’s “machine for living” than a home.
The range of smart appliances featured in the annual International Consumer Electronics Show reflects the attempt to find home applications for the functions that computers have excelled at in business and scientific settings—information processing and cataloging numerical processes. LG Electronics, for example, is developing a refrigerator that allows consumers to scan a grocery receipt with their smartphones so the refrigerator can track what is inside. So if you buy some chicken, for instance, the refrigerator will keep tabs on when you bought it and tell you when it is about to expire. If you have chicken, broccoli, and lemons in your refrigerator, it will ofer recipes that include those three ingredients, even selecting recipes based on specific dietary needs and goals. Several manufacturers are introducing washers and dryers equipped with wi-fi that alert consumers on their television or smartphone when a load is done and gives them the option of flufing the towels for another ten minutes. There is also a robotic vacuum cleaner with a built-in camera that can be operated remotely so that its owner can secretly watch what the nanny is doing.
Manufacturers’ claims that this technological wizardry will make consumers’ lives easier are hard to verify. While there is a market for smart technologies like the Roomba vacuum cleaner, for example, the variety and complexities of household labor impose limits on its mechanization. Even in the diferently ordered world of paid work, robots perform only routine tasks in manufacturing, and much personal service work has proved impossible to automate. Domestic spaces are subject to a quite diferent set of considerations than those that govern the ofices, factory floors, and workplaces within which information technologies have conventionally been deployed. While the dominant logic of capitalist workplaces is that of eficiency and profitability, a diferent logic governs domestic life—one that is primarily emotional and moral rather than quantitative.
Chapter five
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