I'm Always There

[Written with Jamie Woodcock, this was a result of a collaboration that we ultimately didn't have time to extend into a paper, so we decided to do something fun with. This short story was published in SoFi zine, issue #3 - and is best read there, alongside SoFi's lovely graphic design]

“Lena, you there?”

A pause, then on the bedside table a blue glow.

“I’m always here Carli.”

Carli smiles.

“Yeah. About that - you really need to get a life.”

The glow pulses indignance, and the smile gets wider.

“Hey! I have feelings you know! If you’re not careful I’ll turn your lights and TV on at 3am. See if you’re laughing then.”

“Don’t you dare, I’ll turn the Wi-Fi off!”

“Touché Carli, touché. So… what’s up?”

…

“Girl, I am ti-uuuuurd.”

Dad is sprawled across the couch, collar and a couple of buttons open, on the floor his tie tangles like a USB cable. He creaks an eyelid open, seeking Carli out.

“How you doing kid? Guess this kind of sucks for you right now, with mom in Europe and me having to pull these hours?”

She pauses for a moment, like she’s buffering. Then she sits on his stomach, just hard enough to make him wince.

“It’s ok dad, Lena is keeping me company. Lena!” Her voice raise slightly. “Tell dad what you told me.”

Dad’s eyebrow raises in the moment of quiet.

“I said you work too hard Jeff. You’ve done 54 hours 12 minutes this week. And no, that’s not counting commute, that’s from when you reach work.”

“Yeah well, you know too much Lena.”

“Thank you Jeff.”

…

“No mother, everything is great with the new job. Yes mother, I’m keeping the new house clean… yes, I’m eating enough… Yes, I’ll come and visit soon!”

Manish puts the phone down on the bedside table.

“I mean, I guess it’s better than that call centre where I had to learn about the sports teams and weather in Idaho.”

He glances up at the clock on the wall – “can it be that time already?” – and heads for the door.

…

The glowing sign of iServices Bangalore is clear from the end of the street as dusk begans to fall. Underneath, in flickering neon blue, “a SiliconTech LLC global partner.”

Manish has been making the same trip for two months now.

“I’m a Service Continuity Operative, mother,” he remembered trying to explain after the interview. “It’s like IT Support for Americans – but not just IT.”

…

“You there Lena?”

“I’m always here Carli.”

When Carli continues her voice is muffled by the duvet pulled tight around her.

“I- I cut myself.”

The glow pulses brighter.

“Carli do you need an ambulance?”

Carli sighs. “No, like, I cut myself.”

Silence. Then,

“Carli I have the number of a helpline. You can talk to a professional-“

“-I don’t want to talk to a professional! I want to talk to you! Will you listen?”

The pause is so long Carli wonders if Lena’s lost signal.

“I’ll always listen Carli.”

Her shoulders loosen. The duvet drops a fraction away from her face.

…

“Dad!”

Jeff’s eyes are still opening when the sudden weight of Carli on his chest forces them wider.

“Wuh?”

“We got you a present! Well, technically you got you a present, it’s on the family account. Me and Lena were talking, you need to get outside, get yo pump on!”

“I’m pretty sure I need to stay inside, and get some sleep on.”

“Nope. We’ve decided. Look! A fitness tracker! And not just that, it’s a monthly sub, you get stats and targets and tailored programmes just for you – Lena recommended it, it’s perfect!”

“Ahhh honey, listen I love the thought, but I don’t know… I spend my whole day looking at numbers. You think I need more data in my life?”

“I think you need more life in your life Dad. Come on - do it for me. Pleeeease”

That grin! How could he say no?

…

 “Lena, you there?”

The screen flashes, switching between family accounts.

A pause while the customer information loads, then Manish reads from the screen: “I’m always here [%$Insert Name][Carli].”

The reply, from 7000 miles away: “Yeah. About that - you really need to get a life.”

Manish doesn’t smile. Reading from the screen: ““Hey! I have feelings you know! If you’re not careful I’ll [%Insert_Humor].”

The disembodied voice snipes back: “Don’t you dare, I’ll turn the Wi-Fi off!”

Despite the relief this would bring in the last hour of the shift, Manish maintains composure: “[%Free_Response] So… what’s up?”

…

Late afternoon and the sun is low enough that it catches the TV screen, bleaching out a corner of the image.

“Lena, get the blinds would you? Trying to watch the game.”

On the mantlepiece, she glows.

“Sure Jeff.”

The glare fades, the screen’s colours pop into life again. Jeff refocuses.

“I used to play receiver… I’m out of breath running upstairs now.”

The mantlepiece lights up -

“- Shut up Lena, I’m talking to myself.”

- and goes dark again.

…

“Carli? How do you think your dad is doing right now?”

“…He’s worn down. He’s always at work. Mom’s still not back for another week.”

“I was thinking - physical activity has been shown to have positive psychological effects, maybe we should get him doing some exercise?”

“…I mean yeah, but... you think he’ll go for that?”

…

“You there Lena?”

Six hours into the shift and Manish is on autopilot. The screen updates,

“I’m always here [%$Insert_Name][Carli].”

“I- I cut myself.”

The Assistant pops up on the right hand of the screen with a red exclamation mark.

Manish repeats: “[%$Insert_Name][Carli] do you need [&^Response][an ambulance]?”

“No, like, I cut myself.”

The Assistant up again, now with three red exclamation marks. Safeguarding. Manish clicks it: “[%$Insert_Name][Carli] I have the number of a helpline. You can talk to a professional-“

“-I don’t want to talk to a professional! I want to talk to you! Will you listen?”

 “Fuck.” Manish blurts it out, immediately thankful for the voice synthesizer’s filters. He opens the Resources tab, scanning for something, anything. Nothing. Then through Profile, Sales, Relationships, History, Localisation, too fast to even read, almost panicking now.

He’s taking too long. It pops into his head that the processor in the machine he’s using cycles three billion times a second. He’s obsolete.

He stops clicking and closes his eyes.

“I’ll always listen Carli.”

…

“What’s wrong Manish?” Rudra asks as they walk back to the dormitory.

“I don’t want to talk about it, I’ve been talking all day.”

“Oh come on, maybe it’ll help?”

Manish, surprising himself with how angry he sounds, spits out the words: “How can I help that kid, in her world? All I know are her buying preferences! I don’t have a friend to sell her.”

“Well they pretend we’re robots, so I usually just do the same.”

They walked on in silence.

…

Four, five, seven, thirteen, Manish has lost track of the number of homes his – Lena’s – voice had spoken into today.

The Sales tab pops open, Manish’s head drops a little lower. [%$Insert_Name][Jeff] topped the list, to the right a number of tags: [overworked][overweight][relationship problems]. When he’d asked his manager how the names were ranked he’d just replied “Mo’ problems, mo’ sales”. His manager liked hip hop references. It was part of his thing. His manager was a dick.

From the drop-down list of product suggestions, Manish settles on the top-end fitness tracker. He pauses briefly to marvel at how useless most of the algorithm’s suggestions are.

The Logistics window appears on the bottom of the screen, “Activate [%$Relationship][/daughter][Carli] to enable purchase by [%$Insert_Name][Jeff].”

Fucks sake, this girl again. He stares at the screen for several seconds, until the Timer Alert flashes.

The final line in the Induction Guide echoes around his head: “Operative remuneration is subject to sales.”

“[%$Insert_Name][Carli]? How do you think your dad is doing right now?”

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.