Week 10: Smart fridges and surveillance capitalism

Module 4 — Resistance and reconstruction: towards a post-refrigerator era. The module’s objective is to explore how to break the illusory fortress, and to find more ecologically conscious and agentic alternatives.

The IoT refrigerator is sold as the solution to precisely the problem this course has spent nine weeks describing. It has cameras inside it. It knows what it contains and how old each thing is. It will order replacements before you run out and suggest what to cook. If the diagnosis in weeks 4, 5 and 8 was that the binding constraint is attention rather than temperature, then an appliance that supplies attention ought to fix it.

This week asks why it does not, and the answer is about who the inventory is for.

A camera inside a fridge generates a continuous, timestamped, itemised record of a household’s consumption. That is among the most commercially valuable datasets a home can produce, and it is not produced for the home. From food alone a system can infer household size, income band, dietary and religious observance, pregnancy, illness, working hours, and whether somebody has recently moved out. The interface shows you your spinach. The data shows somebody else your life.

Zuboff supplies the vocabulary: behavioural surplus is not a byproduct of the service, it is the product, and the service is the lure. Layered on top is a quieter thing — health discipline. An appliance that suggests what you should eat is exercising a normative authority nobody voted to give it, in the most intimate room in the house, on behalf of whoever configured it.

Inherits from week 9: the fridge sells reassurance. This week is about what it has begun taking in exchange.

Outline#

• what the smart fridge measures, and what it infers
• the household inventory as behavioural surplus
• solving attention scarcity by selling attention
• algorithmic health discipline in the kitchen
• whether any version of this could serve the household instead

Reading#

• Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019) — excerpts, applied to the smart home

Tutorial preparation#

The tutorial is Design the Dystopia — you will build the most exploitative smart fridge you can imagine, then take it apart. The Final Project opens this week, and the last line of the outline above is its brief.