More work for Big Mother: Revaluing care and control in smart homes

Abstract

The home is an ever-changing assemblage of technologies that shapes the organisation and division of housework and supports certain models of what that work entails, who does it and for what purposes. This paper analyses core tensions arising through the ways smart homes are embedding logics of digital capitalism into home life and labour. As a critical way of understanding these techno-political shifts in the means of social reproduction, we advance the concept of Big Mother – a system that, under the guise of maternal care, seeks to manage, monitor and marketise domestic spaces and practices. We identify three tensions arising in the relationships between care and control as they are mediated through the Big Mother system: (a) outsourcing autonomy through enhanced control and choice, (b) increased monitoring for efficient management and (c) revaluation of care through optimisation of housework. For each area, we explore how emerging technological capacities promise to enhance our abilities to care for our homes, families and selves. Yet, at the same time, these innovations also empower Big Mother to enrol people into new techniques of surveillance, new forms of automation and new markets of data. Our purpose in this paper is to push back against the influential ideas of smart homes based on luxury surveillance and caring systems by showing that they exist in constant relation with a supposedly antithetical version of the smart home represented by Big Mother.

“Isn't this Marvelous”

“…Beyond the pandemic, the implications of this research for aged care providers, policy makers or HCI designers wishing to deploy similar smart devices in older adult homes are that these technologies must be viewed as supplements -rather than replacementsto other aged care services. This aligns with smart home literature which has resisted and complicated the technological solutionism narrative that positions smart home devices as capable of independently 'taking care' of the home and its occupants [8,67,74,87]. The devices trialed in this project could enhance wellbeing outcomes for older people ageing in place, but only when provided as optional extras alongside their in-home services, which remain of high importance for the sense of community connection, social interaction and reliability.…”

Intimate technologies: Towards a feminist perspective on geographies of technoscience

“…Directly relating back to early technofeminist work on the industrial revolution in the home, scholars now interrogate how notions of maternal care and the feminisation of technologies play a crucial role in the techno-political shifts occurring in homes in the digital revolution. They show how digital assistants work to ‘rhetorically disarm users with anxieties about intimate data exchange’ (Woods, 2018: 3) and introduce new capitalist modes of commodified surveillance to domestic spaces ‘under the guise of maternal care’ (Sadowski et al, 2021: 3; see also Humphry and Chesher, 2020).…”

The gendering of energy household labour

“…This requires substantial work and expertise and a good understanding of how these technologies can fit within established routines of the household (Tolmie et al 2007). Taking as a starting point that homes are now becoming hubs of emerging technologies that shape the households' everyday routines and labour (Sadowski et al 2021), and that technologies have allowed for the reduction or reallocation of household labour, the present paper explores in what ways practices of energy household labour, as identified below, are shaping the gender roles and performance of household labour, paying attention to the mental aspects of it.…”