‘Delete the family’: platform families and the colonisation of the smart home

ABSTRACT

On its surface, the ‘smart home’ marks an effort to augment everyday domestic life to the benefit of its members, through the pervasive digital technologies of the Internet of Things (IoT). Through an analysis of the family-imitating group accounts offered by both Google and Amazon, as part of their smart home ecosystems, this paper identifies a project of constructing a new site for platform capitalism, in the form of the platform family, and its effort to pacify domestic life. The platform family is an engineered simulacra of domesticity, formatted to run on the smart home operating system, serving simultaneously as a vehicle for domestic consumption, and a vehicle for consuming domestic life. Drawing on sociology of the family, we contextualise this by showing how the home has long been a site of struggles between internal and external control. Addressing the reconfiguration of membership possibilities within the platform family, we show how it seeks to intervene in domestic life, by reshaping family's material possibilities and normativities. Looking past the technologies to the social forms they imbue reveals a project that is ultimately motivated by a desire to colonise the home as a site for platform capitalism. We conclude by highlighting the potential for resistance in this space and ask whether the homogenisation of domestic life attempted by these interventions is not fundamentally contradictory, in denying the very qualities that give family its value.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart home
• Internet of things
• family
• domestication
• platform capitalism
• data colonisation

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Prof Robert Dingwall and Prof Andrew Leyshon for their comments on drafts of this paper, and Dr Jamie Woodcock for his part in the original discussions which gave birth to it. Gratitude is also given to the anonymous referees of ICS for their commitment to improving the paper through its drafts.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Data availability statement

All data used in this paper is taken from the public domain.

Notes

1 At the time of writing, the Amazon Household discussed here is only available to users of amazon.com, the US site. Users in other territories are presented with a somewhat different family structure, in which the Teen role does not exist. Instead, there is simply two Adults and four Children. It is assumed that the Teen role, and associated app, is intended appear in other territories in due course.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by a University of Nottingham Nottingham Research Fellowship.

Notes on contributors

Murray Goulden

Murray Goulden is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Nottingham, and current holder of a Nottingham Research Fellowship. Through the Fellowship he is exploring the sociological implications of Internet of Things technologies for domestic life. His most recent work addresses the ‘smart home’ as an instantiation of platform capitalism, and the implications of IoT-generated ‘interpersonal data’ for intimate social groups. He has worked extensively on research applying novel digital technologies to real world settings, with a focus on digital data and infrastructures, smart energy technologies, and their role in (re)configuring associated social practices, and the implications for policy-making and design.