Home in cybersymbiosis: making home with digital oddkin

ABSTRACT

Acknowledging the history of more-than-human approaches in human geography, and the entrenchment of computational devices in the home, this paper advances the concept of cybersymbiosis as framework to think about the way we make home with computational devices. Doing so provides a speculative tool for thinking through our relationships with devices and the way we make home with them in critical ways. Three insights are identified: first, that these relationships are made and change over time; second, that our relationships with technology are often characterised by ambivalence, meaning it is not just about control and exploitation but extends to the mutually defining nature of those relationships; and third, that our relationships with home technologies can be conceptualised as a speculative ecology. Understanding our co-habitation with such devices can bring more sustainable and ethical approaches to our increasingly digitised homelives.

KEYWORDS:

• Smart home
• algorithms
• odd kin
• cybersymbiosis

Introduction

Home is made through more-than-human relations. For example, Power (2012) demonstrated how nature influences our home making, Bate (2020) has highlighted the role of objects in creating home, while others show how technologies help us maintain relationships with kin outside the physical parameters of our home (Horst et al., 2020; Maalsen, 2022). The shift to nonhuman, more-than-human and companion species as frames for thinking through our relationship with the world is driven by the acknowledgement that many of the challenges of the Anthropocene have evolved from practices embedded in human exceptionalism. Such lenses are useful for interrogating the potentials for creating better and more inclusive futures in relation to ecological and social crises. The home is one site in which our experiences of and responses to these crises are lived and increasingly digitally mediated. As such, the home has become site of contestation around efficiency and optimisation, consumption and extraction, and privacy and intrusion (Maalsen, 2019; Maalsen & Dowling, 2020; Strengers et al., 2020). These debates are not new but have accelerated in a digital age.

In this paper, I extend more-than-human home making cultures to attend to the role that digitally networked technologies play in our homemaking practices. I use the concept of cybersymbiosis to illustrate how we make home with our digital companions. Drawing upon the work of Haraway (2016) and Hayles (2021), I argue that our smart devices are companion species with which we make home. Importantly, these smart devices are not conceptualised from a purely technical lens. Rather, technology is conceptualised as an assemblage of human and non-human actors including, for example, policy, economic frameworks, labour and so on. Therefore, technology is not just technical but socio-technical (Bousquet, 2014; Maalsen, 2019).

This advances the literature in two ways. First, it provides a conceptual framework for the increasing body of work that attends to the tensions and benefits inherent in the digitalisation of home. While there is excellent work on the more-than-human in the home and living with ‘others’, little of this explicitly considers the role of technologies in making home with us as companions or indeed as companion species. Second, it provides a speculative tool to think through these relationships in critical ways that can lead to new insights on the ways we make home and prefigure futures of home. I advance three conceptual insights into the way we use technologies in the home. These are that these relationships are processural in that they are made and change over time; that our relationships with technology are often characterised by ambivalence which complicates narratives focused solely on control and exploitation, accounting for the mutually defining nature of those relationships; and that our relationships with home technologies can be conceptualised as speculative ecology.

The paper proceeds as follows. First, I situate the idea of making home with digital companions by engaging with Haraway’s (2016) work on companion species and Hayles’s (2021) cybersymbiotic ecologies. Grounded in this material, I posit the digitally networked home as made through cybersymbiotic relations. Next, I ground this argument in the extensive literature on the role of non-humans in making home, particularly work that shows how nature and pests disrupts our idea of the home as human and private. Following this, I identify four ways in which our homes are made through cybersymbiosis, these being mutualistic, commensal, parasitic and infectious relationships, and abusive and predatory relationships. This is a framework for a speculative ecology – a study of the relationships we develop with digital technologies at home, which allows us to consider these technologies as companions without being limited by anthropocentric approaches to such relations. As a speculative ecology, it has potential to help us think through the complexities of our relationship with our cyber oddkin and offers a method from which to speculate what better relationships would look like. Importantly, it also reveals that like all relationships, our relationships with digital companions are always in negotiation. Rather than good or bad, we experience our relationships with digital companions in complex ways that are not always phenomenologically experienced as scripted.

Cybersymbiosis, cybersympoiesis and cyber-companion species

The urgency of global scale challenges has led both Haraway and Hayles to decentre human agency and exceptionalism with the notion of companion species (Haraway, 2016) and species-in-bio/cyber-symbiosis (Hayles, 2021). Whether related to the biosphere or ‘technosphere’ (Haff, 2014; Hayles, 2021, p. 41), the sentiment is that these systems are beyond human control and that to tackle the challenges within these requires acknowledging other actors in the assemblage, asking for the ‘ethics and politics committed to the flourishing of significant otherness’ that Haraway (2016, p. 95) challenges us to in the Companion Species Manifesto (2003). I follow this idea of ‘being with’ to interrogate the contested relationships of the computationally mediated home.

By contested I am referring to the complex relationships between digital technologies, capitalism, consumption, homes and ourselves, that has been observed of the ‘smartification of homes’ over the past decade. Just as proponents of smart energy systems claim smart systems improve efficiency, others with a more critical approach show how this is not the case (Strengers, 2013). For each positive report about the value of digital assistants, others detail the threats to privacy and self that these can entail (Carver & Mackinnon, 2020; Sovacool et al., 2021). While some see the smart home as offering affective advantages, it is also situated as a site of extraction. Framing our engagement with smart devices through a relational lens that highlights a spectrum of relationships that are always in flux, enables us to navigate the ‘impasse between exploitation and agency’ (Jarrett, 2014, p. 25), that characterises debates on smart devices within the home.

In suggesting that homes are made through cybersymbiosis I am borrowing from both Haraway (2016) and Hayles (2021) and their use of symbiosis and sympoiesis as concepts for thinking through the ecological threats of the Anthropocene. In Staying with the Trouble, Haraway uses the concept of ‘sympoiesis’ to argue beyond human exceptionalism and bounded individualism characteristic of Western thought to demonstrate how we exist and create with many other non-human things (2016, p. 30). This should not come as a surprise from the thinker who brought us cyborgs and their manifesto (1985) and emphasised the importance of our companion species – whether canines, bacteria or others (2016).

Sympoiesis means ‘making with’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 58) and recognising that nothing is ever ‘really autopoietic or self-organising’, Haraway utilises the ‘worlding-with’ capacity of sympoeisis to show the ways in which it can enfold ‘autopoiesis and generatively unfurls and extends it’ (2016, p. 58). Underpinning Haraway’s approach is the belief that by acknowledging our kin are more than other humans – oddkin – we can act in ways that are less individualised and extractive, and instead stay with the trouble to work with these oddkin for multispecies flourishing. Hayles (2021), inspired by Hörl’s general ecology (2013), posits the idea of species-in-cybersymbiosis to reflect the ‘deep symbiosis with computational media’ that humans have entered into over the last 50 years (2021, p. 34). For Hayles, the saturation of digital media across every aspect of our lives justifies conceptualising this as a symbiotic – a living together – relationship. We see elements of this ‘living together’ in our relationships with our digital companion species in that we make home with them and are living with them. While both cybersymbiosis and sympoesis are useful for reflecting on the complex relationships between ourselves and our digital companions at home, for the purposes of this paper, I use the term cybersymbiosis because it is more widely used. In simple terms, I define cybersymbiosis as the relationships we form with our digital others.

Making home with oddkin

Home is not made by humans alone. For some time now, theorists of home have challenged the anthropocentric understandings of home to account for the ways non-humans are central to home life. Arguing for a post-humanist makeover of family and home, for example, Franklin (2006) shows how the coagency of humans and their companion species, whether dogs, rabbits or others are central to home making, health and well-being. Making home is thus increasingly conceptualised as a multi-species endeavour (see Charles, 2016; Irvine & Cilia, 2016).

There is an established literature on the way that animals and humans co-shape the spatial relations of home (see Power, 2008, 2012; Schuurman & Syrjämaa, 2021), but technologies also play a central role in home making. As Franklin notes, ‘machines, technologies, texts, policies, restrictive covenants, cleaning agents and the agents cleansed’ are all contributors to the house as home assemblage (2006, p. 138). Our domestic spaces are therefore created not just by us but through what Mennicken et al. (2014, p. 105) refer to as ‘human-home’ collaboration. The material relations between technologies and their uses actually reshape the architecture of domestic space and its temporalities (Nansen et al., 2011, p. 698). I conceptualise these co-constituted home making practices, as enabled by our digital oddkin, a reference to the oddkin that Haraway uses to describe our relations which are not delineated by genealogy and biogenetics, but which include our ties to human and other-than-human beings (Haraway, 2016, p. 4). These oddkin are one of our many companion species.

Research on the smart home shows how domestic robots, often gendered digital assistants such as Alexa, that help their users with chores and information, or sex robots that provide emotional and sexual services, are incorporated into our home life in traditional wifely and motherly ways (Strengers & Kennedy, 2020; Woods, 2018). We live with and make home with our more-than-human companions in a multitude of ways. Despite this material on non-humans and home making, very little considers the role of smart digitally networked technology in making home from a relational lens.

This does not mean that all our house guests are welcome. As literature on human-nature relations of home has shown, not all our relations are with companions we choose to live with. Undomesticated species such as possums and cougars transgress the conceptualisation of home as an autonomous, exclusionary zone distanced from nature and the outside world (Power, 2009, p. 30). The noises, smells, yet also familiarity of living with ‘others’ as Power shows with possums leads to complicated relationships of both unsettling and simultaneously comforting (2009, p. 43). This is also true of our digital oddkin. As will be illustrated below, some become conduits for external threats such as hackers and at other times, their behaviour may be undesirable because of glitches, malfunctions, and misuse.

Our relationships with digital oddkin are varied. Sometimes they are mutually beneficial, sometimes beneficial to one and harmless to the other, sometimes parasitic, and sometimes dangerous. Such fluidity underpins the three conceptual insights outlined earlier. First and second, our relationships with digital oddkin change over time and are characterised by ambivalence. Third, these relationships form a speculative ecology of cybersymbiotic relationships of making home which can be: 1. Mutualistic; 2. Commensal; 3. Parasitic and Infectious; and 4. Predatory and Abusive. Tying back into the first two insights, these connections can change over time. A mutually beneficial relationship can evolve into parasitism, dependent on context and values associated with the other. Further, there is a continuum within each category. At points the relationship may be exploitative, but it may not be experienced on those terms. For example, commensal relationships could easily push into a more parasitic relationship which exploits and harms, but it may not be phenomenologically experienced in that way. I will tease out these relationships by using illustrative examples below.

Mutually beneficial relationships

Mutually beneficial relationships, where both parties benefit, is known as mutualism or interspecies reciprocal altruism. The classic mutualistic relationships are between host species and their guests, in which the relationship is often long-term and key to survival (Douglas, 2010; Leigh, 2010). For example, Leigh (2010, p. 23) refers to the mutualistic and symbiotic relationships between corals and zooxanthellae, and the gut bacteria that helps termites digest wood. In the smart home this mutualism can be seen in our use of devices which help us and which in turn they, or the companies behind them, benefit from our use. As critical work on smart homes has shown, the companies that own the devices we use extract significant value from our use, whether that is from the data we generate or the purchasing of the devices and subscriptions (Maalsen & Sadowski, 2019; Sadowski et al., 2021; Woods, 2018). As users of smart home devices however, we also benefit from some of our interspecies relations. For example, smart energy systems may optimise our energy use, increase efficiency and reduce our consumption; and devices which mediate our connection to others via platforms can keep us socially connected. As others have observed of social media platforms more generally, the primary purpose of a platform is communication and connection and there is value in these attributes even if these platforms also extract value from us (Barns, 2018; Leszczynski, 2020). This is also evident in user behaviour research which shows that users perceive the convenience, connectedness, and benefits of IoT devices as justifying the associated privacy sacrifices (Zheng et al., 2018, p. 201).

While still entangled in extractive relations, mutualistic relationships are more than commensal or parasitic. The type of mutual benefit is discussed by Jarrett (2015) in her work which problematises and extends autonomous Marxist analyses of digital labour (see Fortunati, 2007; Terranova, 2000). Jarrett for example, identified the affective and inalienable use-value of a particular social media exchange which generated positive feelings and benefit to the parties participating, yet which also contributed to capitalist processes of value extraction (2015, p. 156). Reflecting on a humorous online exchange between Jarrett and an online friend, Jarrett observes how their interaction had led to the creation of the ‘Englescat’ meme via the Quickmeme website, incorporating them into ‘alienating economies in the form of its copyright regime, in our viewing of its advertising displays and its alienation of our data’ (Jarrett, 2015, p. 156). Rather than a manifestation of false consciousness, the labour relations, economic and social dynamics discussed by Jarrett suggest that this is the ‘production of subjectivity that is more emergent, socially embedded, and necessary to human and social flourishing than is implied by that term … a subjectivity that lacks ‘authenticity,’ but no more than any other socially produced identity’ (Jarrett, 2015, p. 156). This social flourishing points to ways in which our speculative ecology of digital oddkin could contribute to the multispecies flourishing that Haraway advocated. While we are generating data and profit by using platforms, this is not one sided. Users can also find some benefit from the use of the site, such as the affective reward that Jarrett describes.

The accelerated welcoming into our homes of work, social and educational platforms during the pandemic is an example of a mutualistic relationship with our smart home devices. Platforms such as zoom allowed many of us to work-from-home in aid of lockdown and isolation mandates and helped us remain connected with colleagues, family and friends (Maalsen & Dowling, 2020). For those able to work-from-home, zoom helped limit exposure to the virus, enabled work to continue, and facilitated connections on the outside. Our new appetite for Zoom also clearly benefited the platform, with the video conferencing platform registering a 236% growth of $2.6 billion during the first year of the pandemic, driven by a mass shift to working from home (Rushe, 2021). This is in addition to the value Zoom is extracting from collecting and sharing user data for further product research and development, marketing, promotions, and third-party advertising (see Zoom (2021) for information on their data practices).

Mutualism is true of many of our relationships with smart devices. While tech firms and platforms are profiting off us, we are also gaining things we value from the relationship. This partially drives the ambivalence we often see in such relationships. We can happily let Roomba clean our houses and not be overly concerned about what data it is collecting and sharing despite its ability to map and share household interiors with subsequent questions pertaining to who can access this information (Johnson, 2022).

This does not mean however, that a mutually beneficial relationship will remain that way – once the benefits tip in favour of one side over the other, or we no longer desire what the relationship gives us, then relations deteriorate. This is reflective of the changing temporalities of our relationships with digital technologies that was observed earlier. A now viral example, the Pooptastrophe described by Jesse Newton, where his Roomba ran over dog excrement and spread it all over the house, is illustrative of these good relationships gone bad (although in this case in a rather extreme and humorous way) (Gross, 2020, pp. 291–292; Newton, 2016, n.p.). The once happy relationship was finalised by the Roomba’s death, disposal and replacement by a new Roomba (Gross, 2020, p. 292). We see this in nature as well, where ‘long-term mutualisms dissolve if one party ceases to need, or to benefit from, the other’s services’ (Leigh, 2010, p. 2509).

Commensal relationships

Commensal relationships are those where one companion or host benefits while the other is neither particularly harmed nor helped. Derived from the Latin, cum mensa, commensalism, means ‘at the table of’ and although it was introduced to biology in the lates 1800s, it has been in use since at least the Middle Ages where it was used to describe those who ‘enjoyed the hospitality of the king’s lodging but provided no service to him in return’ (Mathis & Bronstein, 2020, p. 169). In nature, we often see these relationships in hosting arrangements. For example, the small non-burrowing crayfish, Gramastacus insolitus survives seasonal drying out of habitat, by inhabiting peripheral areas of the burrows made by larger burrowing crayfish (Johnston & Robson, 2009).

In the smart home we can think of these commensal partners as devices or systems that work in the background and which we don’t particularly engage with. An example could be smart energy meters. In many countries, energy policy and markets have intersected to facilitate a coordinated roll-out of smart energy meters on homes across their energy network. In the UK, for example, this is implemented as the Smart Meter Implementation Programme (Pullinger et al., 2014; Shirani et al., 2020), and in Australia, most states have adopted a market-driven retailer-led model for deploying smart-meters after an unsuccessful network-led mandated approach taken by Victoria (Chandrashekeran, 2020, p. 114). Ostensibly, the smart meter is intended to benefit both the consumer and provider. By being able to monitor energy usage in ‘real-time’ the meters are supposed to allow consumers to better understand their use and adapt accordingly to lower consumption and save on bills (Pullinger et al., 2014). For the provider, it removes the needs for physical meter reads and connection/disconnection visits, as well as optimising network management. However, many consumers do not optimally use their smart meter and lack the competence to optimise the efficiency of their energy usage (Pullinger et al., 2014, p. 1157). On the other hand, the provider is benefiting from the data and ability to respond to and manage the network more efficiently.

Here, the consumer is not particularly harmed by having a smart meter – they have always had a meter so it is not an unfamiliar imposition to have a smarter version, and while they may not be using the data to change their consumption practices as expected they are not being nefariously harmed or helped. This is not uncommon. Research shows that many smart home technologies become backgrounded over time having limited impact on user behaviour as interest wanes (Shirani et al., 2020, p. 4). In these cases, a commensal relationship develops where the installation of meters provides increased benefit to the providers but doesn’t noticeably impact most users’ experience of their energy consumption. Like the Gramastacus insolitus, the smart meter allows the energy company to inhabit peripheral areas of the household where it is relatively unnoticed yet benefits from the host, without the host (the home) necessarily being inconvenienced by it. The relationship may have elements of exploitation or harm but is not necessarily phenomenologically experienced in that way and highlights the ambivalence that can characterise our relationships with digital oddkin.

Relationships are always in flux and have the potential to push toward more threatening experiences. Smart meters are a conduit to increased surveillance in the home. For example, the data collected by the smart meter can illuminate the daily routines of a household through patterns of appliance use, which if hacked, can be used for nefarious purposes (Hess, 2014; Humphry & Chesher, 2021, p. 1179). Similarly, as Maalsen and Sadowski (2019) note, real-time data feedback is generally used to shape user behaviour which can both incentivise and punish. The consumer trust that is established in a commensal relationship may be damaged when the basis of trust is broken. For instance, reports that Amazon shared footage from Amazon Ring devices with police without owners’ permission raised privacy concerns and highlighted the growing surveillant network being assembled by the tech giant (Ng, 2022) and which can carry both personal risk (to the owner) and reputational risk (to the company). Further, the use of assistive technologies in the home can have the unintended effect of devaluing caregiving and household labour (Jackman, 2022, p. 102653; Jackman & Brickell, 2022) having further harmful socio-economic repercussions. Such tensions in an initially commensal relationship can lead to the more extractive and harmful relationships, discussed next.

Parasitic and infectious relationships

Parasitic and infectious relationships are those which have a negative effect on one or both parties. Incredibly diverse, parasitism is a ubiquitous and effective lifestyle (Dobson et al., 2008, p. 11482), characterised by organisms that live off a host, causing harm and potentially death to the host. Infection is when disease enters a system and causes harm. Although predominantly associated with biological sciences, we use these terms to describe relationships in other fields. Computers are infected with viruses, and malicious software (malware) can feast on our data.

Companion species ‘infect each other all the time … are vectors and carry many more for good and for ill’ (Haraway, 2016, p. 29). Our digital companions are no less risky and invite a slew of viruses, scams and hackers into our homes. These threats are what Gehl and McKelvey (2019, p. 220) refer to as the negative shapes – power, exploitation, and inequity – that constitutes modern computing. They build upon Serres’ concept of the parasite (1982) to show how these negative spaces, are underpinned by a parasitic relationality to communities, platforms, and infrastructures of large-scale computational systems (2019, p. 220).

Data are a key target of parasitic and infectious attacks on our devices and by extension ourselves. The data imperative characterises surveillance capitalism – the constant surveillance of our activities through the devices we use in order to extract profit and discipline subjects (Fourcade & Healy, 2017; Maalsen & Sadowski, 2019; Sadowski, 2019; Zuboff, 2015). Extractive relationships such as these can exist along a spectrum from mutualistic to commensal and parasitic. Towards the parasitic end of the spectrum we see the emergence of malware (malicious software) which represents the ‘most significant threat to computer users’ (Baumann et al., 2021, p. 141). As the number of smart and connected devices in our homes grows, so too does the opportunity for infection. The success of parasitic and infectious strategies is apparent in computation with it being estimated that more than 1 billion malware programmes exist (Jovanovic, 2022). The type of infection – spyware, Trojan horse, bots, worms – determines the impact of the infection but generally they will spy, collect and destroy data, steal personal and financial data, extract money, produce junk traffic and so on. In an autoethnography of the malware attack, NotPetya, Dwyer (2021) positions malware as co-collaborators with hackers, pointing to their more-than-human agencies and politics (Maalsen, 2023). These more-than-human entanglements are pivotal for infection.

A classic example of parasitic relationships is spam, characterised by Brunton as the ‘negative shape of the history of people gathering on computer networks’ (2015, p. xvi). Differing from traditional advertising, which while annoying, is an accepted price consumers pay for accessing services and content, spam is unsolicited, lacks market mediated benefit, and provides no opportunity to opt-out (Rao & Reiley, 2012, p. 87). The growth of social media correlated with a rise in spam with more platforms and opportunities to spread ‘false information, propaganda, rumours, fake news, or unwanted messages’ (Imam & Vassilakis, 2019, p. 50). During the pandemic, home cyberattacks were reported to have increased by 35% with IoT devices enabling pathways for spam attacks that included emails targeting Covid-19 treatment, delivery of products, teleconferencing logins and product offers (Andrade et al., 2020, p. 400). Spammers target users by requiring them to share personal details or using hidden links to redirect users to another site (Andrade et al., 2020, p. 400).

Devices which are connected to the internet – such as IoT smart home devices – are susceptible to infection. Botnet attacks are one such vector. ‘Botnets use one or more propagation methods to infect a large number of hosts with bot program viruses, thereby forming a one-to-many control network between the controller and the infected host’ (Rehman Javed et al., 2020; Tu et al., 2022, p. 2). An example is Mozi, a botnet identified in 2016. Mozi is a Peer-2-Peer botnet that uses the distributed hash table (DHT) protocol.

Mozi spreads by taking advantage of weak passwords and identified vulnerabilities ‘to invade network devices, the IoT and video recorders, and other Internet-connected products. Botnets can enslave devices to launch DDoS attacks, launch pay loads, steal data and execute system commands’ (Tu et al., 2022, p. 6). Once a device is infected mozi can tamper ‘with the web traffic of infected systems via techniques such as DNS spoofing and HTTP session hijacking, a capability that could be abused to redirect users to malicious sites.’ (Cimpanu, 2021). When viruses infect our digital companions, they spread the infection to us and our homes. Despite these threats however, our relationships with digital oddkin often remain ambivalent, with research showing that users often perceive ICT security tools and practices as time consuming, difficult, and unhelpful, deprioritising their adoption (Henrichsen, 2020; Ng et al., 2021).

Predatory and Abusive relationships

I add one more type of relationship that relates to more overtly abusive forms. This occurs as malicious hijacking of devices can materialise as unauthorised surveillance and control of the home and its occupants. There have been a number of high-profile examples of hacked smart home devices. In 2019 there were reports of Amazon Rings and Google Nests being compromised, with hackers having access to the devices’ cameras and able to speak to the household occupants through the devices (Burke, 2019). Home automation systems, and their constituent elements such as smart light bulbs and smart switches have also been hacked where the hacker takes control of the devices remotely (Humphry & Chesher, 2021, p. 1178; Sivaraman et al., 2016, p. 195).

Just like in our human-to-human relationships however, often the hijacking of our smart technologies for control and surveillant purposes is done by those closest to us. The leveraging of smart home technologies for enabling domestic abuse is increasingly reported although still under-researched in the literature. As Sugiura et al’s research notes, the indications are, that if ‘there is coercion and control present in a relationship, technology will also feature as a means to conduct that abuse too’ (2021, p. 11). Reports of victims being locked inside by smart locks, having the thermostat consistently changed to uncomfortable temperatures, and having various networked household objects manipulated such as ringing doorbells, controlling alarms and lights, are examples of what happens when our digital companions are co-opted to work against us by those close to us who represent some of the largest threats to us. This has been described as digital coercive control by Harris and Woodlock (2019) or technology-faciliated control by Dragiewicz et al. (2018) and refers to ways in which digital devices and media can be used to abuse, harass, and threaten intimate partners, ex-partners and also, children and is inclusive of behaviours that are considered less ‘serious’ than physical violence (Harris & Woodlock, 2019, p. 533).

But just as these relationships are always in flux, Soberdash points to the value of smart home device data contributing to evidence of domestic abuse, something which is notoriously hard to prove in court (2020, p. 4). According to Sovacool et al. (2021), the recording capabilities of smart speakers have potential to provide evidence of abuse, and Bluetooth trackers and smart apps can facilitate discreet calls for assistance and can record abusive situations (2021, p. 13). The data that smart devices record can be direct records of abuse and although there is still debate around the admissibility of such evidence, data from smart devices have potential to be counted as evidence in domestic violence cases (Soberdash, 2020, p. 3). There are challenges in achieving this potential, however. In the UK context, gathering the required evidence is often difficult and there is a lack of understanding across the criminal justice system about the role of technology in domestic abuse (Sugiura et al., 2021, p. 113).

Discussion

The preceding section has detailed what a relational framework for a speculative ecology of the smart home with digital oddkin might look like. The examples used are illustrative and not exhaustive, but they are useful for drawing out the complexities of our relationships with devices. The framework’s focus on these relationships provides an entry point for studying cybersymbiosis – it allows us to think through our digital oddkin relationships at an individual level, but it also provides scaffolding to scale our understanding of these at a community or population scale. Framed in this way the framework invites critique but also keep us open to the benefits that our devices bring, while bringing attention to the fact that relationships are always in a state of negotiation and flux – a good relationship may turn bad, or two indifferent parties may find a middle ground.

First, considering the ways in which we may mutually benefit from our use of technologies does at least two things. One, it helps us remain open to the positive aspects of smart technologies. Paying attention to the critical body of the literature that does important work on illuminating the parasitic and nefarious attributes of technology, is necessary, but we exist, as Hayles’ notes, in a world saturated with digital media – we are already in cybersymbiosis – and we need to be open to its beneficial opportunities. For example, assisted living devices, such as automated lighting, and voice command has been shown to allow older people or people with a disability to live more independently (Carnemolla, 2018). Although there is a tension between care, risk and surveillance within the use of these devices (Reid, 2021), the benefits are evident.

Part of the work of living with our digital oddkin is finding a way to live well with them and mutualism is useful frame for thinking through this. Mutualism allows us to ask questions of who is benefiting and how benefits are shared, and while this can be individualised, it can also be scaled to systemic levels. For example, thinking about the sustainability of digital technologies, in aiming to live well together, we could demand that our cloud storage is powered by renewables – benefiting us and the environment, and plausibly the provider by running a cleaner product. Rather than discarding a phone who has been our ‘companion’ (Carolus et al., 2019) for a newer model, we could make a more sustainable choice by prioritising care and repair as an act that sustains our relationship and our worlds (Carr, 2023). Thinking about how we can live in mutualistic relationships with our digital companions forces us to ask questions about how we can live well together.

Second, acknowledging that some of our relationships with our digital oddkin are commensal, helps us to think critically about what benefits we are gaining from our smart devices. This works on two levels. Firstly, it means we don’t just accept what we perceive as convenient, useful devices as being the basis of a good relationship. The assumed convenience or novelty they bring may only offer limited compensation for what they extract from us in data and in the labour of using them. As an example, we can turn to Odron, a robotic drone gardener. Odron is positioned as a caregiving device – discreetly watering plants when its sensors tell it they need attention (Jackman & Brickell, 2022, p. 102653). Like the backgrounding of the smart meters, the drone is designed to tend to plants when no-one is home, highlighting the ways in which technologies are designed to be made invisible. Odron, Jackman argues, is a ‘glimpse of a domestic robot anticipated to assist with everyday chores – subservient yet independent’ (2022, p. 102653). We can read the case of Odron through a commensal lens. Ostensibly Odron works in the background to automate plant caring with little interaction with the household occupant. Although we know this relationship in reality is not unidirectional (Odron doing the work and the occupant benefitting), it is predominantly experienced in this way. A more critical relationship with Odron would account for the labour that goes into programming Odron and assessing what data it is collecting in its watering chores and where that data are going. Although there may be merit in its novelty, does it add significantly more convenience than hand watering indoor plants?

Similarly, framing our relationships with smart devices along a spectrum shows how they can fluctuate between multualistic and commensality. Returning to the work of Marxist feminists such as Jarrett (2022a, 2022b; 2014) and Fortunati (2007), we can problematise normative critiques of the extractive capitalist nature of smart devices and platforms. While we may be working for these devices in providing data through our usage, the benefits are not unidirectional. The affective benefits we receive from say, connecting with friends through Alexa, are predominantly experienced as noncommodified, unalienable interactions, even though our use of the device is working for Amazon. We see this for example in the use of communication platforms such as WhatsApp and WeChat which noted for their ability to maintain relationships through connection (Maalsen, 2023) being experienced as uncommodified and beneficial for the user. However, the act of communication through these platforms is simultaneously generating data and profit for the platform. This is then, a sometimes-complex relationship. As Jarrett notes on exchange and use values of immaterial labour, ‘what might be exploitative at one moment of the [commodification] circuit may not be so at another’ (2014, p. 26).

Third, identifying our parasitic and infectious relationships with digital oddkin can build on the critical body of literature on smart technology but the relational framing highlights the agency we have in identifying and responding to this. When we ask of mutualistic relationships, how can we live well together, of these more harmful relationships, we can ask what will I not tolerate and how could we live better together? Understanding that home is made with our digital oddkin, for some, it might force us to reckon with our actual need for them, for others it might prompt us to do those updates or choose stronger passwords to improve our security – immunise – ourselves against infection. This requires ongoing work, because as Gehl and McKelvey observe, ‘what comes after the parasite is always another parasite’ (2019, p. 222).

Fourth, considering the harmful potentials through predatory and abusive relationships mediated via our cyber oddkin, we can broaden the conversation from the maliciousness of predatory and infectious threats external to the home to illustrating how these relationships can devolve into the abusive and predatory within the home. These are not just tools of harm but things that we live with and recognising this can inform practices and responses to issues of technology-facilitated domestic violence. Viewed from a cybersymbiotic approach we would need to look at our relationship with these devices – who is controlling them and how the devices themselves could reframe a relationship to resist their use for harm. The ability of smart devices to collect data on use can potentially be used, as Soberdash (2020) notes to create a record of abusive and gaslighting practices, and work in support of the victim. It also highlights the need for better understanding of the role of technology in coercive control and abuse by the authorities, courts and users of technology. Being aware of how these devices work and are controlled is important and can be as simple as being familiar with the installation and maintenance of networked devices that is currently a predominantly gendered practice (Shirani et al., 2020; Strengers & Nicholls, 2018).

Conclusion

Building upon existing literature on the non-human in homemaking, this paper has developed a speculative ecology for understanding the way we make home with digital oddkin. These relationships are located in the notion of assemblage and as such the argument the paper makes is not a statement on technology but rather on the socio-technical assemblage of the home. By framing our digitally networked technologies as companion species we can begin to better interrogate the opportunities, contestations, and constraints of technologies in the home. Three key points emerge.

First is the emergence of a specific temporality. Thinking through our relationships with technologies using the framework narrates the changing dynamics of our relationships over time. Our relationships with digital oddkin are continuously negotiated. What might start off as mutualism could eventually become abusive.

Second, the framework also reveals the ambivalence of our relationships with our digital oddkin. We are aware of the surveillant and intrusive aspects of these co-habitors but for many of us, we do not experience these interactions as harmful. This is particularly in the case of mutualistic and commensal relationships where the experience of the benefit outweighs the experience of cost.

Third, the relationships reveal cybersymbiosis in action through an ecology of home inclusive of human, nature, and the technological, extending previous work by Hörl (2013) and Hayles (2021). It does this through a framework that makes our cybersymbiotic relationships visible through moments of gain, ambivalence, and harm. Focusing on the experience rather than the device itself accommodates the fluctuation of these relationships. The benefit of this is that it provides a direct entry point for studying cybersymbiosis from which we can gain an understanding of how to live in a way that contributes to multispecies flourishing.

Together, these three insights can push our understanding of how home is made with technologies and as a site in which larger social, economic and environmental factors intersect and are responded to. Understanding that our relationships with our digital oddkin are always in negotiation, ranging from beneficial, to ambivalent to violence opens new critical pathways into understanding the way we dwell with technology by decentring the human, and adding nuance to debates around value, extraction and exploitation in the home. For Haraway, making kin is a political act towards a better and more sustainable future of multispecies flourishing. In much the same way that Haraway identifies two equally problematic responses to the challenges of the Anthropocene – that we can rely on technofixes to save us (hope); or alternatively, it is all too late (despair) – and suggests instead that we need to stay with the trouble, thinking of our digital oddkin in a relational manner helps to navigate the impasse that exists in much commentary on networked devices between their role as tools of exploitation and alternatively, enablers of agency. The notion of home as human, private and autonomous has long been challenged, and digital technologies join a cast of the many ‘others’ we dwell with. Situating home as the site in which our responses to ecological and social crises are lived, reframing domestic technologies as our oddkin may help determine better ways to respond to and live with these.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number DE200100259].

Notes on contributors

Sophia Maalsen

Sophia Maalsen is senior lecturer in the School of Architecture, Design and Planning at the University of Sydney. She is currently researching how the translation of computational logics and technologies is being applied to ‘hack housing’ and address issues of housing affordability, innovation and our experience of home. Her research is predominantly situated at the intersection of the digital and material across urban spaces and governance, housing and home, and feminism. She is interested with the way digital technologies mediate and reconfigure housing, the urban and the everyday [email: [email protected]].