Intrigued by an Ars Technica post about Amazon’s Alexa that suggested all was not well in the tech company’s division that looks after its smart home devices, I went rooting in a drawer where the Echo Dot I bought years ago had been gathering dust. Having found it, and set it up to join the upgraded wifi network that hadn’t existed when I first got it, I asked it a question: “Alexa, why are you such a loss-maker?” To which she calmly replied: “This might answer your question: mustard gas, also known as Lost, is manufactured by the United States.” At which point, I solemnly thanked her, pulled the power cable and returned her to the drawer, where she will continue to gather dust until I can think of an ecologically responsible way of recycling her.
I bought the device on 5 December 2016 (on the basis that one shouldn’t pontificate on kit that one hasn’t purchased oneself) and wrote about it in January 2017. Rereading that column now reveals that I thought the device’s arrival represented a significant moment in the evolution of surveillance capitalism. Why? Because its target market was the home, which was, as the veteran tech analyst Ben Thompson observed at the time, “the one place in the entire world where smartphones were not necessarily the most convenient device, or touch the easiest input method: more often than not your smartphone is charging and talking to a device doesn’t carry the social baggage it might elsewhere”.
