Yolande Strengers - The Smart Wife: Why Siri, Alexa, and Other Smart Home Devices Need a Feminist Reboot

Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy

The MIT Press

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England

2020 Massachusetts Institute of Technology

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Strengers, Yolande, 1981 author. | Kennedy, Jenny (Postdoctoral researcher), author.

Title: The smart wife : why Siri, Alexa, and other smart home devices need a feminist reboot / Yolande Strengers and Jenny Kennedy.

Description: Cambridge, Massachusetts : The MIT Press, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019057347 | ISBN 9780262044370 (hardcover)

Subjects: LCSH: Home automationPhilosophy. | Personal roboticsSocial aspects. | AndroidsSocial aspects. | Home economicsTechnological innovations. | Wives. | Feminism.

Classification: LCC TK7881.25 .S77 2020 | DDC 303.48/34082dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019057347

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A book is sometimes described, to play to a stereotype from this book, as a nagging wife, demanding of our time and attention.

We wont lie; this relationship has had its ups and downs. During our two-year marriage with this all-consuming and consumable other woman, we have experienced moments of joy and pain, love and loss, as sheand wehas transformed into the cyborg figure that now occupies these pages. The Smart Wife has itself become a cybernetic organisma blend of science fiction, artificial intelligence, and organic bodies and mindsculminating in a metamorphizing artifact that will take on a life of its own as it makes its way into the hands of readers.

A project such as this one is multifaceted, with many angles to investigate and ideas to explore. As a result, weve had the fascinating challenge of containing The Smart Wife to something that is manageable and achievable. (There is a curious irony to this, given that many smart wives are literally contained inside containers, and given that one goal of ours as weve written this book has been to think outside her cylindrical sphere.)

The evolution of the smart wifeas an eclectic collection of artificial intelligence (AI), robots, and smart devicesis moving both painstakingly slowly (and occasionally in the reverse direction to what we might hope) and breathtakingly fast. While we were writing this book, we were struck by the tenacious stereotypes that recurred across the many technological forms of the smart wives we encountered. At the same time, keeping track of her developments was near impossible given the pace at which the technology is changingspecifically the latest gadgets, trinkets, features, skills, and tools that appear on a daily basis, and on a global scale. Despite the continual and continuing updates and upgrades of the smart wife, what we have discovered during our research for this book is an enduring set of ideas and ideals, which will continue to be relevant long after the smart wives that occupy these pages are superseded.

In creating the smart wifeboth as a literal and literary product, and a metaphoric figure whose status and significance we have sought to elevatewe have relied on the support and guidance of many people and cyborgs, including smart wives themselves.

We are grateful for the many public commentators, designers, and company representatives whose words and thoughts we have drawn on. We uncovered these ideas as we tracked the smart wifes movements from the design studios, boardrooms, and factories where she is imagined and created, and into our kitchens, lounges, and bedrooms where she is manifested in her relationships with people.

We are also indebted to many academic scholars from diverse disciplines who have traversed the paths on which The Smart Wifeand the smart wifetravels, and have provided their own analyses and research into her visions, manifestations, and emerging effects in the world. These disciplines extend well beyond our own home turf of sociology and media and cultural studies as well as human-computer interaction design, which have been essential as we have sought to understand and reimagine the smart wife. Along the way, we have delved into the ideas and theories from many less familiar fields, such as those associated with social robotics, legal ethics, sexual consent, feminist technoscience, speculative science fiction, linguistics, literature, cybersecurity, and violence toward women.

We are deeply indebted and eternally grateful to a real-life wonder womanour unfailing research assistant Paula Arcariwho took on the task of assembling all that has been said about the smart wife from such a broad range of disciplines. Paula spent hundreds of hours trawling through academic databases and internet search engines, compiling and preparing research materials, assisting with the referencing and image sourcing required to produce this book, and offering useful comments and additions. In the process, we asked things of Paula that went above and beyond the call of a research assistant, including fascinating questions such as, Do sex robots have a clitoris? We also drew support from Paulas canine companion, Dara, who provided sanity and snuggles on several writing retreats. In the final stages, Rex Martin provided additional fact-checking assistance and content updates.

The ideas in The Smart Wife have been strengthened and shaped by the illuminating and informative conversations we have had with friends, families, colleagues, and collaborators. Many of these valuable interactions have taken place at conferences and events where we have presented early concepts from this book. We are particularly grateful to the following people who provided feedback and encouragement on early drafts: Larissa Nicholls, Jon Whittle, Bernie Tschirren, Matt Dyer, Victoria Brammal-White, Jennifer Rode, Dimitrios Raptis, Meagan Tyler, Kelly Jean Daymond, and Shreejan Pandey.

Our own supportive and intellectually stimulating institutional environments also made this book possible. Yolande is especially grateful to her former colleagues at the Centre for Urban Research and School of Global, Urban, and Social Studies at RMIT University, and more recently, her colleagues in the Emerging Technologies Research Lab and Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. Jenny is grateful to her colleagues in the Digital Ethnography Research Centre and School of Media and Communications at RMIT University, particularly the Technology, Communication, and Policy Lab.

We also wish to acknowledge those who supplied us with the funding necessary to conduct this work. Our research on the smart home was supported by the Australian Research Councils Discovery Early Career Researchers Award funding scheme (project number DE150100278), held by Yolande from 2015 to 2018, and conducted in collaboration with Larissa Nicholls. The book also draws on research delivered in collaboration with colleagues from RMIT, Monash, and Melbourne universities in Australia, Lancaster University in the United Kingdom, Aalborg University in Denmark, and Intel Corporation in the United States. For more information on these projects, see A Note on Methodology in this book. The views in