Episode 129 Transcript

Podcast: Our Opinions Are Correct

Episode: 129: Silicon Valley vs. Science Fiction: Smart Home Nightmares

Transcription by Keffy

Annalee: [00:00:00] Charlie Jane, do you have a favorite kitchen gadget in your house? 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:05] You know? My dishwasher. I was just thinking the other day about the fact that for years, for most of my adult life, I lived in houses that did not have dishwashers. And then I moved to the apartment I'm in now, which has a dishwasher, and it was like, Oh my God. I no longer have to wash all my dishes by hand, which I had been doing forever. And it was just like, oh my God, this is literally transforming my life. 

[00:00:29] And I feel like every time I use that dishwasher, I kind of feel this sense of like, my life has been improved by technology that I don't get from a lot of other technology lately.

[00:00:37] So, Annalee, how about you? 

Annalee: [00:00:41] Well, for me it's definitely my espresso maker because that's the first thing I turn on in the morning. It's what gets me out of bed. And I also like the fact that it is electrified, but it's steam technology, so it feels like it's kind of a 19th century thing, but also a 20th century thing. It's very delightful. Plus, I just fricking love espresso.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:04] And I personally benefit regularly from your espresso maker. 

Annalee: [00:01:08] It’s true.

Charlie Jane: [00:01:08] It makes me so happy that you have it. I'm gonna say, yeah.

Annalee: [00:01:10] I always make it for you in the morning and that's, I don't know, it's fun to start out the day as a barista. But it's funny because when I was thinking about kitchen gadgets, it really made me realize sort of what you were saying about your dishwasher, which is how freaking dependent I am on my fridge, my toaster, like, electric lights. Washing machine. It’s just weird to think about how all that stuff, which I completely take for granted is really, really recent. Like my great-grandmother, Zadie Lee Ray, she was born in 1889, which is before pretty much any houses were electrified, which means that she and her mom would've been hand washing clothes and chopping wood for the stove. 

[00:01:58] But by 1925, half of all homes in the US were electrified, as I found out from some research I was doing. And that means that basically our entire kitchen world, our entire sense of domestic chores is only about a hundred years old.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:13] Yeah. And at this point, you're right, it’s like, we can't imagine living without these gadgets. And it transformed the domestic space. It transformed how we think about the home in this really profound way that I hope we never go back. 

Annalee: [00:02:29] Yeah. And basically, electrification is the beginning of cutting-edge technology. It's the beginning of consumer electronics in the home. And so, a lot of these early devices that people had in their kitchens, like sewing machines, which came along in the 1880s, which you might not have in your kitchen, but you'd have in your house. And then things like refrigerators and irons, all that stuff is just completely transforming how we think of our houses, and we're still obsessed with turning our homes into these electrified palaces, except now we don't just want a machine to wash our clothes, right? We want smart homes, which are packed with automation that turns our houses kind of into domestic servants that anticipate our every need. Flicking on the lights for us, playing the music we want, suggesting a healthy meal and reminding us to move the laundry from that electric washer to the electric dryer. 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:26] Yeah, and I think it's interesting to think about as like that, as the next stage of the kinda transformation of the domestic sphere, but also, I don't know. I don't know if anything is ever going to just sweep me off my feet the way my dishwasher did. My dishwasher and I have this really complicated romance that… I just don't think anything can ever replace that.

Annalee: [00:03:49] You are listening to, Our Opinions Are Correct. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm a science journalist who writes science fiction and my latest novel is The Terraformers. 

Charlie Jane: [00:03:57] I'm Charlie Jane Anders. My latest novel is Promises Stronger Than Darkness, the third book in a Young Adult space fantasy trilogy, and I'm also writing New Mutants: Lethal Legion for Marvel Comics.

Annalee: [00:04:10] Today we're gonna talk about the dream of the smart home and how it grew out of the history of consumer electronics and a truly dramatic series of misinterpretations of science fiction stories about home automation. 

[00:04:23] And later in the episode we're gonna talk about the culture of home electronics with Jacqui Cheng, former editor-in-chief and founder of the influential gadget guide Wirecutter.

[00:04:33] Also, on our mini episode, next week we'll be answering your questions, which you asked in our Discord server for patrons. 

Charlie Jane: [00:04:41] Speaking of our Discord server, did you know that there's this huge, like incredibly vibrant community of our patrons on Discord and you could be part of it? Not only that, but if you give us a few bucks or whatever you can afford on Patreon, you are helping to keep this podcast alive, helping to keep us thinking of more correct opinions and just funding our incredible super mega brain that we keep in our basement, which has only been electrified since 1922, I wanna say. So, it's about a hundred years of electrifying our super brain. 

[00:05:14] But you know, if you become a patron, you also get mini episodes after every single episode, and anything you give us keeps the podcast going and goes right back into making our opinions that much more correct. So please find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:05:31] Let's jump into it.

[00:05:34] [NEW! OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Charlie Jane: [00:06:06] So, Annalee. I feel like I've always seen the smart home in science fiction. It's one of those things that's just like a trope that just turns up over and over again. But when did we first start seeing this notion of the smart home in sci-fi? 

Annalee: [00:06:18] It's a really good question, and it doesn't really go back as far as I thought it would. And so, I think if we wanna go back into a historical backstory for this idea, we have to look at fairy tales. I was thinking a lot about the witch Baba Yaga and her sisters who live in a house that wanders around on chicken legs and I love that idea of—

Charlie Jane: [00:06:41] Me, too.

Annalee: [00:06:41] As an early smart home. This is what the ladies want. They want a house that's on legs. And there's also a lot of modern versions of the Beauty and the Beast story, which have household implements coming to life to do chores. And so, I think there's always been this appetite for magical houses that will do our work for us and care for us.

[00:07:03] But the first inkling that such a thing might be possible really comes around in the late 19th century when, as we've already been talking about, electrification starts to go mainstream, and we just see this flood of electrified devices for home convenience. There's the Singer sewing machine from the 1880s, and that's quickly followed by washing machines, stoves, vacuums, refrigerators, and all kinds of other stuff that we don't even use anymore today. 

Charlie Jane: [00:07:31] Yeah, and we already kind of talked about how that transformed the domestic sphere, and it was kind of the birth of consumer electronics, right?

Annalee: [00:07:37] Yeah. Something like that. And electric lights are a big part of this. They were really popular, for obvious reasons, and there's this slow shift at the turn of the 20th century from gas powered homes to electrified homes that really doesn't start to fully transform cityscapes until the ‘20s and ‘30s when the majority of homes are electrified and the majority of streetlights are electrified.

[00:08:03] But interestingly, a lot of historians like Alfred Chandler, who wrote this influential book called Inventing the Electronic Century, don't consider household appliances to be consumer electronics. So when they tell histories of consumer electronics, they say it starts with radio in the 1920s.

Charlie Jane: [00:08:23] So, basically any gadget used by women doesn't really count as consumer electronics because that's, you know, that's a manly concept. It's like gadgets. When we think of gadgets, there's kind of this weird macho framing to the term gadget, like gearhead when you think about that. 

Annalee: [00:08:40] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:40] And nobody thinks like, I'm a gearhead. I work on my stove, you know?

Annalee: [00:08:44] Yeah. I make washing machines. 

Charlie Jane: [00:08:47] Yeah, and it is super weird to think about how those things absolutely are consumer electronics, but we don't put them in that category because they're not macho enough. 

[00:08:54] So, Annalee, when do we start seeing the first fictional representations of smart homes? 

Annalee: [00:08:59] It's really a couple of decades after these electrified homes are coming on the market and people are buying these gadgets. And it's really reflected in sort of science fiction-tinged comedy, which is really interesting. So, in 1922, there's a short silent film with Buster Keaton called The Electric House. We’ll link to it in the show notes. And it's funny because it's about this newfangled smart home that's electrified. And the plot here is very similar to contemporary sci-fi about the terror of smart homes. Like there's this Mr. Robot episode where the hackers take over their adversary’s smart home and kind of torment her with all of these gadgets until she does what they want. 

[00:09:49] And that's kind of what happens in The Electric House. Buster Keaton is this hapless dork who gets hired to electrify this rich guy's house, which involves things like creating an electric bookshelf that will take a book out for you and kinda smack you in the face with the book. But there's another electrical engineer who wanted his job and is pissed off. 

[00:10:10] So once Buster Keaton has electrified the whole house with all these crazy gadgets, including an escalator, by the way, which you can imagine, hilarity, ensuing. So, this guy sneaks in, takes over the smart home and starts making everything go haywire. Spraying people with food and tossing them into the swimming pool. And it's played for laughs, but you can see how it easily could flip over into some of our modern fears about what happens if an evil person takes over our smart home. 

[00:10:36] And then, in 1936, Charlie Chaplin comes out with a movie called Modern Times, which is incredibly iconic. You've probably seen pictures of it where Charlie Chaplin is caught in the gears of a giant machine. He's working on an assembly line doing a lot of physical humor around that. And one of the truly iconic scenes in the film is when he's just having his lunch on the assembly line, and this group of executives comes through the factory and they decide to test out their new home technology on Charlie Chaplin.

[00:11:08] So they strap him into this device that's gonna feed him. It has robotic arms, it has a little lazy Susan that's gonna spin around in front of him, and the robotic arms are gonna give him soup and cake and some other things that you can't even recognize. And of course, immediately it starts to go haywire, particularly when it's trying to give him corn on the cob. So, it jams the corn cob in his face and starts smacking him and it's spinning really fast. So, it's almost like it's knocking his teeth out and there's a napkin that keeps coming up and slapping him. 

[00:11:43] And the scene gets increasingly frenetic because the executives don't wanna let it go. And every time Charlie Chaplin is injured by this machine, they're like, oh, well, we're just gonna reset it. So, he's already had soup thrown in his face like three times, and they keep resetting it and resetting it and Charlie Chaplin is more and more injured and more and more dismayed and covered in goop.

[00:11:59] And finally, at the end, the executives are like, well, I guess this just isn't practical. And I think that the thing about this scene that's so interesting, and that really sets the tone for a lot of later fantasies about smart homes, is that there's a sense that this poor schlub is being experimented on and that this home automation is attacking him. And this is a theme that comes up again and again as the smart home becomes kind of a nightmare scenario as the decades go by and all the way up through the present. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:33] Yeah. And you do see a lot of, like you can see the comedy potential in this kind of thing, like the slap-stick-y-ness. 

Annalee: [00:12:39] Sure. 

Charlie Jane: [00:12:39] And I was saying to you when we were kind of talking about this episode before, like, one of the tropes in science fiction is that you know someone's a quirky inventor when they have like a Rube Goldberg machine that like, they're still in bed, and they nudge a thing with their foot and it makes a ball roll down a slope and knock over a thing, and then a thing goes around and then it like boils water and makes an egg and toast comes out and it automatically puts breakfast on their plate, but then it always goes wrong and like that's kind of the humor value of it. 

[00:13:06] But it's interesting that like, similar to how our first stories about robots are about robot uprisings, our first stories about smart homes and about home automation are kind of cautionary tales. They’re kind of stories of it going wrong and attacking people. And then, you know, you get into the 1950s and it gets more serious. You have this Ray Bradbury story, The Veldt, about a smart home that actually kills people. You have 1984 where the home entertainment system is a surveillance device.

[00:13:36] We actually talked about this a lot. It's hard to find positive depictions of the smart home in classic science fiction other than like in The Jetsons and in kind of industrial kind of like “the home of the future” kind of movies that are like, made as propaganda. So, The Jetsons is really where we get our optimism about smart homes from.

[00:13:55] Why do you think that so much of the, the science fiction about smart homes is so negative?

Annalee: [00:14:00] I’ve been thinking about this a lot, and I believe it has to do with all of the internal contradictions in the marketing of smart homes. So, we see the smart home as an idea coalescing in the 1950s, which we talked about a lot in our myth of progress episode, where the electric home, which is full of domestic appliances, is being marketed by companies like Westinghouse and GE.

Smart House Clip: [00:14:25] Truly the most wonderful and exciting thing I've ever had the chance to talk about. It's the Westinghouse total electric home, a home where electricity does everything. Heats, cools, illuminates, launders, preserves and prepares foods, entertains. It even lights a path to the front door with rayescent strip lighting.

Annalee: [00:14:50] This is also a period where women are being pressured to return to housewife roles. So, they're the main consumers of these gadgets, like washing machines and dishwashers and so forth. But they've also been forced out of the workplace. So, the paradox is that we're seeing technology being manufactured for people who can't actually buy it.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:13] Right, which is why there's this huge trope in pop culture of like the wife kind of badgering her husband to buy me a new dishwasher, buy me a new blah, blah, blah. And he's like, ah, honey, we can't afford it. And meanwhile going out like, I guess bowling with the guys or whatever and spending money on his bowling habit or something. Fucking bowling.

Annalee: [00:15:34] His goddamn bowling habit. I mean, and that's a stereotype that we see in a lot of fiction, including science fiction like The Jetsons. But meanwhile, there's this counterforce in culture where women are treating the domestic sphere as science, and that's thanks, really, to the popularity of home economics classes.

[00:15:55] These were developed first by Ellen Swallow Richards, who was the first woman to graduate from MIT in 1870. 

Charlie Jane: [00:16:03] Wow. 

Annalee: [00:16:03] She was a chemist. She also was a eugenicist, so not the greatest person, but she invents this idea that women should learn science in order to be homemakers, and it's really her way of trying to carve out a place for women in science that doesn't challenge patriarchy. It's just a weird compromise situation. And she and a lot of other women managed to make places for themselves in science departments, in university positions, and even in the federal government and a lot of state governments where they set up bureaus of home economics and pushed it as a science.

[00:16:45] And so, by the mid-20th century, almost every young woman in the United States was taking home economics classes. And here's a really interesting clip I found from a 1951 movie that was made by the state of Iowa, and it was encouraging women to study home economics in college. 

Home Ec Clip: What's chemistry like?

Well, it's not as hard as I thought it was going to be. It's different. You have to get used to thinking in a new way, but I sort of liked it. And you know, it applies in…

In such common ordinary things as making cream of tomato soup. Pour milk into the acid tomato and you are likely to have curdled tomato soup. Pour the acid tomatoes slowly into cold milk and well, you can see that cooking is practically applied chemistry.

Annalee: [00:17:33] So we're elevating the domestic sphere. We're calling it scientific, but we're also confining women in it. And like I said, there's such a strong contradiction there. We're calling women home economists we're designing high tech control rooms for them in their kitchens and their homes, and yet we aren't paying them for something that sounds a lot like a job.

Charlie Jane: [00:17:58] Yeah, and part of the elevation of the domestic sphere for white women who we’re now calling home economists and associating with science feels like a way to distinguish them from women of color who are often working as domestic workers and whose contributions are much less highly valued, and who are kind of… and it feels like that labeling of home economist and this association of science is an attempt to kind of, to say that even if white women are being confined to the home again after World War II, they're still on a higher level, status wise, than women of color. And it's a way of just trying to reinforce this hierarchy that's racial as well as gender based.

Annalee: [00:18:38] Yeah, it's interesting. There are definitely examples of Black women getting college training in home economics and will link to an article in the show notes that deals with that. But it is, this is another one of the contradictions because women of color are being paid for domestic work, and yet they're being treated as somehow less worthy than these white women who aren't being paid.

So, there's again, all these contradictions in this treatment of this high-tech domestic world. And eventually a lot of this discontent leads to a powerful wave of feminist influenced science fiction like The Stepford Wives, which is a novel that got made into a movie in 1975. It's totally classic. It's been remade a million times. And it's about how this domestic technology that we've been talking about is actually aimed at men. It's not something that women can buy. Men are the ones who are buying it, and it's a technology in the Stepford wives that ultimately allows men to completely eliminate their wives by replacing them with devices and robots who are very compliant.

Charlie Jane: [00:19:47] Yeah. That might give us some ideas about why personal assistants in fiction and in reality so often have a female voice, like Siri. 

Annalee: [00:19:57] Yeah. And Alexa. 

Charlie Jane: [00:19:58] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:20:00] Yeah, it's definitely a holdover from that idea. And also in the 1970s, we see even more violent and disturbing representations of smart homes hurting women.

[00:20:12] One of my favorite cult movies is Demon Seed, which comes out in 1977, and it's about a very cold and calculating man who invents an AI called Proteus that takes over his smart home and rapes his wife. 

Demon Seed: [00:20:28] Open the door, Alfred. Can you hear me? Open the door.

All electrical and mechanical systems here are now under my control.

Annalee: [00:20:40] She actually winds up giving birth to a cyborg at the end. So, I guess her little girl is the first offspring of a human and a smart home. So, it's a really horrific vision of smart home as rapist. And earlier, we also have Marge Piercy’s 1976 novel, Woman on the Edge of Time that also shows us this potential dystopian future. This is an interesting novel that suggests that there's a possible utopian future for women and a possible dystopian one. And the dystopian one is set in an apartment building that is a smart building, and these women spend all day long basically getting manicures from their house and being turned into these domestic servants who are constantly surveilled by the buildings that they're in.

[00:21:27] And, like I said, these are nightmarish stories and it's just really hard to understand why executives, why product designers, decided that these would be great templates for future technologies. 

Charlie Jane: [00:21:42] Yeah, and that's really what it comes down to. This feels like another area, much like the metaverse, where this is a really dystopian idea in science fiction, it's something that is usually portrayed as dystopian and horrible. And yet you have these companies trying to turn it into reality and trying to make it into a consumer product. And it’s this dream that your home can go beyond having just a bunch of awesome gadgets into one that actually kind of becomes your main servant and replaces housewives or domestic servants or enslaved people altogether. And you know, it feels like they try to make this into a happy thing. I feel like I don't understand the appeal of it, and it feels like there's so many ways it could go wrong and I don't understand why it's a thing that we've been told we should want. 

Annalee: [00:22:27] Yeah, so to understand more about how these consumer electronics are marketed to us and why we've come to want them, we're gonna talk to Jacqui Cheng about contemporary gadgets for the home and what exactly the modern-day smart home really is.

[00:22:44] [OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.]

Annalee: [00:22:48] Jacqui Cheng is the former editor-in-chief of the consumer gadget guide, the Wirecutter, and also, fun fact, she and I both worked at Ars Technica though, at different times, which was kind of sad. I'm sorry I missed you there, Jacqui. And currently she's entrepreneur in residence at Columbia's Brown Institute for Media Innovation.

[00:23:07] Welcome to the show, Jacqui.

Jacqui: [00:23:09] Hi thank you so much for having me, and thanks for thinking of me when thinking about this topic. 

Annalee: [00:23:16] Oh yeah, you are like the gadget master, the gadget. I don't know what's the term of art for this?

Charlie Jane: [00:23:21] Gadget Emperor. 

Annalee: [00:23:23] Gadget Emperor. Yeah, I think so. Sure, sure. Thank you. Yeah, I think so. 

Jacqui: [00:23:24] Sure, sure. Thank you.

Annalee: [00:23:25] So we've been talking about smart homes and I wonder if you could talk to us a little bit about the smart home in the tech world and in pop culture. Like how has it changed? I feel like 10 years ago everybody was like, smart homes. That's the next thing. And then it's sorta different now. How has it changed and what do you think it means now? 

Jacqui: [00:23:49] So, in addition to being, you know, the editor-in-chief at Wirecutter and Sweet Home, I also just personally have been a smart home nerd, since like ’95, so…

Annalee: [00:24:01] Amazing. 

Jacqui: [00:24:03] I feel like back then and in the early 2000s and whatnot there was like a certain kind of vision of smart homes where… I feel like it was very Jetsons-like. It was very, you'll arrive home and the lights will come on as you go from room to room or the garage door will automatically open for you and then the music will automatically start playing, that kind of stuff. And maybe, you know, a smart speaker speaking to you or a robot. 

[00:24:32] So, I do feel like some of those manifestations have somewhat endured. We have lots of smart speakers now all over the place. But then about 10 years ago, I think things became much more modern-nerdy, I would say. Like, for a while there was an obsession with X-10 outlets, which was kind of like the early way to get, you know, any of your stuff sort of online in a way that you could control it via the internet. But that was really deep nerd stuff, and that was really just turning things on and off, like lamps and whatnot. 

Annalee: [00:25:05] So you would plug it into an X-10 outlet, and then you could use an app to turn all your shit on and off. 

Jacqui: [00:25:11] Yeah, back then you'd probably write your own script to do that. But, you know.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:17] Right. 

Jacqui: [00:25:17] And then, years ago it was probably all about people setting up mesh networks and setting up a million smart lights and connected speaker systems like the Sonos. And then the beginning of the, the sort of drop cam, nest cam era.

[00:25:39] And now, I think we've totally gone away from the Jetsons fantasy, except for a couple of things like the smart speakers and we've gone way into just total practicality. You know, at least when it comes to the stuff that tends to work and endure. 

[00:25:58] It's the stuff that makes your life easier. It helps you save your house from emergencies. Maybe it does turn on some lights and turn them off later. It’s, I would say, perhaps simpler in concept, but broader and deeper in our lives, maybe. 

Annalee: [00:26:15] Like what's an example of that when you say something that's more practical?

Jacqui: [00:26:20] I would say, so one example is smart water sensors, and this is something that has, maybe, that has not been smart in the way that we think of it today but has been automated for a very long time. Which is just a little sensor to detect if there is like a flood or something anywhere that you don't want there a flood to be. Now they're smart so they can do other things like send you push notifications, send you emails, but they've been around for a long time. I think the modern ones have been great. I use one at my house in the mountains because there's a weird place that sometimes floods and it's super, super useful.

[00:27:04] I feel like that's the kind of thing that it’s very simple and it works and I feel like that's the kind of thing you can recommend to people. In fact, we recommended it at The Wirecutter. For your grandparents, for anybody. That thing is gonna endure and it will totally work. So, I feel like that's where we are now.

Charlie Jane: [00:27:24] Yeah. I find it super fascinating that you kind of mentioned this dichotomy between on the one hand, the Jetsons vision and on the other hand what you describe as being practical. And I was wondering if you could speak more to that and why companies were so focused on giving us this Jetsons vision rather than something that was actually geared towards meeting a perceived need among the consumers.

Jacqui: [00:27:45] I think it was kind of the classic nerd fantasy building towards the fantasy world. That was really like, in the Steve Jobs era, I feel like.

Charlie Jane: [00:28:00] Right.

Jacqui: [00:28:00] And so it was all about what we'll be able to do in the future. And it was really catering towards not only wealthy people, people who had money, but also people who had kind of deeper knowledge of tech to be able to do some of those things. Now things are so much more simplified as well, you know, in addition to being more practical. I think more what some people would call “regular people” are using all of these things more commonly.

Annalee: [00:28:32] So I'm wondering, in your experience consuming home gadgets, but also studying and writing about them, are there any that became really popular that totally surprised you? 

Jacqui: [00:28:42] I wouldn't call it exactly a surprise, but I do think that the explosion of doorbell cameras has just been insane. On one hand, I kind of expected it, but on the other hand, I don't think I realized so many people were willing to just throw them everywhere. Obviously now, there's all these articles you read about, like Ring cameras and collaborations with authorities and how people feel about that in addition to people posting all kinds of crazy stuff on Nextdoor. So, I think—

Charlie Jane: [00:29:16] Oh my God.

Jacqui: [00:29:16] We’re facing an interesting moment where everyone has door cams and you know, Nest cams everywhere. But I think that's one where I just don't think I realized people would adapt to that so easily. And, of course, I'm also talking about myself. I have Nest cams everywhere, but it's partially because I wanna watch my cats.

Annalee: [00:29:40] Yeah. I love the videos that we've seen of wild animals from Nest cams.

Jacqui: [00:29:43] Oh, yeah.

Annalee: [00:29:43] That’s like a huge part of the pleasure of having them.

Jacqui: [00:29:48] It’s wonderful. At my house in the mountains, I also get to watch for foxes all the time on my Nest cam. 

Charlie Jane: [00:29:54] Oh, foxes. I love that. What I feel like I'm hearing here is that there's kind of, there's a category of home automation that's roughly boils out to surveillance or monitoring, like the Nest cam, like the water sensing equipment you mentioned? 

Jacqui: [00:30:08] Yeah, I think that’s true.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:08] And then there's the kind that's like, it'll turn on your dishwasher via an app, or it'll make your toaster make toast when you're… you can be a hundred miles away and you can be like, I wanna make toast even though I'm not home right now.

Jacqui: [00:30:21] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:30:21] And, I feel like, one, I could see the application of the monitoring and surveillance side much more easily than I can the other side. Do you think that… have people been surprised by the popularity one versus the other? Do you think that there is a divergence there?

Jacqui: [00:30:41] I'm not sure. I do think some people have been surprised. I'm not sure who, exactly, but like, maybe marketers, even have been surprised that people haven't taken to smart appliances as much. Like, say, a smart coffee maker, which I have, and we never, ever, ever use the smart features.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:59] What makes your coffee maker smart? Like, please talk me through that.

Jacqui: [00:31:04] So, I have a couple coffee makers. This particular one is like a fancy Keurig, and so it connects to the WIFI. And then when you put a pod in, it scans the pod to figure out exactly what it is, and then it's supposed to connect and then figure out the best way to brew that specific pod and then brew it for you that way.

[00:31:29] What the reality is, is that like, everything about… every single step of this process is very, very slow. It's clunky. Half the time it can't connect to the internet properly. 

Charlie Jane: [00:31:39] Oh my God.

Jacqui: [00:31:40] And, honestly, you don't really… like. given all of these annoying problems, you don't really care if it's brewed exactly perfectly for the pod. It is a Keurig after all, you know? 

[00:31:52] So it's like you kind of just give up on the whole smart thing and you just are like, go, hot water. And I feel like that's what a lot of people do, right? You get tired of the fanciness after about a day. And I think that happens with a lot of those types of things. Even smart lights, which a lot of people like. They can be super laggy. I've used various iterations for, God knows, almost 20 years, and even today they can be kind of laggy, maybe less laggy. But if you don't have any tolerance for that, if you expect to walk from room to room and have it light up like The Jetsons, it’s not gonna be like that.

Annalee: [00:32:34] Yeah. I have a smart light in my hallway that often changes color on a whim, and it's because that I have a—

Charlie Jane: [00:32:40] It’s spooky. It’s spooky. It’s actually very spooky. I have been spooked by that. I've been freaked out by that on occasion when I'm at Annalee's, when I'm in Annalee's hallway, I get freaked out by the hallway light. 

Annalee: [00:32:51] It’s just, the app is buggy and that’s part of the problem is that you have to have all these apps on your phone to control all of the devices in your house.

Jacqui: [00:33:01] The apps are awful. That's the other thing. The apps crash all the time. They have bad UIs, people don't like them. So that just makes it even more unusable. 

Annalee: [00:33:13] One of the things we were talking about before you came on is that there's this famous history of consumer electronics by Alfred Chandler called Inventing the Electronic Century. And he completely ignores all of these domestic home devices like washing machines and irons. And he's like consumer electronics start with radios in the twenties. I mean, why do you think he does that? Why are we ignoring the sewing machine stuff like that?

Jacqui: [00:33:42] Well, I mean my immediate answer is it’s a gendered view of consumer electronics and automation of some things. I think that… Actually, I am a sewer [pronounced like sower, not part of a city infrastructure]. I love to sew. So, sewing machines are, in fact, amazing. It's truly a great invention. And yet, you're right. Why have we always, even still now, we mostly ignore it except for when people talk about the fancy embroidery machines that have computers on them. That's literally the only time like men will ever talk to me about a sewing machine, by the way. If there's like a computer in it.

Annalee: [00:34:24] Ah, yeah. It's like, oh, but I have a CAD program that helps me sew.

Jacqui: [00:34:29] But, no, I think there's a seriously gendered view there, and I think that has endured. Today, luckily, things are significantly different, but I wouldn't say it's totally gone. And I think that's totally why. I think we just view women's work and hobbies as kind of minimal. And so they are not serious. They're not like machines, you know? Not like a radio apparently. 

Annalee: [00:34:58] Mm-hmm. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:59] And do you think that the product design process should be different for home electronics and domestic devices than for computers or smartphones? Do you think that companies should approach that differently?

Jacqui: [00:35:10] Well, I mean, my perspective when I was at the head of Wirecutter and Sweet Home was no, that, I feel like that only helps you get deeper into this weird, gendered space. 

Annalee: [00:35:23] Mm-hmm.

Charlie Jane: [00:35:23] Right.

Jacqui: [00:35:23] That doesn't really help anybody. So, I kind of feel like it's like everyone has to take a big step back and you're just designing for a person who is not an expert in that thing. 

[00:35:35] I mean, and that's how we always tried to view things at Wirecutter and Sweet Home as well, which is just that, can someone who's just a regular person who's a regular smart person, like all of us, can they just sit down and start using this? That's where we would start. 

[00:35:52] I think companies could really benefit from doing that, especially the ones who make actually the more techy stuff, the things that are maybe seen as more male. I feel like I often have to walk other family members through those even more because they can be complicated.

[00:36:11] I just think it would benefit everybody if we would just kind of view everyone kind of on a flat plane, at least to start, and just kind of approach it from a user-centered point of view. 

Annalee: [00:36:25] Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the Wirecutter Smart Home division, because Wirecutter was a gadget guide or is a gadget guide, and then you spun off the Sweet Home to talk about kind of home technologies. And I wonder when you were conceiving of that split, which I know they've now merged back together, but when you were thinking about the two, like how would you decide what was a Wirecutter gadget and what was a Sweet Home gadget? 

Jacqui: [00:36:52] So it's interesting that you asked that question that way because I don't really see it that way. I see Wirecutter having launched first and at that time there was like the plan to launch Sweet Home as a separate vertical.

[00:37:09] Brian Lam, who is our founder, he came from like the Gizmodo Empire and Gawker, et cetera. And so, they—

Annalee: [00:37:17] I’m familiar.

Jacqui: [00:37:17] Yeah, right! And so, uh…

Annalee: [00:37:20] Brian was my boss. 

Jacqui: [00:37:21] Yeah, right, totally. And so like, you know, there's a lot of verticals there. So, I feel like at that time we were just kind of thinking in that mindset.

[00:37:30] And, to be totally honest with you, I always kind of felt a little bit like it was gendered from the beginning. But I don't know if I would've said that back then. I think I just like wasn't, you know, kind of just felt a little weird. But it wasn't exactly clear why, and I think Brian just felt like it was easier, when it came to advertisers, et cetera, you know, to have these verticals.

[00:37:52] And so I think we all just were like, let's just do it because we wanted to do the content and not worry about the details of that stuff so much. 

[00:38:02] But I think once we started getting going, you know, it was difficult to decide sometimes how to split things up. In the beginning, Sweet Home was pretty much all home stuff, and so we would almost say it was like Home & Garden, but it was also like home and garden and garage, home and garden and garage and lawn.

[00:38:23] It starts expanding. And meanwhile, Wirecutter is like electronics, but not home. And so, as we're kind of coming to, in this episode here, the home is becoming a smart home naturally I think out of practicality. And so eventually, kind of, it just became more and more difficult because we were like, well, does this piece that we've produced belong on this site or this site? And we'd be like, well, should we cross post it? And then next thing you know, we're cross posting a lot of things…

Charlie Jane: [00:38:56] Oh my God.

Jacqui: [00:38:56] And so I think that's what led to us bringing them back together. Or together, from my perspective, for the first time, mostly just because it made more sense that way. Because I felt like you almost had to think of it in a gendered way in order to decide on which site to put it on.

[00:39:18] And. I'm not saying that that… like, nobody stated that, by the way. Nobody ever told me to do that. I never told anyone to do that. I'm just saying that's kind of the pervasive attitude and it just didn't feel right. So, I think there's a lot of things that we miss about Sweet Home. I had an awesome team there and they all ended up working at Wirecutter. But I thought it was the right decision. 

Annalee: [00:39:42] Yeah, I think so too, because as you're talking, I'm like, well, where does a Ring camera fit? That’s for the home, you know… It’s domestic, but it’s also techy.

Jacqui: [00:39:53] I feel like we would probably have an 18-hour debate about that as well as like Roombas and, you know, 10 million other things.

Annalee: [00:40:03] I liked how there was that phase with Roombas where people were hacking them to put giant, sharp spikes on them and make them fight each other just to make sure they were really manly.

Jacqui: [00:40:13] I feel like I just learned that people are still doing that.

Annalee: [00:40:17] Oh, okay. So, there you go. 

Jacqui: [00:40:18] I was like, oh wow. Okay. People are still doing it. That’s cool.

Annalee: [00:40:21] Fighting Roombas. 

Jacqui: [00:40:21] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:40:22] I wanted to finish up by asking you if there's any science fiction stories out there that you wish would inspire more smart home design? Like we talked about The Jetsons being kind of bankrupt as a source of ideas. 

Jacqui: [00:40:38] Oh man, I don't… You know, that’s a good question because I tend to get into really dystopian science fiction. So… I'm not really… I don't know. I'm not sure. What do you think? Like, I would actually turn back on you.

Annalee: [00:40:51] I actually, I have a question about that, which is, I mean, do you have any ideas about why so much. Sci-fi about smart homes is dystopian? Because we’ve just been talking about how there's all of these really dark stories about smart homes, and I keep wondering why did Silicon Valley decide that that was a template for product development?

Jacqui: [00:41:15] It's kind of weird, but I somewhat suspect that it's like a play on like the Poltergeist thing. Where it's kind of like a ghost is controlling your house, but even worse it's. It’s like a hacker or something.

Annalee: [00:41:30] A hacker ghost. 

Jacqui: [00:41:33] I don't know, like I'm, I'm sort of just making that up, but I feel like that's the vibe they're going for, which is sort of like, it's creepy. You don't know who's like messing with you. 

Annalee: [00:41:43] But then how do we make it desirable? Like, as an entrepreneur or as a product designer? Like, what do you think is happening in those rooms where people are coming up with ideas where they're like, wow, I saw this really fucked up thing on like, whatever—

Charlie Jane: [00:41:55] Black Mirror. Mr. Robot.

Annalee: [00:41:58] Black Mirror, exactly.

Jacqui: [00:42:00] I don't know. I mean, who knows, right?

Annalee: [00:42:06] It's a complicated question and we don't have the answer. That's why I was just curious is like, because we see things like Black Mirror showing us the dark side of smart home technology. 

Jacqui: [00:42:15] Yeah. 

Annalee: [00:42:15] And so I'm just wondering if you have a sense of what happens when people are coming up with ideas for these products that we've seen so many negative stories about? Like how are people, product designers, or entrepreneurs, thinking about it when they're like, oh, we're gonna try to market something that people have really only seen negative images of.

Jacqui: [00:42:37] You know, I often wonder this myself, but I don't know. Honestly, I wish they would take that a little more into account and take people's real experiences more into account. I think that a lot of product developers and marketers really lean into what excited them about creating the product in the first place, which is fine. I think we're all for enthusiasm and excitement and getting hyped up for your thing. 

[00:43:11] But I think that we've seen a lot of stories, for example, about internet stalking and stalking from abusive partners and spying on you from both partners and hackers. And so, this tends to disproportionately affect women and people of color. And so that kind of thing always tends to be thought of 10 million steps later, like way after release and years after people have been complaining. 

[00:43:37] I feel like they should consider more of like the real lives of people when they're in these rooms instead of just the enthusiasm for why they created it. I feel like a lot of these very well-meaning people are just hype nerds just like us and they’re like, I wanna spy on the animals outside. I wanna see who is ringing my doorbell. Like it's gonna be awesome. And then you don't really think about what is the experience of another person unless you have those people in the room or you're explicitly going down a list and thinking about these people. And I think they should be. 

[00:44:19] So in a way, I wish they would consider some of these negative experiences in that they should consider… Like, if they're seeing it in Hollywood, they should just be like, okay why is this scaring people? What is the thing that scares people about this and how can we address it? How can we address that fear?

[00:44:39] I feel like some companies are beginning to finally address privacy issues and various encryption connections. And so, you know, these things are moving slowly, but I feel like, I just feel like companies could really take into account what people's real fear is.

Annalee: [00:44:57] Yeah, that's a really good point, and I think that's a great place to end. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us about all this stuff. Is there any place that listeners can find your work online?

Jacqui: [00:45:08] Oh boy. I'm hiding online right now, but uh…

Annalee: [00:45:12] That's cool, then. We don't have to say that.

Jacqui: [00:45:15] My website is digitalmeow.com and it generally just has what I'm doing there, so you can usually find my contact info there as well. 

[00:45:28] I'm mentoring and whatnot, so feel free to ping me wherever and I'll be happy to respond. 

Annalee: [00:45:35] Cool.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:35] Yay. Thank you so much. 

Annalee: [00:45:36] After the break, we're gonna finish up by talking about why Silicon Valley keeps screwing up smart homes.

[00:45:43] [OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.]

Charlie Jane: [00:45:49] So, I mean, Jacqui kind of talked about how 10 years ago there was this idea of the smart home as this amazing thing that was gonna transform your life. It was like endless amounts of hype from Silicon Valley. 

News Clip: [00:46:00] What if someone or something were watching you in your home? Silently, secretly, observing your every move? Knowing what you do when you do it, and the moment you walk out your door, that's the idea behind smart homes, which watch how you live and try to make your life easier. 

Annalee: [00:46:27] I mean, those were the days when you heard a lot of discussions about the internet of things. The idea that your refrigerator will be on the internet and it will alert you when you're low on milk. Your stove will be on the internet and it'll talk to your fridge about what you can make for dinner. You'd control your entire home from an app.

News Clip: [00:46:45] Coats, a blogger and web entrepreneur has rigged his small San Francisco home with a handful of sensors that let him know through his home's own Twitter feed what's happening when he's not there.

Charlie Jane: [00:46:59] And at the same time, there was so much science fiction 10 years ago where people had a home assistant that was alive and sentient. Like, Iron Man had Jarvis who was like a smart home basically. And there was the movie Her with Scarlett Johansson as basically a smart home digital assistant.

[00:47:17] And then there was the show, Eureka, where there was a smart home that fell in love with an android sheriff and it was a really sweet love story, but it was also super weird, but it also made the smart home look glamorous and awesome for the first time. 

Annalee: [00:47:31] Yeah, I definitely think there's something to be said for this idea that smart homes and romance kind of go together. A lot of people talk about being in love with aspects of their smart homes or as we heard in the clip, having a chatty relationship with your home. And I think that there's a corollary to this right now in science fiction, which is that we've had a lot of stories about falling in love with spaceships.

[00:47:54] Becky Chambers has this in her work and Aliette de Bodard’s new novel The Red Scholar’s Wake is all about a spaceship and a human having a romance. And I think this is proof that we're still dreaming about having a perfect smart home, in this case, a spaceship, that cares for us and cleans our clothes and keeps us safe.

[00:48:19] But the reality is we are as far away from having something like that as we are from having sentient spaceships. 

Charlie Jane: [00:48:23] Yeah, and you know, I feel like where the rubber hits the road is when you get something like Alexa from Amazon, which was a really underwhelming product that failed horribly. 

Annalee: [00:48:33] But yeah, Alexa was just this huge thing 10 years ago. Everyone thought it was gonna revolutionize our worlds, but now you can see why people wound up being really disenchanted with them. There's been a ton of discoveries over the years that personal assistants like Alexa and also Google Nest are listening even when they're supposedly turned off. I've experienced that personally. We have a Google Nest device. We have a Google hub and sometimes we’ll say something and it'll wake up and just respond like it thinks it's heard the word Google and it'll be like, I don't know that. 

[00:49:10] And we've also recently learned that people who were beta testing Roombas, those little disc shaped autonomous vacuums. They now have cameras on them and people who were beta testing them were being filmed. And last year it was revealed that techs at the company were sharing videos of people sitting on the toilet and—

Charlie Jane: [00:49:29] Oh my God. 

Annalee: [00:49:29] Here's Washington Post tech columnist Jeffrey Fowler talking about how he discovered that Alexa was recording even when it was supposedly off back in 2019. 

Jeffrey Clip: [00:49:41] Here's an idea for Amazon. [Error buzzer] Don't record us by default. Eavesdropping is an invasion and Amazon is putting its profit over our privacy. It's also a sign of a bold data grab that's going on in our increasingly connected homes. 

Charlie Jane: [00:49:57] Yeah, I mean this is where the fact that a lot of smart home technology kind of revolves around surveillance turns it into something that can easily just be an invasion of privacy and kind of make your home feel more unsafe and more invaded by, you know, big big data in a way.

Annalee: [00:50:16] And people on the other end who are swapping your embarrassing home videos. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:20] Ugh. 

Annalee: [00:50:20] Honestly, I really feel like Charlie Chaplin got it right in Modern Times. You know, home automation is more likely to attack you or spy on you or screw up your life than it is to make things easier. And if you add to that the pernicious ways that smart homes have historically been used to marginalize women while pretending to cater to them and I think we should just be wary of anyone trying to sell us automated homes of the future. 

[00:50:46] You have been listening to, Our Opinions Are Correct. Thank you so much for being here. Remember that you can find us on Mastodon at @OurOpinions at Wandering.Shop. You can find us on Patreon at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect, and we're on TikTok and Instagram as @ouropinionsarecorrect.

[00:51:07] Thank you so much to our amazing intrepid producer, Veronica Simonetti. Thank you to Chris Palmer for the new music that you're hearing. 

Charlie Jane: [00:51:13] Yay.

Annalee: [00:51:13] And for the old music. And we'll talk to you later. If you're a patron, we'll see you on Discord. 

Both: [00:51:20] Bye.

[00:51:20] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]