Vincular las dietas saludables y las frutas y verduras con otras agendas,

We can rather understand the development of the ‘smart house’ as mentioned in the first chapters of this thesis, not from the point of view of dystopian/utopian perspectives, but rather a particularly mid-century and American dynamic: “the smart house concept is therefore born from the convergence of blooming domestic technologies in the twentieth century, the modernist progressive mentality, dreams of total control and rationalization through technology,” which also has a kind of “aesthetic element” Bounegru (2009:11)³³. Bounegru (2009) therefore premises the way in which the ‘smart house’ was supposed to be a liberation, specifically for housewives, from the chores of domestic labour. What is further interesting about the development of the concept is how it sits with other

developments in and ideas about technology, and ultimately, has shared their fate: “the smart house or the house of the future was, along with other modernist dreams such as the colonizing of space, repeatedly a failed technology in terms of total automation of the house across the twentieth century” (Bounegru, 2009:12). Important here is Bounegru’s (2009) explicit linking of smart technology with a modernist project – rarely remarked upon in the literature – but an important step in contextualizing some of the more difficult debates concerning power and control when people inhabit smart technology or AmI environments. Hence, Bounegru (2009) reconnects us to the way in which the ideas that drove the notion of smart technology were not a product of mere business on the one hand, and Governments on the other (as I have remarked seems the case today), but rather, of a particular intellectual, moral and aesthetic orientation towards the future. This was a time of great optimism about the liberating potential of technologies, in early 1920s

33Bounegru, L. (2009). Smart Houses. Masterthesis, University of Amsterdam. August 23, 2009.

and 1930s America (we saw the downbeat mood of Heidegger’s war-ridden Europe at this time); for example, Bounegru (2009) notes that the first ‘smart houses’ to be shown to the public included built-in washing machines, automatic garage doors and an airport hanger on the side, since people assumed that in the near future every household would have an airplane. Hence, the development of smart technologies can be situated in a climate of Modernism, which also existed in limited forms in Europe during this period, but which always remained a minority set of pursuits. Regardless, what is important to note is the way in which one of the central tenants of Modernism concerns the individual and their general development and liberation.

This underpins the way in which, today, it is useful to consider the underlying approach to AmI taken by those who pioneer and design it. This is because, whilst AmI can be understood as the development of isolated pieces of technology to fulfill specific aims in people’s everyday lives, there is also a way in which we can consider the sort of world that people can intend to create with this technology. More generally, AmI technologies can be said to aim to create – as this thesis suggests – a set of circumstances where human agency, judgement and freedom are progressively supplanted with external, frequently algorithmically-applied, standards and norms. This could be understood as the externalizing or outsourcing of human decision-making processes and practices. For example, the automatic door can be said to externalize the social standard that one opens a door to go through it, and then closes the door afterwards. Understood in this basic way, we can begin to appreciate the liberating potential of a world of AmI in the future. One particular area in which development work has been carried out concerns physical and mental health. For example, the PlaceLab ³⁴, encourages what can be understood as

‘proactive healthcare’ - the intelligent technological agents function as disciplinary apparatuses which display statistical knowledge about behaviour, consumption and health patterns, establish routines, suggest and encourage healthy behaviours in terms of diets, exercising and medication. Here, the AmI technology plays a central role as regulator.

Significantly, the particular areas of human behaviour to be regulated pertain to those areas that particular people want or need regulation. Hence, this is often understood relative to the lives of the more elderly generation. However, there is also an underlying sense of what kind of world the developers of particular AmI scenarios want to create, which can be understood in some way to be a continuance of the Modernist impulse. So:

The regulation of conduct becomes a matter of each individual’s desire to govern their own conduct freely in the service of the maximization of a version of their happiness and fulfillment that they take to be their own, but such lifestyle maximization entails a relation to authority in the very moment as it pronounces itself the outcome of free choice. (Rose, 2006:58-9)

The important point raised by Rose (2006) above is the way that AmI qua regulator can be said to have an important ‘relation to authority’, both in its existence in that specific form and in its use for some aim or other by an actor in a particular context. However, the creation and sustenance of this authority over time is further understood as being in the ‘same moment’ as the ‘outcome of free choice’, in the sense that there is no dystopian power ‘forcing’ individuals to take particular actions - though one could also refer to Foucault’s point that power can only be exercised over free agents (see Chapter 5).

Further, it must be noted that such technologies would not be developed if there weren’t some use for them in the wider society; hence, there is in a wider sense a social basis for the ‘authority’ that AmI might draw on to fulfill their aims. However, it should also be noted that the focus on improving health particularly is itself an outcome of a particularly contemporary concern with pursuing a ‘healthy lifestyle’. This might account for some of the resistance to certain AmI ‘visions’. The MIT PlaceLab is one such scenario, and describes a house which supports the ‘proactive healthcare’ mentioned above, which is designed specifically for the aging population. The worry here, of course, is that this might suggest that the private homes of elderly citizens become places primarily for monitoring, regulating and improving health, rather than for living per se precisely because these needs are taken care of, being outsourced to the technology embedded in

the external environment. Yet the idea that a person might spend their later years in a space entirely orientated around the monitoring and upkeep of their health might be exactly why some might choose to stay in their own homes rather than move to nursing homes or even hospitals. Thus, it would make sense to develop an AmI environment that is as unobtrusive as possible, and which allows for the exercise of more autonomy and freedom of activity in private homes. By unpacking the details of the MIT place lab I hope to now shed light on these related visions.