A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day

The first chapter examines the rise of home economics and scientific management, which introduced new time-saving labor practices that linked the comfort of the home to notions of temporal and spatial efficiency. This call for greater efficiency eventually led to the development of electrical appliances, automated kitchens, and domestic robots. The second chapter focuses on the introduction of new media technologies into the home, such as televisions and computers, which gradually transformed the home into “a communications and processing center” and its inhabitants into passive spectators and consumers (p. 42). In the third chapter Heckman more closely examines this shift from futuristic visions of the home to contemporary smart homes, and he outlines two competing discourses concerning the fully integrated home. On the one hand, the smart home represents a new image of freedom that is closely linked to consumerism, which is best exemplified by reality television programs whose purpose is to promote certain lifestyles. On the other hand, haunted house narratives provide a counter-discourse that illustrates the repressive controls lurking behind such consumerist fantasies. Reality television and haunted houses thus represent “opposite sides of the same coin of universal freedom under neoliberal capitalism: one story celebrates the freedom that comes with integrating oneself wholly into the system of commerce, the other warns that living inside the system forces one to become subject to its whims” (p. 139). In the fourth and final chapter Heckman focuses on what he calls “the dream of the Perfect Day,” which represents both the notion of everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice and the fantasy that every problem can be solved by modern technology. Heckman argues that smart homes are fundamentally based on this belief that technology can transform the world into a perfect place: “The smart home . . . edits the world and makes it perfect as we experience it so that we may be given the impression that the world is indeed perfect” (p. 164). The “Perfect Day” thus resolves ethical dilemmas by “only displaying those things which the subject would like to see” (p. 141), and by avoiding “the ethical dilemmas posed by this system” it effectively represents “a refusal to engage with ethics” (p. 142).

Heckman employs this argument to intervene in contemporary debates concerning posthumanism and posthuman ethics. Heckman argues, for example, that “the smart home functions theoretically in accordance with the classic conception of the cyborg” because it allows “subjectivity to migrate through informational flows” and it replaces “the ‘human’ with a representation of subjectivity that is accentuated by a variety of machines” (p. 151). Heckman notes that Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” does address “questions of ‘human rights,’ such as welfare, access to health care, and labor reform,” yet he adds that it “makes little effort to establish or even acknowledge the humanist foundations from which these scholars can clearly operate and offers no assurances or ‘rules’ by which abuses can be soundly critiqued” (p. 147). Heckman thus concludes that “abandoning the human as a solution is foolish” (p. 152) and runs the risk of “deliver[ing] subjects over to the mercy of the free market” (p. 153). In his closing paragraph Heckman even compares the repressive force of the “Perfect Day” to Nazi concentration camps: “The Perfect Day . . . may very well still use the motto ‘works makes you free’—in the sense that this promise of total agency is one which requires a form of constant attention to a multiplicity of media forms. In the walls of the fully automated home is a camp that requires every bit of psychic concentration as it enfolds a new generation of abject souls” (p. 168-169).

Heckman’s book is extremely thoughtful and well-researched, and his argument clearly follows in the Frankfurt School tradition. His description of the “Perfect Day” as a “tyranny of pleasure,” for example, seems to echo Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s famous “culture industry” argument. Like Horkheimer and Adorno, however, there are moments when Heckman’s otherwise very incisive arguments seem to resemble a conspiracy theory. In his final chapter, for example, Heckman suggests that there is a link between the “Perfect Day” and the increase in government surveillance following 9/11, yet it remains unclear whether these government initiatives would have any impact on the design of smart homes or how the “Perfect Day” would even be compatible with a regime that maintains a constant state of fear. Heckman’s warnings concerning the dangers that smart homes pose to the humanist tradition also seem to be somewhat exaggerated in light of the fact that virtually all of the futuristic designs outlined in his book ultimately failed. While Heckman acknowledges that Walt Disney’s EPCOT and Roy Mason’s Xanadu were never successful, for example, he still suggests that these failures contributed in some way to the contemporary incorporation of technology into the home. It seems possible, however, to interpret the failure of Jim Sutherland’s Electronic Computing Home Operator (ECHO IV) and Honeywell’s H316 Kitchen Computer as emblematic of a more widespread resistance against the capitalist forces that guide the development of new technologies. This idea already seems to be implied in Heckman’s discussion of haunted house narratives, and I would have liked to see Heckman draw a closer connection between the presence of this counter-discourse and the failed promises or dystopian futures that the smart home also represents.