Once upon a time at the foot of a great mountain

There was a town where the people known as Happyfolk lived

Their very existence a mystery to the rest of the world

Obscured as it was by great clouds

Here, they played out their peaceful lives

Innocent of the litany of excess and violence

That was growing in the world below

To live in harmony with the spirit of the mountain called Monkey was enough

Gorillaz feat. Dennis Hopper, Fire Coming Out of the Monkey’s Head

Since ancient times the human abode has been considered a sanctuary that protects us from beasts and enemies, from the threats coming both from the natural world and from our kind. The home (domus) is not only the place where intimacy and self-knowledge occurs and, therefore, where the individual emerges, it is also the primordial locus of sovereignty (0.27, 6.7), its place of origin. However, this domus—the fortified dwelling we have won from nature through technology—was invaded by the media and the gaze of the other (9.1, 9.9, 9.12) and its character of sanctuary was left behind. This incursion, fatal to human privacy and our inner world, was complemented by an even more recent invasion that can be pinpointed to a precise moment in time.

In 2000, a group of engineers and technologists at Georgia Tech collaborated on a project called Aware Home that introduced for the first time the idea of ubiquitous computing applied to human homes. This project—the result of a number of telemetric technologies that emerged thanks to the miniaturization of electronic components—is the origin of the discipline of domotics, or the application of digital technology to home automation. Aware Home, Shoshana Zuboff tells us, was based on three assumptions:

First, the scientists and engineers understood that the new data systems would produce an entirely new knowledge domain. Second, it was assumed that the rights to that new knowledge and the power to use it to improve one’s live would belong exclusively to the people who live in the house. Third, the team assumed that for all its digital wizardry, the Aware Home would take its place as a modern incarnation of the ancient conventions that understand “home” as the private sanctuary of those who dwell within its walls.¹

The creators of Aware home were right about the first assumption, the data produced was of a new kind. However, the second and third assumptions were soon betrayed with the emergence of a new economic model that Zuboff has called surveillance capitalism, which takes as starting point the data generated by users as they browse the Internet. As soon as “the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the the home as a private domain,”² were invalidated, the respect that guarantees both individual privacy and public space—already weakened by the traditional media (9.2)—ended up disappearing. The house ceased to be a sanctuary and the human-home symbiosis implicit in domotics leaned decidedly towards the technological pole. In the digital era the polarity between human life, zoē, and the new definition of dwelling, the domus digitalis, is inverted and the home, once the intimate core of the paradeisos, is swallowed up by it. (0.27)

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1. Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 15. ↩︎
2. Ibid., 15. ↩︎