In 2015 Mattel released Hello Barbie, a new version of the flagship product of the company that came equipped with speech recognition technology (with 8,000 pre-recorded statements) that allowed it to interact with children by adjusting her responses in a “smart” way. The main accessory of the new Barbie was a smart dollhouse that responded to more than 100 voice commands that made it look less like a toy and more like an exercise in conditioning and normalizing the invasion of the domus from childhood (10.1, 10.2, 10.4, 10.5). Both the house and the doll required a smartphone app and an internet connection to operate. It soon became known that children’s voices were being recorded and transmitted to the servers of ToyTalk—Mattel’s partner in this line of smart toys—where they were converted into text and with the help of artificial intelligence generated the doll’s responses.

Shortly thereafter, the advocacy group CCFC (Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood), dubbed the toy Surveillance Barbie and initiated a nation-wide campaign to get Mattel to halt production. For Zuboff, this new line of toys expresses the surveillance ethic of the new capitalism that instead of making products for us creates products to collect information about us. Intimacy as we know it is being compromised,

the doll that was once a beloved mirror o a child’s unfettered imagination, along with all the other toys in the toy box—and the box, and the room that host the box, and the house that hosts the room—are all earmarked for rendition, calculation, connection and profit. No longer mere things, they are reinvented as vehicles for a horde of commercial opportunities fabricated from our dialogue chunks and assorted gold dust.¹

After a spate of concerns about online safety, production of Hello Barbie and its smart dollhouse was discontinued in 2017 without further explanation from Mattel or ToyTalk.

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1. Zuboff, Surveillance Capitalism, 267. ↩︎