The Essence of Smart
Sat on the sofa at 10 every Saturday morning, around the time when the morning news gives way to numerous cooking shows, my girlfriend’s watch will buzz. In quick succession she will learn that her mum, dad and sister have just completed a ‘work out’. This in and of itself is of little value, yet, it is representative of the experience of many. For this buzzing watch is an Apple watch and her immediate family have completed a Parkrun — as the name suggests a Saturday morning 5K blast around a local green space. However parkrun is significant for the posting of results to not only Strava or Facebook, but also the posting of exercise vis-a-vis a smart watch. My partner’s family all wear smart watches, which are all interconnected, meaning that if anyone ‘completes a work out’, the entire family is aware of this. This interconnectedness, a digitally mediated intimacy, is in my mind, utterly fascinating.
The smart watch is but one of many manifestations of ‘smartness’. Millions possess either smart watches, trainers or phones, which all belong to us at an individual level. We also have smart appliances — kettles, washing machines, toasters, fridges, vacuum cleaners, electricity meters and door bells to name a few — which fill smart homes, many of which exist in smart cities and may be produced in smart factories. The prefix ‘smart’ has entered seamlessly into the lexicon, much in the same manner as resilience or FOMO, and is often portrayed as the entwinement of the internet and the various mediations of technology which fill our lives. Before smartness emerged, or perhaps was dragged into our reality, the gadgets and appliences which burnished convenience upon our laps were therefore, stupid.
Smartness as a concept is presented as an obvious good. Take the smart meter. In an age of justifiable and urgently needed climate consciousness, energy and resource consumption needs to be reduced — for the means of producing energy are dirty — and it is the primary function of the smart meter to tell us how much energy we are using. In fact in Songdo, the from-scratch smart city located in South Korea, places residents of apartment blocks against each other in competition to determine who the ‘greenest’ residents are. Yet, there are legitimate concerns surrounding the smart meter, primarily the harvesting of personal data by energy companies, who profess the virtues of their customers being self-aware and reflexive in order to prevent climate catastrophe.
However, to be smart is far more than to connect your telly to wifi. It is far more than having access to instagram on your phone. It is even more than using digital sensors to track traffic flows through your city. For, as the example at the foot of this essay can attest, smartness, in essence, tells you something you didn’t know, and importantly, enables you to experience things you were previously unable to experience. For my partner, sat on our sofa at 10am on a Saturday, when her watch vibrates it alerts her and makes her (and thus myself) aware that her close family members have been engaged in exercise. In short, the smart component of anything — be it a watch, a fridge, a house or a city — reveals new essences to those who experience this smartness.
This notion of ‘revealing’ stems from the work of one of the greatest (but deeply flawed) philosophers of the 20th century, Martin Heidegger, and his seminal 1953 lecture The Question Concerning Technology. Within it Heidegger asks a simple question, what is technology? Generally, according to the German philosopher, technology is usually viewed as either a means to an end or as a human activity. Take the Apple watch for example, the watch is a means to an end — a way of tracking exercise and quantifying its effects (calorie, step and heart rate monitoring amongst other functions) — as much is it a human activity — for the watch to function it requires a human control. These are entirely adequate explanations of the functioning of an Apple watch. Yet this conceptualisation of technology misses an essential point. This is due to the Heideggerian notion that technology is not solely a means to an end, nor is it solely a human activity, it is actually a means of revealing new essences, entities and insights into the world. The Apple watch tells the user (and those connected to it through family sharing) that after a run they have burnt 296 calories, had a peak heart rate of 179 and that it was 23 seconds shy of their personal best. Much of this insight would be unknowable for the user without the smart watch. Yet, this does not mean that these things wouldn’t exist without the watch, for the runner would have burnt those calories, had that heart rate and would still have fallen short of their PB regardless. But the watch reveals them to the runner, as an experience of the effects of their exercise upon themselves. In essence the smart watch revealed that which is invisible.
Now, a critical function of the Apple watch is the instigation, and sustainment of, so-called ‘streaks’ — namely when an activity is carried out, say the running of 5K under a certain time, the week after at the subsequent parkrun, the watch wearer will be encouraged to beat their personal best. This may seem innocent and even helpful, and in many ways it is, yet, within the realm of smartness, the revealing of activity, along with the experience of it from a user’s perspective, is mirrored by those who own the access to the data produced by the software.
Whilst it is of interest for an individual to experience how many calories are being burnt on a run, for a corporation such as Apple (or Google, Fitbit, Garmin or Huawei) multiply that insight by millions upon millions, and suddenly societal trends can be revealed to such an extent that some argue we are in an age where the end of theory is possible. This asymmetry of insight produces the attention syphoning tendencies of smart technology. For the greater and better sustained the use of a technology, the more insight it will uncover, which is catnip to advertisers. Say you go to a Starbucks after your run and pay with your iPhone — which is linked to the same account as the Apple watch — to subsequently be bombarded via social media about their latest sugary concoction or why not get a cake with your post run coffee? After all, you’ve earned it.
The streaky tendencies of smart tech (can you go faster this week, save more energy, get more followers, watch more shows etc.) manifest another essence of technology according to Heidegger; enframement. The streak is one of the greatest — or nastiest depending on your view — developments of the ‘attention economy’. Rather than just going for a run, why don’t you try and beat your previous best? Ohh and by the way, here are a range of nutritional supplements, trainers and ibuprofen gels pushed to the top of your Facebook or Insta feed to help you attain that goal. This gamification (a horrible term, but one which works) of the ‘project self’ provides a framework for future action; it enframes it. Thus, without the Apple watch telling you that last Saturday you ran just short of your best, when you try and out-do yourself one week later, your actions are squared primarily by the new insight revealed by the technology sat just above your left hand.
So far the essence of smart technology has been centred upon the work of Martin Heidegger and two of his arguments, that 1) technology reveals and unconceals entities, bringing-them-forth into a domain where they can be experienced, and that 2) these insights produce a framework for future action. However, these entities cover the essence of technology as a whole, not smart tech specifically. So the obvious follow up question is what demarcates smart tech as something different? A smart TV is still a TV nonetheless, so why is your new 77” OLED smart TV fundamentally different to the one your grandparents have? Well, to interrogate this, and to cast our net a little further, another philosopher needs to be brought on board. Welcome to Roy Bhaskar’s work on critical realism.
If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? This is one of the most established and commonly known thought experiments in contemporary society and according to a critical realist, one which has an obvious answer; YES! This is because, despite the progress of scientific knowledge and the insights produced by it, we as a species do not know everything. For a critical realist such as Bhaskar, ontology is independent of epistemology, or excusing the jargon, reality is independent of our experience of it.
To further this, Bhaskar reasons that there are three domains of reality operating simultaneously. How best to explain this… Well, think of an iceberg floating in the ocean (a commonly used metaphor). The bit observable for any sailor is the tip which juts out of the frigid sea, embodying the ‘empirical’ domain. Empirical because it is empirically experienceable. We can see the iceberg, they tend to be massive and often the size of small islands. However, the majority of the iceberg is submerged under water, in the ‘actual’ realm. Actual because it actually exists beyond our perception of it; just because we can’t experience it, doesn’t mean it’s not there! Finally, a particularly philosophical and broody sailor may think to themselves ‘why is this iceberg here before me’? Well, given the melting of the polar ice caps and their breaking up and fragmentation, there are more icebergs in the world’s oceans. The climate emergency which is producing these icebergs is known as a causal mechanism, a reason (a cause) for events taking place — regardless if we experience them or not. This is the third and final domain of reality and is called the ‘real’. Real because it is from these forces that reality springs forth.
For the critical realists, everything that exists does so and a proportion of this existence is, or has been, experienced by human kind, either directly (seeing an iceberg first hand) or remotely (by seeing a picture of one or reading a Wikipedia article on them). Now, Heidegger argues that technology reveals new entities and brings-them-forth into the realm of experience, i.e. the empirical realm. When Heidegger wrote and delivered his lecture he was talking about, by contemporary standards, somewhat arcane technologies — his example to explain the concept of revealing was the creation of a silver chalice to be used for religious or spiritual ceremonies.
The technology was a means of revealing new essences which were, in a sense, original. A jet plane, another example used by Heidegger, reveals the capacity to fly from London to JFK in under seven and a half hours, therefore, revealing a new event — i.e. relatively quick trans-continental flight. However, before the jet engine a seven hour, transatlantic flight would be impossible. This is where smart technology differs from other forms of technology. Rather than generating new events, smart technology reveals the actual event, one which we would be unaware of if it wasn’t for the technology.
Smart watches reveal PBs and calories burnt. Smart Meters reveal how much electricity has been used. Smart TVs reveal what shows you have been watching, for how long and when. Smart toasters, kettles and fridges reveal how long they are used for and in the case of the latter, when certain produce is about to go off. These examples concern the home, but what about our smart cities, an industry predicted to be worth over $2036.10 billion by 2026. Air sensors reveal the quality of air. ANPR vehicle counting sensors reveal traffic flows and congestion levels. Earthquake sensors measuring the terra firma under Los Angeles are able to produce 3D maps of the subterranean reality underpinning the city of Angels. These are but a few examples, but they all share the same quintessential trait, that they all reveal events which were previously in-experienceable. Therefore to use smart technology is to experience previously non-experienceable events which have been revealed in order to attain a set goal or vision.
We have so far covered the first two elements of this above definition — the experience of what were previously in-experienceable and how they are revealed to us — and we shall conclude by concerning the final element; the attainment of goals and/or visions. Towards the top of this essay I discussed the asymmetry of smart technology — i.e. how a user of a smartwatch will experience their own revealed insight, but how a corporate entity will also see it alongside millions of other examples. For the user of a smart watch, there are a plethora of reasons underpinning its use, from increasing fitness to wanting to be a part of the latest technological developments or fads — each of which are equally justifiable reasons. Now, for the company behind the production of the smart watch, their goals are rather different.
As Shoshana Zuboff eloquently argued in the totemic The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, big tech entities such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Facebook, Huawei or Smasung (amongst many others) exist to extract, in her terms, behavioural surplus from users. Profit is primarily reaped from the collection and utilisation of user data, not through the more traditional means of developing a product and selling it on the market (although admittedly Apple do this alongside their data harvesting operations). Ever wonder why an Amazon Echo is so cheap? It doesn’t exist to make money through sales alone, but rather to harvest user data. Everytime you call out to Alexa or Siri, or when you yell out “Hey GOOGLE play Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood” (or whatever), the device learns, through AI and adapts, all whilst harvesting your data. Whilst this appears on the surface to be somewhat conspiratorial, it still exists and takes place, we just don’t experience it. Through Zuboff’s excellent work, we learn how user data is not only sold to advertisers but also how data is used to train algorithms in order to make them even better at not only reacting to your purchases — by promoting certain products — but, more sinisterly, to enable them to predict what you will want to buy in the future. This has prompted some to claim that smart technologies and the algorithms underpinning them know us better than ourselves. Hence why the attention economy is such a critical entity to research and understand, for the more you use a smart device, the more data you produce and, thus, the more valuable as a user you become. This is why things such as seamless scrolling, gamification and the aforementioned streak is such a prevalent component of our everyday, digitally mediated lives.
Therefore, the essence of smart technology is an entity which produces the experience of previously non-experienceable events which are revealed in order to influence subsequent user action.
In the introduction to The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff argues that the fundamental changes wrought by surveillance capitalism have eschewed detection within broader society because our existing concepts and theories cannot adequately grasp them. Mirroring this, the need for original concepts, understandings and approaches for grappling with the expansion of smart technology into our lives is paramount. Therefore, what lies above is my contribution to the expansion of our understanding of a rapidly changing world, one which is becoming forever ‘smarter’.
By Will Brown
Email: w.brown@lboro.ac.uk
