Traditionally considered a space of rest, intimacy and autonomy, the ‘home’ has been integrated into the market by capitalism and digital technology, becoming an object of surveillance and manipulation.
Smart speakers, security cameras and streaming devices, while masquerading as convenience, target every aspect of life for data extraction. Is the home now a place of self, community and continuity or merely a control unit?
The following article is an extract from the author’s new open-access book: The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power, which can be read or downloaded here.
Take your pick: a multi-storey penthouse or a rural cottage? A place by the sea or a mountain retreat? The very idea of home is wrapped in sentiment, aspiration and fantasy.
Home is supposed to be the welcoming nest, the place of comfort, familiarity and return, the private refuge where one can relax after the day’s labour and recover a sense of self. Yet this cosy image has long been cultivated, packaged and sold back to us as part of a wider system of social control and commercial extraction.
Over the years, our perceptions of home have been shaped by planners, designers, advertisers, estate agents, manufacturers, media and markets. Town planners know that spaces become places through their organisation, their use and the meanings imposed upon them.
But houses become homes in another way too: through the emotional and material investment people pour into them. That is precisely why the home has become such a lucrative site for manipulation.
Every perceived need within it can be monetised. Every dream about comfort, security or status can be turned into a product. Carpets, curtains, kitchens, bathrooms, soft furnishings, lighting, patios, smart speakers, security systems, streaming devices—name any area of domestic life and a market has been created to colonise it.
In this sense, the home is no longer merely a place of shelter. It has become a carefully curated consumer environment, a domestic showroom of aspiration. We are told not only how a home should look but what kind of home we should want, where it should be located, what social class it should signal and which technologies it should contain.
A home is increasingly defined less by the people who live in it than by the standards imposed on it from outside. The result is a domesticated imagination: an image of well-being mediated by the market.
The home, like the city and the countryside, has been caught up in the larger social process described throughout this book: enclosure. The old idea of the home as a stable, separate domain has gradually been dissolved by the same forces that have standardised food, eroded local economies, flattened urban space and converted soil, labour and culture into manageable assets.
Homes have also been transformed by technology. Every new device that enters the front door changes what home means and what we do within it. Some technologies genuinely ease labour. Others restructure everyday life in ways that deepen dependence and erode autonomy.
Previous generations had a mangle and clothes rack; the washing machine and tumble-dryer made them obsolete. There was a hearth for coal in the living room; central heating displaced it. Families once made their own entertainment or simply talked. Radio and television altered the rhythm of domestic life, and now the internet has turned the home into a permanent node in global networks of data, commerce and surveillance.
At first glance these changes can seem like progress. But they also reveal something more unsettling: the home was never the sealed sanctuary some might have imagined it to be. The world has always been at the doorstep. What has changed is the intensity of its arrival and the scale of its penetration.
What happens in the home no longer remains in the home. Our devices connect us to a vast apparatus that predicts behaviour and monetises attention. The promise of convenience masks a deeper surrender.
People give data away voluntarily. They furnish the home with smart products and networked appliances, while corporations learn more about them than their neighbours ever did. The old thief needed a key. The new one only needs our participation.
The more people rely on digital spaces to construct a sense of self, the more their intimate lives become legible to data systems built for extraction. Although the web may look like a personalised extension of home, it is also a surveillance medium and an enclosure of attention.
