Hey Astro, Meet Tocqueville and Francis
Ascending Bookstacks #7 - Alexis de Tocqueville and Pope Francis on Amazon's Astro
This week, Amazon unveiled “Astro” - an admittedly adorable Alexa/R2D2/WALL-E mashup. It comes equipped with Ring- and Alexa-style cameras and microphones, makes use of a a periscope, emits endearing chirps, and follows nearby people around to capture biometrics for its recognition systems.
Naturally, the announcement foiled my plan to write about something other than technology this week. I mean look at it. How can we even be mad at our corporate overlords for this?
Others have already taken to typing about the Astro’s mechanical flaws and privacy implications. Jordan Pearson at Vice’s Motherboard denounced it as a “spybot” and a “privacy nightmare.” Folks at the Electronic Frontier Foundation have pointed out its vulnerability to abuse. There’s plenty to raise eyebrows over.
I think the bigger issue, though, is how Astro exploits our desire for convenience. Nearly two centuries ago, in Democracy in America (1835, 1840), Alexis de Tocqueville identified the human drive for convenience as a potentially corroding influence in democratic societies. Pope Francis has likewise written extensively about how prioritizing convenience can undermine healthy human relationships. Together, they help us assess Astro’s appeal—as well as Astro’s likely fraught future.
Convenience Technology
What is the appeal of an Astro? According to Amazon, it (a) watches your home while you’re gone, checking “to see if you left the stove on” or “[confirming] you have all the ingredients you need for dinner,” or letting you know when someone has broken into your home, (b) can be a digital assistant for your elderly or disabled family members, (c) be a mobile Alexa that follows you while playing “your favorite shows, podcast, or music,” taking pictures or videos, or “[following] you around your home while you are on [a] call,” and (d) it “presents a new way to experience technology that is fun, entertaining, and engaging.”
The Astro relieves its owner of responsibilities—basic home safety and family care—while bestowing luxury conveniences.
Amazon unveiled Astro alongside several other products—presumably intended to work in concert within Amazon-connected-homes. In just one event, they released, among other products:
Amazon Smart Thermostat - self-explanatory
Echo Show 15 - a larger Echo Show with facial recognition
Amazon Glow - a child-oriented video-calling and augmented-reality device
Halo View - Amazon’s take on the Fitbit, which comes with a subscription service for fitness and nutrition
Always Home Cam - a Ring-style camera that flies around your home when you’re gone
Ring Alarm Pro, Blink Video Doorbell and Floodlight Cam, and Ring Virtual Security Guard - enhanced WiFi connectivity and surveillance cameras that you can connect to a private security company
Amazon markets each of these products as relieving you, the consumer, of a burden. You shouldn’t have to adjust your thermostat, let Amazon do it. You shouldn’t have to write physical sticky notes, let Amazon take care of it. You shouldn’t have to spend time on your diet or think about exercising, Amazon will tell you what to eat and do next.
Jamie Siminoff, who leads Amazon’s Ring, argued in his presentation that, “it’s 2021, why should you have to take out your phone to check your security cameras or wake up in the middle of the night to make sure your TV is turned off? Wherever possible, your home should do all of that for you.”
Amazon isn’t just selling devices—it’s selling an integrated but disconnected lifestyle. Just sit back, relax, and let Amazon manage your life.
Letting Amazon Drive Your Life
In The Voice Catchers: How Marketers Listen In to Exploit Your Feelings, Your Privacy, and Your Wallet (2021), communications scholar Joseph Turow argues companies want to use smart devices like Halo, Echo, Ring, and (presumably) Astro to manipulate consumers. He claims Amazon et. al. are now in a “scale-building period,” where they attempt to get as many users as possible on such smart devices. Then, he writes:
Once the company becomes a firm part of many people’s lives, and once its engineers have figured out the best ways to turn what it knows about its customers into profits, the scale-building period will end, and the hardcore use of their voice [and other biometric] data for profiling and discriminatory offers will begin.
And again, later:
The goal clearly is to use seductive surveillance [i.e. cute, convenient devices that vacuum data about our lives] to help create an extreme version of personalization: to know a person better than they know themselves. And marketers are trying to access a torrent of speech, voice, and other new data to make this goal a reality.
Halo, Ring, Astro, and Alexa serve Amazon, not you. According to Turow, these devices create actionable marketing data in order to nudge users’ behavior. They cultivate ideal consumers.
This nudging makes Amazon’s next claim curious—that home robots are inevitable.
Chris Tritschler, Amazon’s Product VP, enthusiastically explained: “In one of the senior management meetings, we talked about, ‘does anybody in the room think that in five, ten years you’re not gonna have robots in your home?’ And everybody’s like ‘yeah, we are!’ So we said ‘well let’s get started.’” Gregg Zehr, President of Amazon’s Lab 126, likewise claimed: “the question wasn’t, ‘should we build it?’ but ‘why wouldn’t we?’”
Tritschler and Zehr’s future isn’t inevitable—no future is assured, everything is contingent (history 101). Furthermore, a robot’s existential value is likely tied to many different factors. Who does it serve? Can we—and should we—relate to it as a sentient being? How does it change us as humans in the process, and why? Perhaps robots can be companions for humans, but are robot companions desirable over our human relationships? How do robots affect civil society, or our relationship with God? If our attention is on the robot dog / Astro, what are we missing?
Tocqueville on Power
Alexis de Tocqueville was a French writer who traveled across the United States in the early nineteenth century, chronicling his observations in Democracy in America. Much of the book discussed governance, forms of community, social dynamics, and family relations. But Volume II, Section 4, Chapter 6 of Democracy in America—which described a democratic form of despotism—has persisted as a touchstone for conservatives and libertarians into the present.
In that chapter, Tocqueville worried Americans would succumb to despotism while searching for convenient pleasure. He predicted that citizens would become isolated, each evolving into “a stranger to the fate of all the rest” while disconnected from governance. The government would accumulate power without a politically engaged citizenry.
Tocqueville then warned:
Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?
Thus it every day renders the exercise of the free agency of man less useful and less frequent; it circumscribes the will within a narrower range and gradually robs a man of all the uses of himself.
Tocqueville worried that democratic citizens would seek convenience through the state—at the cost of their liberties. The state would cease to be a venue for participatory governance, what Barack Obama terms “us collectively making decisions together.” Instead, the state would become a totalitarian apparatus managing all but “the trouble of living,” which comfortable citizens would tolerate because this despotism was democratically assembled to perpetuate “rejoicing.”
Tocqueville acknowledged that, in this hypothetical world, people could still “[intervene] in the more important affairs” of society—revolutions, mass movements for reforms, etc. would remain possible. That wasn’t the problem. He was more concerned that people would become “[enslaved] in the minor details of life.” Here’s how he put it:
Subjection in minor affairs breaks out every day and is felt by the whole community indiscriminately. It does not drive men to resistance, but it crosses them at every turn, till they are led to surrender the exercise of their own will. Thus their spirit is gradually broken and their character enervated . . .
Losing “minor” agency is, according to Tocqueville, a major deal. We live each day through thousands of little decisions and actions. What are we without little freedoms? Perhaps, the “tutulary power” would respond, we could become free to think about more important things. Tocqueville, for his part, feared we would become passengers in our own lives.
Tocqueville wrote about government, but I think his insights are more aptly appplied to contemporary technology companies than contemporary government. We can still hold elected officials accountable, vote leaders out, and protest policies. There is no such accountability with, say, an Amazon/Google/Facebook—no vote and few meaningful protests beyond leaving platforms. Thus Tocqueville’s convenience-and-pleasure-driven-despot is a fitting critique of modern surveillance capitalism—even (especially) when they produce adorable Astros.
Francis, Amazon, and Knowing
I also think Pope Francis provides a thoughtful contrast to Amazon’s press conference. In my post on surveillance capitalism, for example, I reflected on Francis’ Laudato Si and asceticism in the digital world:
I think Christians may be called to digital asceticism—which could, as a result, repair privacy. Near the beginning of Laudato Si, Pope Francis considers Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople’s analysis of consumerism. Bartholomew calls for “asceticism” that “entails learning to give, and not simply to give up. It is a way of loving, of moving gradually away from what I want to what God’s world needs. It is liberation from fear, greed and compulsion.” I think the patriarch’s words translate directly to the digital world.
So, what does that digital asceticism look like with Amazon Astro, Ring, Always Home, Alexa, or Halo?
Francis gives us some direction, here, in his encyclical Fratelli Tutti (2020) on fraternal love. Reflecting on the digital world during the coronavirus pandemic, Francis wrote:
Everything has become a kind of spectacle to be examined and inspected, and people’s lives are now under constant surveillance. Digital communication wants to bring everything out into the open; people’s lives are combed over, laid bare and bandied about, often anonymously. Respect for others disintegrates, and even as we dismiss, ignore or keep others distant, we can shamelessly peer into every detail of their lives.
By always turning our lives into data—whether our health with Halo, our movements, faces, and voices with Astro, or our neighborhoods with Ring—we indeed “bring everything out into the open.” The pope warns that this make-known lifestyle could impede our capacity for wisdom and intimacy. Here’s Francis, again:
A new lifestyle is emerging, where we create only what we want and exclude all that we cannot control or know instantly and superficially. This process, by its intrinsic logic, blocks the kind of serene reflection that could lead us to a shared wisdom.
It’s an interesting proposition.
Smart devices enable us to always watch our front porch, always check our pulse, always see whether the TV is on. Amazon then automates most of these processes (with the exception of your pulse). Perhaps, in an ideal world, this would free us to be artists and great readers. Instead, since surveillance capitalism is dependent on keeping our attention, smart devices create an overflow of superficial information that we kick back to watch. We risk becoming preoccupied with the device, with the process, with being relieved of responsibility while we sit back and “shamelessly peer into every detail” of our and others’ lives.
While Halo scans our heartrate, Always Home canvasses our rooms, or Ring watches the street, are we missing out on wisdom?
Amazon, however convenient, can’t fix a broken world, can’t take away our stress, can’t make us wise, can’t do the work of living. Indeed, Francis reminds us that “the marketplace cannot resolve every problem, however much we are asked to believe this dogma of neoliberal faith.”
Perhaps, rather than putting our trust and attention in Astros and Halos, Rings and Shows, and all their dings and boops and chirps, we can turn to the classroom of silence and meet the Lord there.
(Robots Could Still Be Cool)
All of that said, I love scifi and appreciate that humane robots could be in our future. Shoshana Zuboff writes about the “Aware Home” project in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight For a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power (2019), which was developed at Georgia Tech in 2000. The Georgia Tech folks envisioned a smart home before it was cool, while emphasizing that such technology needed to be transparent and private. Here’s Zuboff:
It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imaginaed as a simple ‘closed loop’ with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be ‘constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities . . . even tracing its inhabitants medical conditions,’ the team concluded, ‘there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.’ All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers ‘to ensure the privacy of an individual’s information.
Maybe, if Astro met those standards, we could really consider it. We’d still have to reflect on how we use our attention and why we rely on conveniences—but that’s a persistent problem when human.
In today’s daily Mass readings, Nehemiah tells the reptentant-but-distressed people of Israel: “Today is holy to the Lord your God. Do not lament, do not weep! . . . Go, eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks, and allot portions to those who had nothing prepared; for today is holy to our Lord.”
I’m not sure this connects to Amazon. Perhaps, after writing a couple thousand words about smart devices—and dealing with a stressful computer situation that made this post late—I too need to remember that today is holy.
So that’s it! Lots to think about with the new Amazon devices. I think Turow, Tocqueville, and Francis give us plenty of reasons for hesitance, but what do you think? Would you buy one? Do you want a future with robots? What would have to change for Astros or Alexas to constitute humane technology? (Also, do you love WALL-E references as much as I do?) Let me know in the comments.
Have a great day!
See you tomorrow.