Circuits of Control: Smart Video Doorbells, Automated Labor Surveillance, and the New Frontier of the Social Factory

• In Event: Networks of Empire: Borders, Racialization, and Social Reproduction through Algorithmic Systems

Abstract

Over the past two decades, platform economics, E-commerce delivery, and consumer surveillance devices have merged in an unholy matrimony within the Americas and many European countries. This marriage has given birth to several troubling offspring, the most noteworthy of which is the massive expansion in the surveillance capacities of both behemoth tech companies and law enforcement. Focusing on the labor disciplining functions of Amazon Ring’s video doorbell devices within the United States, this paper argues that installing the threat of automated labor surveillance into the extra-factory built environment represents a new frontier in the history of the social factory. Scholarship examining the intersection of platform economics, digital labor, and social reproduction has laid down an illuminating foundation for analyzing the role that new technological systems play within twenty-first century capitalism (Dyer-Witheford et al., 2019; Fuchs, 2010; Nakamura, 2014). This paper suggests that bringing this scholarship to bear on Ring’s surveillance network highlights the unique dynamics that Ring introduces into the social factory. As the paper demonstrates, this vast apparatus of Taylorist labor disciplining tools does not merely act as capital has in the past, grasping social dynamics outside the factory and shaping infrastructure into the optimal form for capitalist accumulation; in a functional and material sense, Ring’s circuit of surveillance devices transforms all networked space into the factory. While there is uncertainty about how Ring Video Doorbell data are used by Amazon, the paper demonstrates that this is a productive uncertainty for Amazon’s purposes of labor discipline.

Author

• Michael Brier, University of Michigan