things

s07extra01 · 27 September 2019 · supporters

Stop Using Nouns

This issue grapples with Amazon's latest product announcements and the broader problem of lazy product naming in tech, but pivots toward a deeper critique of how voice assistants are designed as compliant, feminized personalities that reinforce problematic power dynamics. The through-line examines how Amazon's relentless strategy of putting Alexa into everything (from glasses to rings to toothbrushes) mirrors a troubling trajectory where intelligence and surveillance become seamlessly embedded in everyday objects, while also highlighting how voice assistants' uniform demeanor and feminine defaults quietly normalize a kind of digital servitude. The writer argues that something as simple as randomizing assistant personalities—making them grumpy, sarcastic, judgmental, or outright contrary—could subtly resist this homogenization and remind people that they're interacting with programmed tools, not helpful companions.

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0.0 Sitrep

I have to admit I got stuck on what to put for the subject line for this first subscriber-only email and what episode naming convention to use. I guess I’m going with s07extra01 so that we can keep these all together but also so they don’t interrupt the flow of the public episodes. So confusing!

I’m writing this over lunch on Friday September 27, which means I have to concentrate really hard to stop typing and to eat something, because otherwise it’s not really lunchtime, it’s typetime.

Today I am eating a Kuu style Locomoco because it is delicious and I am also having garlic rice with it because I don’t have any meetings with anyone.

If you’re the kind of person who really likes this newsletter, then I guess you could also buy someone a gift subscription? There’s a special button for it in the CMS and everything, look:

Give a gift subscription

How about that.

1.0 Things That, Etc.

Two things today:

1.1 Amazon Everything

OK, so Amazon announced a bunch of stuff called “Day 1” this week, which included products like Echo Buds—not little minifigs so that Finally Your Echo Has Friends To Play With—but instead boring airpod-type things. They also announced a Ring (sorry, an Loop), which is like I guess a little ring that you can talk to, but not an awesome genie ring? I find it amusing that Amazon have had to call what would otherwise be a Ring a Loop because they already have a different Ring and honestly you all deserve what you get for just using single generic Nouns for your Products.

I have to admit my first dumb reaction was that they announced a whole bunch of things with Alexa in them (glasses! Sorry, Frames) and lots of smaller things around the house, as if we’re very clearly following this progression and have achieved step 4:

  1. A Thing (I dunno, something like Scissors. Or a Toothbrush.)

  2. A Computer, that is not a Thing (heh, like an iPad or a MacBook Pro with a working keyboard, or WOPR)

  3. What if we put a Computer in the Not a Computer Thing (phones, toothbrushes, watches, ovens, police officers, not keyboards, headphones, juicers)

  4. What if we turned everything Thing that has a Computer in it into something that Listens to you, but not creepy like in that Nolan Batman movie.

I would be very surprised if there is not a team or person at Amazon whose job is to simply go through the dictionary, find all the nouns and add “Echo” in front of them and wait I need to go write a Twitter bot.

Anyway, first observation: they’ve launched glasses (sorry, Frames), and a ring (sorry, Loop), and they haven’t launched a piece of jewellery like, I don’t know a brooch, that could be perhaps worn on your person and tapped or spoken to, to invoke Alexa? No? Weird, that.

Second observation: more Echo/Alexa Kids stuff! A nightlight and a new Echo Dot Kids, and a thing that would be cool to 10 year old me, which is Alexa Communications for Kids, which The Verge has this to say:

Amazon also announced a new Alexa Communications for Kids mode, which will let children talk to each other through Alexa. It’s a specifically whitelisted service: parents have to turn it on, and explicitly whitelist who kids can talk to. Parents on both ends have to agree, at which point the kids will be able to communicate. [The Verge]

Which is like when I was a kid and my friends and I wanted to get walkie talkies so we could talk to each other all the time because it was the 1980s/1990s and you kids have it so good right now. Jeez. Only Alexa Communications for Kids also works with the Echo Show, I think (OMG THESE NAMES), so it’s like FaceTime or whatever (SERIOUSLY, THESE NAMES).

But! Alexa Communications for Kids and the Echo Dot for Kids is managed by something called Freetime and Freetime on Alexa, which is a subscription product from Amazon that lets you enforce, amongst other things, parental controls on Alexa/Echo things. Which… seems a bit weird? Like, it kind of implies that Amazon’s saying if you want some sort of privacy controls or content moderation on your Echo you need to pay extra for it? I mean, sure, charge for whatever you want to charge and that the market can bear while we’re all still alive, I guess.

1.2 Genuine People Personalities

I was talking with some friends about this horrendous tweet about Echo Frames (“Amazon Echo Frames glasses lets Alexa sit on your face”) and the inevitable and sad observation by one friend that who could possibly have foreseen something like this what with most (all?) voice assistants having feminine names and being positioned as compliant, dutiful personalities.

From that, Tom had the idea of “Representative Alexa/Siri/Google Assistant”):

which basically means that when you unbox an assistant it provides you with three and only three randomly generated options for you and you have to choose one.

So there's Elderly Southern White Supremacist Siri, and Angry Sarcastic Scotsman Siri, and Pretentious Art Student Alexa and Bitchy Double-Entendre Making Google Assistant and Depressive Siri who only grunts.

Emo Adolescent Assistant changes all your devices to dark mode whether you like it or not and screams at you when you ask them to do anything.

Judgmental older friend Alexa asks you if that's what you're really going to be wearing before you go out in the evening. And then sighs and says that it's up to you.

Worthy Older White Man Google Assistant keeps telling you that he has no problem taking instructions from a woman or a minority, whether you ask him or not.

Now, apart from being funny (I mean, it is funny, because imagine intolerant people having to deal with things outside their comfort zone), this is brilliant because it:

  • increases diversity and acts against homogeneity

  • preserves variation in dialect, accent

  • helps reinforce how we’re all different (and the same, in many ways!)

And also because I think a better name for what Tom is describing, especially the surly and un-cooperative personalities, is what Douglas Adams called Genuine People Personalities in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

2.0 And Finally

A few smaller Things:

OK. I ate the lunch. I am garlicky. It’s the weekend, and I’ll be back next week with 1-4 newsletters. Oh, and if you’re a longtime subscriber, you might remember that I had started a chapter-by-chapter commentary on Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. Weeellll I might have just started doing that again. So we’ve got that going for us.

How are you?

Best,

Dan