A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day (review)

Davin Heckman's A Small World: Smart Houses and the Dream of the Perfect Day examines the history of smart homes and the utopian fantasies that informed their design. By focusing on both the history of technology and the representation of technology in literature, film and television, Heckman's book effectively analyzes the cultural discourse surrounding the very concept of "smartness" and offers a vehement critique of the incorporation of technology into everyday life.

The first chapter examines the rise of home economics and scientific management, which introduced new time-saving labor practices that linked the comfort of the home to notions of temporal and spatial efficiency. This call for greater efficiency eventually led to the development of electrical appliances, automated kitchens and domestic robots. The second chapter focuses on the introduction of new media technologies, such as televisions and computers, into the home, which gradually transformed the home into "a communications and processing center" and its inhabitants into passive spectators and consumers (p. 42). In the third chapter, Heckman more closely examines this shift from futuristic visions of the home to contemporary smart homes, and he outlines two competing discourses concerning the fully integrated home. On the one hand, the smart home represents a new image of freedom that is closely linked to consumerism, which is best exemplified by reality television programs whose purpose is to promote certain lifestyles. On the other hand, haunted-house narratives provide a counter-discourse that illustrates the repressive controls lurking behind such consumerist fantasies. Reality television and haunted houses thus represent "opposite sides of the same coin of universal freedom under neoliberal capitalism: one story celebrates the freedom that comes with integrating oneself wholly into the system of commerce, the other warns that living inside the system forces one to become subject to its whims" (p. 139).

In the fourth and final chapter Heckman focuses on what he calls "the dream of the Perfect Day," which represents both the notion of everyday life as the ultimate consumer practice and the fantasy that every problem can be solved by modern technology. Heckman argues that smart homes are fundamentally based on this belief that technology can transform the world into a perfect place: "The smart home . . . edits the world and makes it perfect as we experience it so that we may be given the impression that the world is indeed perfect" (p. 164). The "Perfect Day" thus resolves ethical dilemmas by "only displaying those things which the subject would like to see" (p. 141) and by avoiding "the ethical dilemmas posed by this system" it effectively represents "a refusal to engage with ethics" (p. 142).

Heckman employs this argument to intervene in contemporary debates concerning posthumanism and posthuman

Heckman argues, for example, that "the smart home functions theoretically in accordance with the classic conception of the cyborg" because it allows "subjectivity to migrate through informational flows" and it replaces "the 'human' with a representation of subjectivity that is accentuated by a variety of machines" (p. 151). Heckman notes that Donna Haraway's "Cyborg Manifesto" does address "questions of 'human rights,' such as welfare, access to health care, and labor reform," yet he adds that it "makes little effort to establish or even acknowledge the humanist foundations from which these scholars can clearly operate and offers no assurances or 'rules' by which abuses can be soundly critiqued" (p. 147). Heckman thus concludes that "abandoning the human as a solution is foolish" (p. 152) and runs the risk of "delivering subjects over to the mercy of the free market" (p. 153). In his closing paragraph Heckman even compares the repressive force of the "Perfect Day" to Nazi concentration camps:

The Perfect Day . . . may very well still use the motto "works makes you free"—in the sense that this promise of...