Smart Homes and the New White Futurism
This article explores the consumer technology industry’s discourse about emerging Internet of Things smart home devices.
This article explores the consumer technology industry’s discourse about emerging Internet of Things smart home devices and sketches an outline of a “new white futurism.” New white futurism displaces prior consumer fantasies of labor-free living in smart homes and frames emerging smart home devices as tools for data-driven management of work/life balance in contemporary heteronormative, white, middle-class culture. The research draws on existing scholarly literature, archival documents, contemporary marketing discourses, and participant observation at CES in 2014 and 2018. The article concludes that it is crucial to reimagine cultural relationships to emerging technologies through Afro, Indigenous, and queer futuristic thought.