Interlude: Smart Homes Available to Purchase

This interlude engages technologies that constitute the smart home by returning to the idea of home itself as a technology. Hometech, which increasingly sells privacy as a commodity, produces a distinction between the inside and the outside even as it automates, manages, and makes more efficient the intimate business of social reproduction, rendering people and their activities into data. Elaborating on privacy as a racialized and racializing right, this interlude argues that privacy is an inadequate framework for understanding what home means. In doing so, the interlude invites readers to imagine alternate visions of home that center collectivity, mutuality, trust, and struggle.