Reading the Room: Messy Contradictions in the Datafied Home Available to Purchase

This essay draws on the artwork LAUREN by Lauren Lee McCarthy to discuss opaque forms of datafication in smart home assistants. The artwork exemplifies the technological creepiness as characterized in this edited collection through the ways in which it effectively disturbs the prevailing logics of human-machine binaries. Through the theoretical concept of algorithmic intimacies, the essay reveals the messy contradictions of the datafied home and challenges technodeterministic dreams of outsourcing sociopolitical issues to algorithmic systems.