The Aware Home was designed as a closed loop controlled by its occupants

Evidence

All of this was expressed in the engineering plan. It emphasized trust, simplicity, the sovereignty of the individual, and the inviolability of the home as a private domain. The Aware Home information system was imagined as a simple “closed loop” with only two nodes and controlled entirely by the home’s occupants. Because the house would be “constantly monitoring the occupants’ whereabouts and activities… even tracing its inhabitants’ medical conditions,” the team concluded, “there is a clear need to give the occupants knowledge and control of the distribution of this information.” All the information was to be stored on the occupants’ wearable computers “to insure the privacy of an individual’s information.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 30

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘closed loop’ ideal directly contrasts with the later machine processes of chapter 2+ (behavioral surplus extraction); this is the innocent precursor ideal. — connects to: Early smart-home designers assumed occupants would own the knowledge their homes generated — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 29; Georgia Tech’s 2000 Aware Home prototype embedded context-aware sensors in a house. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 28

Broader Connections

• Georgia Tech’s 2000 Aware Home prototype embedded context-aware sensors in a house. #expands (0.85) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 28