Where once the suburbs were characterised by net curtains and the drone of lawn mowers, now they are defined by Ring doorbells. An unsleeping gaze is fixed on our gnomes and driveways, our children walking home and our midday deliveries. The houses have eyes now.
My street WhatsApp is populated with daily reports from neighbours’ doorbells – suspicious roofers, sinister car thieves at 3am, sometimes just a guy, standing by the wall, leaning oddly. The group buzzes frequently, too, with videos from other streets’ doorbells, images that have been forwarded so many times they have the weary sheen of photocopies. Watch out, the messages say, for men in hoods, men with bricks, men stealing packages from doorsteps, or, yesterday on our road, a doorstep itself.
I feel like the last person alive to remain disturbed by the many ways we continue to welcome surveillance into our domestic lives. It’s a rare home that hasn’t invited in an Alexa, or set their family’s phones to be tracked on small cartoon maps, or rigged up a doorbell camera over the front garden, despite a number of cases of, for instance, hackers peering into children’s bedrooms, and police asking for videos of neighbours, and Max Eliaser, an Amazon software engineer, saying Ring is “simply not compatible with a free society”. It seems that until recently, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos has been boosting his government’s attempt to build an increasingly invasive surveillance state, a task that, judging by his ringside seat at Trump’s inauguration, appears almost complete.
An aside, I guess: I can’t talk about Amazon and suburban delivery culture without quickly meandering into a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, which is the encroaching horror of our reliance upon delivery apps. Not only have they tricked us into accepting that something easy is actually difficult (few of us are truly unable to go to the corner shop for some bread, come on) and that our time is better spent working at the computer than slipping outside among the humans to buy our milk or to cook some noodles but, in doing so, and in encouraging us to make excuses for our choices, have made us prioritise our comfort over the safety of the drivers, who are made genuinely ill by their jobs. It’s perhaps an unpopular opinion, but increasingly I believe that ordering food online is awful for everybody involved – the driver is underpaid and insecure, the customer is ripped off, the food is unsatisfying and joyless, the interaction clumsy and imbalanced and life, real actual human life, is degraded all round for the sake of a tepid burger. When we argue for it, which we do, out of pride and laziness, we’re arguing on behalf of Bezos, who profits – both here and with the camera doorbells – from our self-imposed fears and growing passivity.
There are some benefits to having a camera running, sure there are (who doesn’t love watching their cat eat lunch?), but for me they pale violently beside the drawbacks, which shift and range in size and weight from hacking to hypervigilance. At the smaller end, I see on my street WhatsApp elderly neighbours’ increasing fear as they feel under siege from unknown invaders triggering the motion sensors and unexpected Amazon drivers loitering on the pavement. The idea of “Watching out” mutates into a state of agoraphobic voyeurism watching, not looking, and we all become immune to (or reliant upon) constant surveillance.
In 2019, Refuge reported that 72% of women accessing its services said they had been subjected to “technology-facilitated abuse”, and warned that the growing use of camera doorbells and smart speakers can provide perpetrators with more tools to harm victims. They’re an effective method of coercive control, for monitoring, spying and withholding power. Which is chilling, of course, but also potentially useful for everybody to think about as a way of interrogating our own relationship with this technology, and our own fractured scrabblings for control.
As more and more millions of internet-connected doorbells and devices are sold, the problems of mass surveillance become both more expansive and more intimate. Especially as we learn (and had confirmed with last week’s Channel 4 report on Gen Z’s doubts about democracy) that people between the ages of 13 and 28 are growing “more uncertain about who to trust”. The knowledge their parents are tracking them remotely, the knowledge their privacy is a myth, how does that contribute to this instability of trust? These pricks of paranoid light that watch them as they walk home, that broadcast a darkened street to their family’s phones, that make the world seem suspicious and full of dread simply by capturing a night scene through a fisheye lens, what impact does it have on their understanding of equality, or safety, or identity, or youth? Trust takes time to earn, but falls away in seconds.
And, of course, these doorbells are not simply peep-holes to look out of – as with internet-enabled speakers and internet-enabled trackers, these are devices that collect, analyse and share information. They’re not just cameras, they’re a threat to our mental health, our communities, our sense of self, our relationships and our privacy. While the net curtains of suburbia past accommodated peeking voyeurs, today’s suburbs are hung with portals. The watching goes both ways.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk
