Electricity Consumption, Household Monitoring, and the Enterprise Form
Download PDFLevenda, Anthony M., Dillon Mahmoudi, and Gerald Sussman. 2015. “The Neoliberal Politics of ‘Smart’: Electricity Consumption, Data Analytics, and Ubiquitous Financialization.” Canadian Journal of Communication 40 (4) (November): 615-636. doi:10.22230/cjc.2015v40n4a2928
Abstract
This article investigates how digital technologies in the energy sector are enabling increased value extraction in the cycle of capital accumulation through surveillant processes of everyday energy consumption. We offer critical theory (Gramsci, Foucault) and critical political economy (Marx) as a guide for critical understanding of value creation in ICT through quotidian processes and practices of social reproduction. In this regard, the concept of the “prosumer” is extended beyond notions of voluntary participation in Web 2.0 to the political economy of energy use. Within this broad framework we investigate national and local level “smart grid” campaigns and projects. The “smartening” of the energy grid, we find, is both an ideological construct and a technological rationalization for facilitating capital accumulation through data collection, analysis, segmentation of consumers, and variable electricity pricing schemes to standardize social practices within and outside the home. We look at BC Hydro as one illustration of where such practices are being instituted.
Summary
And given the enormous and egregious liberties that the National Security Agency has in fact taken in gathering data on citizen telephone, email, and website usage, there is little reason to doubt that federal authorities are already doing the same thing on a massive scale with regard to household electrical usage.
We end by arguing that the smart grid makes households pay twice. Residents pay for electricity, and then the utility pulls value out of the behavioral data that same paid service produces. That data is free “identity labour.” It feeds three things: panoptic oversight of specific households, segmentation for targeted marketing, and possible state profiling, with the NSA revelations as our warning. We also turn the climate case for smart meters against itself. Data sold to marketers could lead to more energy use, not less. And the savings from managing demand mostly flow to the utility instead of being passed on to households.
The smart grid fuels an exploitative and more alienating relationship in the realm of social reproduction wherein value is created in the quotidian use of energy and extracted in the accumulation of data and subsequent analysis that is not only ‘free,’ but also gained through a service consumers are charged for, electricity.
Because most people don’t act like the “rational economic actors” these systems assume, smart metering works as disciplinary power. It punishes people financially and socially through norms set outside the public sphere. Earlier, we push the privacy point into constitutional ground: if home electricity use can be read, it becomes a kind of unintended speech, which threatens both Fourth Amendment protection and the right not to speak. The end result is not a smarter grid but “smart” neoliberal subjects, rebuilt as calculating managers of their own homes.
Note: Feature image by Loudmouth Printhouse an Ottawa based, artist run, printing cooperative. The image is the cover image for the print edition of the Canadian Journal of Communication Vol 40, No 4 and is used here with permission.