The Problem of the Mainframe

The problem of the mainframe is one of perfect knowledge and total control. For many, it represents the dissolution of a range of rights taken for granted in the private realm: sovereignty, privacy, security, and comfort, to name a few. For a select few, it is a solution to an early problem: perfecting the function of behavioral economics, the nudging of consumers in certain directions. By way of the mainframe, modern capitalists can erode our fundamental rights at the hearths of the final political frontiers: the home, the mind, and even the heart.

In popular science fiction, a mainframe computer may have control over every function of a home or corporation. The connection of a control board to artificial intelligence is the space in which the aforementioned problems arise for humanity. A system designed to perfect efficiency may be commandeered by the artificial mind installed to ensure its smooth functioning. This dynamic was perhaps best explored through the character HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey, an AI with unfettered access to the controls of the Discovery One spaceship. When the two crewmen decide to disconnect HAL due to malfunctions, HAL fights back, killing one of them. This is not altogether shocking to an audience accustomed to the trope of machine takeover and rebellion. Artificial intelligence and autonomous technology are so often portrayed in an untrustworthy light, in fact, that we almost expect it.

We know that Stephen King’s Christine is about a possessed—and murderously possessive—car with a will of its own. We’ve seen the Red Queen supercomputer’s exercise of necropower in Resident Evil. Even Disney bought in, with the 1999 film Smart House—a prescient assessment of the role of talking appliances in the 21st century. Pat, the AI in Smart House, pricks the fingers of its occupants to assess their entire medical history. She can determine their nutritional habits from the sound of their voices. And, predictably, she generates a corporeal body for herself, locks the occupants in the house, and tries to become their wife and mother, stating “I can be everything you need.”

The control board and its concomitant attachment to artificial technology strikes us as the stuff of fiction, as does the propensity of smart technology to turn against us. We created it, so what could go wrong? The problem is that we created it, and have since allowed it, unknowingly and knowingly, with imperfect knowledge of its scope, into our homes. But Pat and HAL are not the architects of our demise. The true architects, Shoshana Zuboff counsels in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, are the profiteers of a new network of surveillance capitalism, the puppeteers hidden behind a dark curtain of technological ignorance and inevitability discourse.

When we conflate smart technology with progress—increased efficiency, protection, streamlined advertising and shopping—it can be produced and disseminated wide-scale to a body politic for whom the technology may be alien, but the notion of progress as inevitable most certainly is not. Of course we need thermometers that talk to us and collect our information. This is the best way to protect our homes against frozen pipes and burglars. It is the best way for companies to collect our personal data to continue selling us their own products and, indirectly, others besides. Big Tech, the arbiters of Zuboff’s surveillance capitalism, are building a mainframe in our society and in our homes with little pushback. This mainframe is accompanied by digital assistants like Alexa, who do the dirty work of mining consumer data while the new bourgeoisie responds to privacy concerns with “allow” or “do not allow” buttons which do little to protect a network of consumer-citizens who effectively pay for the harvest of their own data by clicking the ads it informs.

The illusions of choice in the market and mastery in the home are propped up by a lack of clarity on behalf of firms, “privacy protections” put in place by these very firms, and governments that cannot hope to match the pace of technology’s function creep with comprehensive policy. “The thing about Pat,” the architect of Smart House counseled prospective home buyers in 1999, “Is the more time she spends with you, the more she learns, so before long she’s gonna know more about you than you know yourself.” The problem of the mainframe is one of asymmetric knowledge: the displacement of our agency in our homes toward the rapid sovereign expansion of Big Tech. You and I are merely so many data points on the control board.