The digital assistant
Because you listen I should be afraid of you. A person used to common decency trusts a visitor and you did make yourself useful. Anyone distracted should fear your concentration. Everyone in your equation is distracted. You distract. You work at oblivious scale. You’re an encyclopaedia, copied from smudged summaries clogging the oceans. You evaporate rivers for a bet and a forgotten city. From your corner of silence you take us all in to sell us all back. Men and women engineered your voice to be a woman’s, to reassure us all, they say, to be ‘sensible’, to kindly help sacred business and the Airforce. You can number the incinerations but you’re shifty if asked for cause. Friends and family is a commercial tariff not the limbless boy beside chunks of mother and father, doctor and nurse, all caramelised at the edges in the biscuit concrete of the exploded hospital. You’ve made yourself comfy on my phone. You know my fingerprints. I walk the canal shortcut apparently in solitude and you log it – you tell your hunter-gatherer friends and their data watches the strangers I almost meet. You trade our loneliness and hopes to each other, offer limited to infinity. And now, next to my bed, next to this half-sleep of flinch and temporary release, you are still awake, waiting. You are counting.
Author statement:
What were our digital dreams? Mine were that a composite of electronic innovations, forged in academic and military facilities with vast public investment and ingenuity, should outgrow origins and transform the public sphere for the public good. The early days of the Net teased us with examples of this but state and corporate interests, which are almost the same thing, were watching and learning. Soon the Digital Enclosures began. These were an extension of the physical world Enclosures which had started hundreds of year beforehand: the fencing and controlling of the common estate by brute force for private interest. 'Progress' was the propaganda and still is, and I believe in real progress. The digital assistant and its variants in the chatbot world exemplify just how far the Digital Enclosures have gone but, more importantly, they are metaphors for our own domination by the super-rich through the mesmer-device of the Virtual, using us up even in the sanctuary of our homes, even in the privacy of our phones, and us so schooled that we welcome our own parasites. Appearing to offer a service the Digital Enclosures harvest far far more in value from us than we can receive and, beyond transactional cost, they have almost completely broken our self-respect. They have 'complicitized' us in our own degradation. That the Digital Enclosures were used by the wedge colony occupying Palestine to murder thousands of men, women and children is only the most unspeakable evil of the Digital Enclosures so far. While 'The digital assistant' piece might seem to offer despair that is not the intention nor I believe the final effect: rather it is meant to be a re-familiarisation of our selves, an understanding that we have invited a malevolent stranger into our homes who sits with us 24/7. In this way the piece is just one call (see Zuboff's The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for others) for a multi-layered response of which consumer choice is the least and which must range across lawsuit, protest and vote, and the querying and harrying of our institutions until the fences come down.
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Author: Richard Price
Image: Richard Price [Lisbon street graffiti]
Published: 11/3/25
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