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Author: Admin | 2025-04-27
The user of Amazon’s eavesmining platform, interaction is marked by an obligatory act of speech, an “incitement to discourse” (Foucault 1978: 17), directed to the Echo and Alexa and overheard by Amazon, which listens in from a position of silence but never speechlessness. Much like confessional discourse, I suggest that discourse enclosed by eavesmining processes exerts force on the user and surrenders the agency of domination to Amazon and third parties, a suggestion that is supported by my critical audit of EUAs. The recuperation of historical listening practices and techniques by eavesmining platforms expands discussion of auditory surveillance beyond issues of semantic listening. Specifically, the voice represents a biometric trait and can potentially be interpreted for behavioural, affective, and psychological variables. In a recent interview, Amazon’s VP of Alexa AI Prem Nataraja states that, in the future, he would like Alexa to respond to “mood, sentiment, feeling as expressed in your speech” (Nataraja 2018). This reality may lie just beyond the horizon since computational analysis of vocal expression has already been applied in non-commercial areas for the detection of affect and psychological conditions (González, Carter, and Blanes 2007; Mitra et al. 2015; Scherer et al. 2016). A sonic epistemology of surveillance supports the assertion that “computational politics are as much about psychology as about computing” (Stark 2018: 220). Indeed, eavesmining affordances appear to recuperate psychoanalytic listening practices (Reik 1958; Lagaay 2008). As Sigmund Freud’s pupil, Theodor Reik (1949: 136) writes: “It is not the words spoken by the voice that
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