Recently, Apple Computer, Inc. has branded the privatization of the idea of the commons, by renaming the retail Apple stores as “Town Squares“[1]. In Apple’s definition, these “Town Squares” are where people will gather, talk, share ideas, and watch movies, all within Apple’s carefully curated, minimalist designed, chrome and glass boxes. In this scenario, Apple’s “Town Square” is tidy, spartan, and most critically, privatized. This isn’t new behavior, however, what is new is the context within which Apple is able to do this, from both inside of shopping malls, and from retail locations on Main Streets. Applin (2016) observed that private companies are collecting and replicating community through their networks and communications records [2]. Madrigal (2017) observes that  “the company has made the perfect physical metaphor for the problem the internet poses to democracy” [3]. This article provides a discussion of what happens and what we forfeit in these hybrid gathering places between Internet usage and privately owned spaces; and how these hybrid spaces have become enabled in the first place.

During the 1980’s and 1990’s, the American public witnessed and participated in the privatization of public space through the shopping mall, a privately owned conglomerate of retail stores located in a single place, usually away from the “Main Street” in a downtown area. Shopping malls were located in places where space was available, land was less expensive, and people were further away from a downtown. As shopping malls became centralized shopping spaces, downtown “Main Street” stores lost revenue and many shopkeepers could not compete with the prices offered at shopping malls, or the proximity to so many other businesses. An outcome of the popularity and usage of shopping malls by the public, was that they were public spaces within private spaces and as such, people’s rights were limited depending upon the policies of the shopping mall. This was a quiet, barely noticed outcome of where we shifted our attention and participation, and as surveillance equipment became more available and cameras became installed in malls, we often unknowingly participated in new ways for malls to record our behavior and habits, and to monitor us. As we began to use mobile devices enabled with cameras, we started to participate in monitoring malls and the people within them, as we photographed and cataloged our lived experiences. We also began to move more, and as technologies became more enabling, to shop online.

For those and other reasons, the shopping mall hasn’t sustained continued growth. Many malls have closed or gone into disrepair, and others have seen a downturn in businesses wanting to support them. It’s a complex web of retail vs online shopping, combined with how fuel and driving patterns have been changing. As a result of these new factors, walkable cities and their associated downtown real estate has become once again in vogue, but with caveats. In particular, the mall stores have now been renting spaces on Main Streets, with their economic leverage to price out local business, and this creates fusions of public space and the “mall sensibility” (e.g. a conglomerate business model, often based on extremely advanced supply-chain automation and customer profiling data capabilities and soon to be driven by Artificial Intelligence capabilities).

With shopping malls, the privatization of public space happened in the physical space of the mall, but the outcome of how our behavior has changed is now within the public spaces of our communities, as we rely more and more upon communications technologies to maintain our social networks. As we automate, we are shifting our conversations, relationships, messages, and preferences to the private control of companies whose interest is not in maintaining our community or its health and well-being, but rather to increase their knowledge of us, so that they may provide more targeted advertising, better “services” that we will pay for, and to enable control over our communications in new ways.

What this means for communities is that community knowledge of the local locale, which is built over time in a community via social relationships, cooperative efforts, and group awareness is becoming individualized and commoditized. This is happening simultaneously as Main Streets are becoming “automated” through participation in the reconstruction of the shopping mall’s corporate influence into community.

When Apple rebrands (privatizes) the “Town Square,” their corporate desires and objectives take precedence over people within that space. The ethics questions and concerns of how Apple will use unproven, experimental, biometric technology such as facial-recognition [4], can be overlooked with the framework of a private “Town Square” where public experience is curated.

In the Apple “Town Square,” all is known and controlled by Apple and any technology that could benefit from ethics oversight (or at least some governance review) could be perceived to be bounded within Apple’s domain, which includes servers located out of town or perhaps out of country, and within a store that is at base, a private corporate space accountable to itself and its shareholders.

In the Apple 1984 Super Bowl advertisement [5], men and women with shaved heads wearing grey uniforms are marching through space age chrome and glass minimal tunnels while a “Big Brother” type of authoritarian figure talks to them across a screen. What he says from various monitors, as the people assemble in a similarly outfitted auditorium is:

Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause[6].

With the rebranding of “Town Squares” into privatized Apple stores, it becomes apparent that Apple is transforming its retail spaces into “a pure garden of ideology—where each worker may bloom, secure from the pests purveying contradictory truths.”

Apple isn’t the only one. Amazon pushed community bookstores out of business with competitive pricing online and are now opening physical bookstores in communities [7]. In these spaces Amazon sells books, but they also do so utilizing vast data networks, which include many human reading preferences and order histories.

In Amazon Go and the Erosion of Supermarket Sociability [8] and in Deliveries by Drone: Obstacles and Sociability [2], I examined how automation is replacing human contact and interchange and within those frameworks, I question whether or not community knowledge is passed along, or becomes owned by the various private enterprises, who are controlling the communication around and about transactions. Gas stations are privately owned hubs of community knowledge. Where I live in Silicon Valley, gas stations are beginning to be replaced by office buildings, and developers who desire corner lot real estate in a land strapped area, are willing to invest in changing the urban landscape. In my neighborhood alone, three gas stations have been closed and developed into office properties. It is not necessarily a bad outcome to develop gas stations, for it is an indicator that better energy sources are being adopted. However, it does mean that the small corner gathering and community knowledge outposts in some areas (even if privately owned) are being developed in new ways that remove their function and replace it with more refined and harder to access gathering points.

When we stop talking to each other in a community and default to automation or removed accessibility, we are forfeiting part or all of our community knowledge, homogenizing it, and offering it to private control. Data mining and machine learning will begin to track more and more of our community spaces, and our public rights in digital space combined with what we have in physical spaces will change our relationships and the way we choose to express our opinions and beliefs.

References

[1]Apple Computer, Inc. 2017. Town Square.

[2] Applin, S. 2016. Deliveries by Drone: Obstacles and Sociability. In The Future of Drone Use (Custers, B. editor). Springer. T.M.C. Asser Press, The Hague. Oct. 16, 2016.

[3] Madrigal, A. 2017. The Great Thing about Apple Christening Their Stores, “Town Squares.” The Atlantic. Sept. 13, 2017.

[4] Applin, S. 2017. Paying with our Faces: Apple’s FaceID. Savage Minds. Sept. 23, 2017.

[5] Apple Computer, Inc. 1984. Apple 1984 Super Bowl Commercial Introducing Macintosh Computer (HD) via Robert Cole. June 25, 2010.

[6] Wikipedia. 2017. 1984 (Advertisement).

[7] Blumenthal, E.2017. While Barnes & Nobles close, Amazon is opening real live bookstores. USA Today. May 24, 2017.

[8] Applin, S. 2016. Amazon Go and the Erosion of Supermarket Sociability. Savage Minds.

I recently finished my Ph.D. As a present, a friend of mine gave me a hand. Not help, which he had done during the process, but rather a battery-powered automated hand, cut off at the wrist, similar to that of Thing, the Addams Family’s servant from TV and film. In part of my thesis, and my research on automation, I’ve looked to Thing as a metaphor for IoT software automation. Thing, on TV, is a trusted friend who builds relationships with family members and can negotiate with others on their behalf. In fiction, and the representation of fiction, Thing works beautifully and embodies what a smart agent could be. It is aware of its surroundings, it builds trust. It connects people. Thing is a keeper of local knowledge. The Applin and Fischer (2013) Thing agent, is a software construct using deontic logic to encourage and support human agency, building trust in a relationship based context.  The hand my friend gave me moved on a fixed path for several seconds, and then stopped until its button was pushed again. It looked like Thing, but it was only a physical representation, a simulation of physical form. In automation, data collection is not the same as building relationships, and community knowledge cannot easily be derived from quantitative Big Data. This is one of the more serious problems with Amazon Go.

Amazon Go is a grocery store concept that allows people who have activated the Amazon Go app on their mobile phone, to walk through an “authentication” turnstile into an Amazon Go supermarket. Once inside, people can “grab” what groceries they want or need, and walk out the door, without needing to check out, because Amazon’s “computer vision, sensor fusion, and deep learning” will calculate what people take, and charge them accordingly via the app. Amazon Go has a video on their website that explains all of this, and shows people “grabbing and going” with their groceries, stuffing them into bags or just holding onto them, and walking out. In the Amazon Go video, no one is shown talking to each other.

On the surface, Amazon Go may seem ideal to people who need food and lack time. Supermarkets are a mess. The current market I go to has long checkout lines as well as a huge navigation problem. Mostly the navigation problems are due to online shopping service workers, who are tracked and clocked and thus rush carts around the store to fulfill orders amidst others operating at a different pace (similar to what we will start to see as more autonomous vehicles join us in more numbers on the roads). This may not be any different for Amazon Go. People might prefer a store with no check out, but might take their time shopping and browsing and block progress for those harder core grabbers and goers. Amazon Go seems to be turning shoppers into mini versions of the Amazon order picking robots, clearly trying to leverage their warehouse technology to apply to grocery shopping. However, Amazon doesn’t seem interested in building trusted relationships with shoppers as Thing—if Thing were real. In Amazon’s world, shoppers are tracked, and measured and their data is reported back to Amazon, who isn’t sharing it for anyone’s benefit but Amazon’s. People’s bodily motion, response rate, etc. will be tracked as well, which is a huge forfeiture of privacy.

Amazon Go’s focus on “grab and go” seems to be about time savings. This is not unexpected, as Amazon has demonstrated more than a little Quantitative focus (bias). Amazon’s rush to quantify and automate has seemingly depleted its ability to examine both its impact on society, and its own limitations. Amazon does not demonstrate prioritizing people, or the personal side of automation and agency. The main metric that Amazon has focused on is saving people time, which has somehow evolved to be the thing to save, based on early manufacturing models of assembly line efficiency. It isn’t clear if Amazon Go is considering what the “grab and go” action does—does it train behavior on an aggregate scale? Does it have the potential to create long term damage to communities, as sociability is removed from the shopping experience?

Grabbing and going seems to be a revisited human theme in current society. It’s popular with toddlers, and has a history for adults as well. Through the ages, humans have plundered and looted as a “reward” of war; to make ends meet; and/or to enrich their own situation at the expense of those who are deemed to have more than enough. What is new is how it has resurged. A current trend in burglary is “grab and go.” Certain stores are targeted over others, and Apple stores are particularly vulnerable. The Burlingame, CA Apple store was recently robbed three times in this way, twice within four days. In about 10 seconds, 3 to 5 robbers entered an Apple store, untethered and grabbed devices on the tables closest to the front door, and ran out. In New York, a man “grabbed” an 86 pound bucket of gold flakes worth $1.6 million dollars off the back of a truck, and walked down 48th Street with it. “Grab and Go” is clearly a time saving strategy.

What robbers are doing with “Grab and Go” in each case is exploiting a vulnerability in a system—preying on predictable social interaction, or finding a loophole where there is no local surveillance. (We’ve seen other exploits of the same type , such as what happened on 9/11.) Exploiting vulnerabilities in a system allows for certain types of innovation, as well as exploitation. In innovation, Amazon Go is enabling human agency for ease of product procurement, while saving time for individuals, however this may be coming at the expense of the community group in a broader way, as it simultaneously exploits individuals for their behavior patterns.

Marketplaces throughout human history have been a vehicle for trading commodities, and one of their main functions has been to create a venue for people to exchange information and ideas, and to socialize. This social exchange is what enables us to cooperate with each other in broader ways outside of the marketplace. Additionally, because vendors interact with so many people in the community, those working in the marketplace are the keepers of community knowledge—the understanding in a holistic (or close to) way of the health of the community writ large.

In moving the marketplace to a commodified and quantified framework, Amazon has removed the sociability of the marketplace, which is a vehicle for both community cooperation, and the qualitative data of a community’s well-being, replacing it with its sole ownership of the aggregate of individual quantitative data. Amazon Go will be activated without any consideration of its impact to the community it will be deployed upon. Furthermore, the community knowledge that comes from trusted human relationships will now be seemingly “created” by analyzing Big Data algorithms, which will not produce anywhere near the same result—without broader contextual knowledge. Community knowledge is local and specific. It is also critical to the way that people cooperate and survive in their communities.

The power of Amazon Go is that it is creating a marketplace for people with time constraints and mobile phones, which is just about everyone. The problem is that in doing so, Amazon Go will be contributing to changing community structure even further than the advent and broad usage of mobile phones, and soon to be other autonomous based services. As we’ve migrated away from our local locales, relying more and more on our networks for community knowledge, we too, “grab and go” information and data, applying it only to ourselves and our lives. The problems arise when we need to communicate and cooperate in our local locale, but have a network that is distant and distributed, or based solely on quantitative data.

[1] Sally A. Applin earned her Ph.D. in Anthropology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, UK, working with the Centre for Social Anthropology and Computing (CSAC) where she researches the changing relationship between humans and algorithms, the impact of technology on culture, Maker culture, leading technologies, and the outcomes of network complexities as modeled by PolySocial Reality (PoSR). Sally holds a Masters degree from the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU (ITP), and a BA in Conceptual Design from SFSU. Sally has had a career in the science museum design, computer software, telecommunications, innovation, insight, and product design/definition industries working as a Senior Researcher, and Senior Consultant. Sally is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, and Associate Editor of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine (Societal Impacts Section), a member of IoT Council (a think tank for the Internet of Things (IoT)), and a board member of the Edward H. and Rosamond B. Spicer Foundation.