Smart Homes and the New White Futurism

This article critiques the consumer technology industry's promotion of IoT smart home devices through a concept called “new white futurism.” Drawing from scholarly literature, marketing discourse, archival research, and CES observations (2014 and 2018), the study argues that smart homes are no longer imagined as labor-free utopias. Instead, they now represent data-driven tools for managing work/life balance, particularly in white, middle-class, heteronormative settings. The author demonstrates how corporate tech cultures reproduce racialized and gendered power structures through devices framed as neutral tools of domestic efficiency. The article concludes by calling for a reimagination of technological futures through Afro, Indigenous, and queer futurisms.

This article critiques the consumer technology industry's promotion of IoT smart home devices through a concept called “new white futurism.” Drawing from scholarly literature, marketing discourse, archival research, and CES observations (2014 and 2018), the study argues that smart homes are no longer imagined as labor-free utopias. Instead, they now represent data-driven tools for managing work/life balance, particularly in white, middle-class, heteronormative settings. The author demonstrates how corporate tech cultures reproduce racialized and gendered power structures through devices framed as neutral tools of domestic efficiency. The article concludes by calling for a reimagination of technological futures through Afro, Indigenous, and queer futurisms.