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## Wakewordlessness

Wakewords were never going to last. They were always a trojan horse, designed to inveigle voice assistants into our homes and machine listening into our daily existence via a fantasy of consent. Their tendency is to disappear. In the future, machine listening will be wakewordless. Much of it is already. The smart city in particular is always listening; though the distribution of this listening is heavily stratified by, for instance, [race and class](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/gun-violence-police-shotspotter/). ![Urban gunshot detection systems](audio:static/audio/lawrence-shot-spotter.mp3) like [Shot Spotter](https://www.shotspotter.com/), and the microphones embedded in [CCTV cameras](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/08/privacy-comissioner-grave-concerns-listening-devices-moreton-bay-council-australia) and [street lights](https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/sensors/remote-sensing/cops-smart-street-lights), never sleep. Only personal devices retain the pretense. And not for long.
Wakewords were never going to last. They were always a trojan horse, designed to inveigle voice assistants into our homes and machine listening into our daily existence via a fantasy of consent. Their tendency is to disappear. In the future, machine listening will be wakewordless. Much of it is already. The smart city in particular is always listening; though the distribution of this listening is heavily stratified by, for instance, [race and class](https://www.codastory.com/authoritarian-tech/gun-violence-police-shotspotter/). ![Urban gunshot detection systems](audio:static/audio/lawrence-shot-spotter.mp3) like [Shot Spotter](https://www.shotspotter.com/),[^Abu Hamdan] and the microphones embedded in [CCTV cameras](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/feb/08/privacy-comissioner-grave-concerns-listening-devices-moreton-bay-council-australia) and [street lights](https://spectrum.ieee.org/view-from-the-valley/sensors/remote-sensing/cops-smart-street-lights), never sleep. Only personal devices retain the pretense. And not for long.

In response to the pandemic, the latest OS update to Apple Watch will include a [feature](https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-06-23/apple-wwdc-2020-ios-14-digital-key-and-hand-washing-arm-chips/12383124 "a watch that tells you when you can stop washing your hands") that uses "machine-learning models to determine motion, which appears to be hand-washing, and then use audio to confirm the sound of running water or squishing soap in your hands.” All this with a view to helping you "keep going for the amount of time recommended by global health organisations."

@@ -57,9 +57,10 @@ For such an ambient sensing environment to work, this very environment must be d

[^Mattern]: Shannon Mattern, ['Urban Auscultation; or, Perceiving the Action of the Heart' *Places* (2020)](https://placesjournal.org/article/urban-auscultation-or-perceiving-the-action-of-the-heart/)
[^Schuller et al]: LIBRARY, Schuller et al, COVID-19 and Computer Audition: An Overview on What Speech & Sound Analysis Could Contribute in the SARS-CoV-2 Corona Crisis (2020)
[^Szendy, Vetter]: LIBRARY, All Ears; The Architecture of Control
[^Szendy, Vetter]: LIBRARY, Peter Szendy, All Ears; Grant Vetter, The Architecture of Control
[^Sterne, Rice]: LIBRARY, Jonathan Sterne, “Mediate Auscultation, the Stethoscope and the ‘Autopsy of the Living’: Medicine’s Acoustic Culture,” Journal of Medical Humanities 2, (June, 2001): 115–36; Tom Rice “Learning to Listen: Auscultation and the Transmission of Auditory Knowledge,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. 1 (2010): 41– 61.
[^Goldenfein]: Jake Goldenfein, Monitoring Laws; Ken Alder, “A Social History of Untruth: Lie Detection and Trust in Twentieth-Century America,” Representations 80, no. 1 (November 1, 2002): 1–33, https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2002.80.1.1.
[^Wark]: LIBRARY, Capitalism is Dead
[^McQuillan]: LIBRARY, Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism
[^andrejevic]: Interview
[^Wark]: LIBRARY, McKenzie Wark, Capitalism is Dead
[^McQuillan]: LIBRARY, Dan McQuillan, Data Science as Machinic Neoplatonism
[^andrejevic]: Interview with Mark Andrejevic recorded on 21 August, 2020
[^Abu Hamdan]: Interview with Lawrence Abu Hamdan recorded on 13 September, 2020. See also Abu Hamdan, "H[gun shot]ow c[gun shot]an I f[gun shot]orget?" (2016), http://lawrenceabuhamdan.com/blog/2016/3/7/hgun-shotow-cgun-shotan-i-fgun-shotorget

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