Tag: smart device

Amazon Dash Button (2015-2019)

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In March 2019, Amazon announced that their Amazon Dash Button would be discontinued, almost four years after its launch in summer 2015.

In Amazon’s own words, the Dash was “a Wi-Fi-connected device that reorders your favourite item with the press of a button”. Crudely, they were small, plastic, key fob-like objects, branded for each specific product, with a single button, that when pressed, sent a pre-programmed order to Amazon, to be automatically processed, packaged, dispatched and delivered. Or, as YouTube product reviewer RadRider33 puts, an “IoT Clicky Thingy“

But for those of us that missed out, what did we miss out on, and what would an obituary of the Dash tell us about the way we consume, digital infrastructures and the wider workings of the Internet of Things?

Original image source: Amazon (now removed)

The low-res physical form of the Dash appears to align with its limited functionality. For the user, once connected to Wi-Fi and set up with a specific product and order quantity, the Dash served one purpose: to order more of that product. To help us buy detergent, coffee and toilet paper without “…even hav[ing] to think about it’,’ according to Daniel Rausch, vice president of Amazon’s smart home division. And as long as we didn’t mind a house peppered with logo-mania, the convenience of push-button shopping was worth it.

For Amazon, the benefits were less obvious, and often decoupled from what was officially declared (Easterling 2014).

The Dash secured Amazon a physical presence in a consumer’s home, ensuring return purchases and preventing competition. It also mitigated any risk of items staying in virtual baskets, un-checked-out, by simplifying the task to one action (or as Bruno Latour might suggest, by enforcing the desired program and removing the risk of anti-program (Latour 1991)).

More critically still, every time detergent was ordered, Amazon gained valuable insights, building a data-profile of the consumer’s purchasing behaviours, needs and wants (Greenfield 2017). This, when layered over data harvested from other smart devices, and coupled with that of other users, contributed to a topographical landscape of information resource.

A node in an ever-growing interconnected network of smart devices and systems, known as the Internet of Things (IoT), the Dash offered both the promise of connectivity and intelligence, as well as convenience and simplicity. But just as Adrian Mackenzie describes the “fantasy of the freedom of Wi-Fi” (2005), the promises of IoT too obscure the complex systems and structures it is predicated on and embedded within – the algorithms, privacy violations, environmental impacts, manufacturing standards, supply chains and labour conditions (Latour 1994, Star 1999).

The Dash, and many of its peers, ancestors and descendants in the genealogy of IoT, are less facile push-button, more corporate Trojan horse.

Now, the Dash buttons live digitally, outmoded by Amazon’s own product subscriptions and smarter devices like Alexa and Echo, which, with their wider reach into user data, are even harder to quantify in terms of their role in the IoT, and exploitation of technological opacity in the pursuit of maximum profit (Bridle 2018).

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