Core77

Subversive, Adversarial Product Design: Alexagate Add-On Blocks Amazon Echo From Listening In

This is like a design school graduate thesis, but it's real

By Rain Noe - July 27, 2020

in Object Culture

It's insane to me that anyone would bug their own house for the convenience of shopping with your mouth. Yet Amazon had sold over 100 million Alexa-enabled devices by January of last year; combined with Apple's HomePod and Google Nest, millions of homes have offered better self-surveillance than the NSA could've cooked up in their wildest dreams.

Now MSCHF, a subversive company that creates viral moments and products (for the former, that "Keep your finger on the app" contest; for the latter, Jesus Shoes, which were Nike sneakers filled with Holy Water), is taking on the Amazon Echo. Their Alexagate product, which debuts today, is like a hat that sits on the Echo and jams it on-command with ultrasonic waves.

Like a good design school graduate thesis, Alexagate comes with a manifesto. Here's an excerpt:

The Amazon Echo records everything it hears in your home, 24/7, and archives it to Amazon's cloud storage.

The Always-On Evil Microphone is cartoonishly villainous yet wholly unsurprising. Perhaps you don't subscribe to the notion that Facebook always listens through your phone's mic, but ask yourself at least this in all honesty: Do you think the Echo "mute" button really does anything?

Alexagate is an adversarial retrofit. It is useless without the context of an Amazon Echo, in the same way that a phone case is useless without a phone. Unlike a case, meant to preserve the device it holds in as close to a factory-direct state as possible—or, variably, to compensate for poor cell network receiver architecture, or to shore up the hubristically poor structural integrity of a too thinly milled aluminum unibody - Alexagate specifically hamstrings the Echo manufacturer's intent.

The Amazon Echo has one fatal flaw, that is (still) shared among all Internet Of Things devices: It is a physical object. This inescapably allows users certain affordances-among them that the Echo can be forced to interact with other physical objects. There may be No User Serviceable Parts Inside, but conversely, there can always be a company-inaccessible part on top.

Alexagate is hardware hacking to reduce functionality. Though "human-centered design" is at this point a meaningless jargon term to fill space in decks and design firms' About pages (Alexagate's relationship to humans is up to the user), we might at least term it "anti-corporate design." Alexagate retrofits UX to meet a different set of priorities.

Perhaps the talking toaster is now an inextricable part of the human futurist psyche. So too, we hope, are the tools to break it.

This is fantastic stuff.

The $99 device is up for pre-order here.

o

Favorite This
Q
5

Comment

Comments

Ivan Kontselidze

4 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

bjoernkarmann.dk/project_alias
Would be cool if you sited more stuff in your articles. I personally find that useful

!Report as spam
Michael DiTullo

4 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

Having worked on a few products that integrate these voice platforms I have decided not to keep any in our home... which is likely the best solution :-) I know a few engineers from those product development programs who have made the same decision.

!Report as spam
Richard Kuchinsky

4 years ago

Z

Z

Reply

I read the whole article and still don't understand what it is supposed to do.

!Report as spam
- Nathan D.
  
  Richard Kuchinsky
  
  4 years ago
  
  Z
  
  Z
  
  Reply
  
  I think it's supposed to cost money and float in the ocean for all eternity.
  !Report as spam
- Frederick Fasola
  
  Richard Kuchinsky
  
  4 years ago
  
  Z
  
  Z
  
  Reply
  
  Its not something you would actually buy, its purpose is to highlight the absurdity of having an Alexa device in your home, and invite people to reconsider their relationship with the brands we interact with. Its a manifesto, a piece of art, a (actual) statement (that word has been so misused that we have forgotten what it actually means!!!).
  MSCHF is using design to remind us that we, as consumers have a choice. we can choose what we bring into our homes, but also, when companies like Amazon, Facebook, Apple and others overstep the mark by forcing us to accept features we don't want or need, or use the pretense of the service they offer to harvest data we don't want to share, we should not just accept it but seek to limit it, either through legislation ( like the EU GDPR regulations), through software (adblocks in browser, denying app permissions for microphones or webcams...) or as is suggested here, by an add-on that phisically limits the functionality of the device (even Mark Zucherberg has a post-it note covering his webcam....).
  Of course, here the mitigation is pushed to the extreme, rendering the original object basically useless!
  !Report as spam