The automated states, automated government, and self-automation of the ‘smart’ appliance: three questions about refrigerators

This essay considers the automation of the everyday through ‘smart’ domestic appliance, specifically the current regime of smart refrigerators. The essay revisits and rethinks perspectives about media by McLuhan, focusing particularly on his discussion of clothing, cars, clocks, light bulbs, and highways as ‘media’. The essay outlines a critical practice (a ‘critical refrigerator studies’), as a means of rethinking ‘media power’, through perspectives by Foucault about technologies of government and through perspectives by Otter about Liberal objects.