ABSTRACT
By the 1990s, the home was being heralded in the United States as a new utopia. Not for the first time, of course. It appeared that Alvin Toffler’s prediction a decade before of the “mass electronic cottage” was being realized on an altogether new scale. A trade magazine devoted entirely to the home-based e-business “explosion,” House of Business, was launched at the turn of the century. A lead editorial in an early 2001 issue of the magazine, entitled “The Bandwidth Revolution,” proclaimed:
While noting some of the “bugs” in the home connectivity social program, the editorial had the requisite spirit of the networking day, up-beat and down-to-earth at the same time. History, not to mention anachronism, is a thing of the past! The editorial continued:
This description of the free-flowing, electronically networked house is unusually similar to that of the pre-industrial town house-with workers and others circulating in and out day and night, and work and leisure running parallel and often simultaneous courses. Only the family and privacy had not yet acquired their objective status and significant connection to each other (Rybczynski 1986). Thus, the difference of today’s home “revolution” is precisely the family, as the editor of House of Business notes in the closing lines of the editorial:
The propaganda of networked home e-business is fomented through an appeal to the privatized family, on the one hand, and social (that is to say, socio-spatial) equality on the other. Located somewhere between the desirable and necessary reproduction of the family and the democratic space of social equality, I am arguing, is the contemporary (hidden, invisible) homeworker. Neither free from familial responsibility, nor with immediate access to democratized space, the homeworker finds herself in the very place where she is purported to be most safe, most free, and most respected: at home. Only she’s not really there, or not yet, or not enough. The Enlightenment discourse of social equality serves here not only to obfuscate the realities of home-based work; it also reinforces the value of the disappearance of the antediluvian industrial economy and its social woes. On the other hand, in the ghostly re-imagining of the broadband home, the pre-capitalist town house meets the modernist family in an open space, flowing with people and work, and effectively erasing the nineteenth century’s ideological and material separations of home and work, private and public, production and reproduction-if not also the sexes and races.
