I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants - Catalyst ...
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I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants Jason Toncic Montclair State University toncicj1@montclair.edu Abstract Recent advances in science and engineering have facilitated the development of artificial intelligence voice assistants. While this is true from a technical aspect, smart speakers and voice assistants did not develop in isolation from the rest of human society. The devices may be new, but the practices and patterns in their development and use are not. Using Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, I map homologous practices of smart speaker interaction onto historical conceptions of supernatural magic use. This structural comparison suggests that practices and patterns that were essential to magic use have re-emerged in smart speaker utilization in similar forms. Some of these practices are noteworthy for their homology alone. However, other homologous behaviors revive patterns of inequity that, in Western magical traditions, had privileged the traditionally educated man. The goal of this paper is to elucidate the ghost in the machine: the prejudiced social practices of supernatural magic that were asserted to be eradicated yet which are now, nevertheless, newly instantiated within our most cutting-edge devices. Keywords digital assistants, smart speakers, structural anthropology, magic, feminism Introduction Enter the sorcerer. He commands it to be light, and his surroundings illuminate. He demands protection, and an invisible sphere secures his home. He invokes his kin who lives hundreds of miles away, and a voice echoes in response throughout Toncic, Jason. 2021. “I Dream of Siri: Magic and Female Voice Assistants.” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2): 1–24. http://www.catalystjournal.org | ISSN: 2380-3312 © Jason Toncic, 2021 | Licensed to the Catalyst Project under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license
Original Research his room. And when he requires information from afar, he orders, “Siri, tell me the news.” Artificial intelligence voice assistants such as Siri and Alexa have become fixtures in homes, offices, and even classrooms. With a few words, people can turn on lights, ask about the news, play music, define words, create grocery lists, and arm security systems. However, few questions about the social implications and meaning have been asked about the prolific popularity of such smart speakers. Amazon reported in 2019 that over 100 million Alexa devices had been sold (Bohn 2019). Amazon, however, is just one of many companies offering a smart speaker voice assistant (e.g., Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google’s Assistant, Baidu’s DuerOS, Alibaba’s AliGenie, and Samsung’s Bixby). Voice assistant adoption may be partially attributable to individuals with physical disabilities who may benefit from voice assistants (Guo et al. 2019). However, there is scholarship that suggests the superficial promises of (voice-activated) technologies for individuals with disabilities are masking underlying systemic issues of access with the internet (Ellcessor 2017). Other research contends that AI technologies “have been repeatedly shown to produce biased and erroneous outputs” (Whittaker et al. 2019, 7). Furthermore, the majority of users are those without disabilities who can access other devices to perform these same tasks (such as using smartphones to control home security systems or play music). According to Matthew Hoy, “A voice assistant simply provides the bridge that allows users to issue commands verbally rather than via an app” (2018, 84). Thus, while some may prefer the vocal “bridge” that smart speakers facilitate, that alone does not appear to explain the saturation of voice assistants, nor does it provide insight into some of their unique characteristics—like the nearly universal feminization of the voice assistant. Perhaps it is how one interacts with smart speaker voice assistants that may explain their social appeal. In this vein, some scholarship has suggested that the anthropomorphic, interpersonal capabilities of digital assistants (i.e., the devices’ emulation of human behavior, see, for example, Guzman 2017; Turkle 2017) may be driving their adoption. Yet although the conversational aspects of present-day voice assistants can be astonishing, there are limitations. Voice assistants only intelligibly respond to particular queries and commands (Goksel-Canbek and Mutlu 2016). And although research has suggested that the first few hours of interaction with a new voice assistant are often uniquely conversational, long- term use of voice assistants eventually settles into predictable patterns of commands and questions (Sciuto et al. 2018). That is, during extended use of voice assistants, interactions become less like conversations between friends and more like imperatives given from master to servant. In fact, recent research has investigated whether the mismatch that occurs when a humanlike voice displays a lack of humanlike understanding may actually diminish consumer trust in voice 2 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research assistants (Hu, Wang, and Liu 2019). As the New York Times pithily opined, “If Alexa were a human assistant, you’d fire her, if not have her committed” (Manjoo 2015). Explanations of voice assistant popularity that center on humanlike emulation, then, require further consideration. I contend that smart speaker take-up is in part attributable to submerged social practices and rituals. As mentioned, the feminization of smart speakers—Alexa, Siri, and Cortana all interact with voices and names traditionally attributed to women—suggests technological devices, in this case voice assistants, are developed, whether knowingly or not, from and among the social values and belief systems of their creators. Indeed, patriarchal institutional structures (such as labor, investment, and entrepreneurship) often reinforce biased social values and belief systems (Brush et al. 2017). Several recent works have explored the issue of the marginalization of women by AI (Villa-Nicholas and Sweeney 2019; Noble 2018; Noble and Tynes 2016; Buolamwini and Gebru 2018), the gender- biased problem of speech assistants (Phan 2017; Bergen 2016), and how feminized voices are increasingly being used in surveillance capitalism (Woods 2018). However, an understanding of the subsumed gender roles within voice assistant technology does not alone provide a robust understanding of the proliferation of voice assistants. For better insight, we can turn to other, more esoteric social practices—which converge with gendered voice assistants in a surprising way. I speak, perhaps unexpectedly, of occult magic—particularly, the social practices around the enactment of magic spells. The subsumption of occult magic social practices within voice assistants has not been discussed before. After all, writing in 1917, social theorist Max Weber declared that the world had been “disenchanted,” suggesting that empiricism had drained society of its mystery, superstition, and magic (Jenkins 2000). Weber’s disenchanted world was a place of cold rationalization. Indeed, for a large portion of the Western academy, magic had been largely dismissed. In its place, science explained natural events, like lightning and magnetism. New technologies, such as the electric light, performed the formerly miraculous. Weber’s disenchantment assumed that a scientific zeitgeist had replaced magical belief systems, but this assertion has not held up. Magic and miracle continue to operate in society today. Take, for example, the preoccupation with occult magic in various fictional popular media (e.g., books, television, movies, video games, and trading card games). This seems apparent in sheer numbers: the word magic increased in relative use by nearly two and a half times in published English- language works from 1700 to 2019, as visualized by Google Books Ngram Viewer (see Figure 1). Based on this graph alone, the premise that the world has abandoned the idea of magic in its social and cultural systems appears to be mere 3 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research Figure 1: A visualization showing the increasing relative use of the word magic across the English- language corpus, compiled from published English-language texts from 1700 to 2019. Created with Google Books Ngram Viewer by author superstition. It should perhaps not be surprising that magical practices have reappeared in the ways that we interact with our technological devices. This paper follows theoretically in the tradition of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s (1963) structural anthropology. Structural anthropology, in brief, analyzes human cultural practices to discern homologous social and behavioral counterparts across different societies. The word homologous, in the structural anthropology tradition, refers to two human practices, beliefs, or artifacts that are temporally removed (and may appear to be distinct) yet nevertheless share similarities due to a subsumed historical or cultural connection. Building on the magical theory of Marcel Mauss ([1902] 2005) as well as the ethnographic studies of Alfred Radcliffe-Brown (1922), Bronisław Malinowski (1935), and Edward Evans-Pritchard (1937), Lévi-Strauss (1963) identified analogous practices in shamanic healing rights (of the Nambicuara in Brazil, the Zuni of New Mexico [US], and the Kwakiutl from Vancouver [Canada]) and contemporary psychoanalytic therapies of the 1960s. To Lévi-Strauss, both shamanic rituals and psychoanalytic practices appeared in their healing practices to offer a “sense of security that the group receives from the myth underlying the cure” (1963, 183). With this insight, Lévi- Strauss established magic as a fundamental component of structural anthropology. However, after the notable works of Daniel O’Keefe (1983), E. Fuller Torrey (1986), and William Covino (1994), only a limited number of modern scholars have focused on magic as it pertains to modern cultural practices. I contend that social practices deployed in the use of modern voice assistants are homologous to occult magical practices, particularly the casting of magical spells. This paper will explore the various homologues, beginning with logocentric (i.e., word-based) magic and then, separately, magic circles. Next, this paper will discuss the feminization of voice assistants by exploring the analogous feminization of magic, as seen in the demonization of witches. An examination of the media forerunners of the magical female voice assistant—personified as the 4 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research protagonists of the Western television shows Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie— will conclude this paper, which I believe demonstrates how insidious the unquestioned repurposing of magical social practices can be. Altogether, the homologous practices mapped in this paper suggest that magic plays a far more critical and foundational role in modern society than appears, and that magic is a means by which earlier prejudices are repackaged and repurposed for a new, technological age. Logocentric Word Magic Magic language (i.e., magic spells, logocentric magic) is perhaps the most well- known type of occult magic: it spans time periods, geographic locations, and cultures. For example, the Greek Magical Papyri, a collection of magical spells and recipes dating from the first century BCE to the fifth century CE, provided practitioners with explicit linguistic instructions (Betz 1990). According to the traditions of Jewish cabalism, clay statues could be brought to life by a rabbi who expertly chanted thousands of Hebrew words and then affixed the word emet (i.e., truth) onto the summoned golem’s forehead (Covino 1996; Mazlish 1995). Babylonian incantation bowls from the Middle East were engraved with spells to lure and then subdue evil spirits (Davies 2017). In Ethiopia, amulets called ketab (documents) or metshaf (book) were inscribed with magic text and illustrations (Chernetsov 2005). Grimoires like the approximately fifteenth-century Key of Solomon were filled with arcane incantations and charms requiring precise recitation under prescribed circumstances (Davies 2012). And according to the indigenous Laguna Pueblo tradition in New Mexico, tribal witches could perform magic through the act of storytelling (Silko 1977). In short, one can find instances of alleged word-based occult magic throughout the world. Sorcerers and sorceresses recite spells, chant incantations, and engrave amulets with words. Ontologically, alleged magical language taps into a supernatural power. Many societies and groups that have practiced magic trace the power of word-based magic to an originary language that can command the elements by employing the “true names” of things, creatures, and people (Covino 1994). To the more scientifically inclined, this is more likely to sound irrational. According to the traditions of post-Saussurean linguistics, a word and what it signifies are understood to be arbitrarily linked. Words have no power over nature, and there is no mythical language (e.g., John Dee’s fabled Enochian, the reputed language of the angels) that can harness supernatural power. In the absence of an actual magical language, voice assistants—housed in totemic-looking smart speakers—“enmagic” language. By installing a smart speaker voice assistant, consumers gain the legendary ability to speak and have their surroundings “magically” respond. Through a voice assistant, the spoken word is “enmagicked”: the smart speaker creates a zone in which spoken words control one’s surroundings. And like magic spells, which often follow a scripted 5 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research form, individuals interact with voice assistants by following a precise spoken formula. For one, each command must begin by announcing the name of the voice assistant itself (e.g., “Alexa”), much like the nature of some occult magic that ostensibly worked by directly naming (and thus harnessing) the power of a supernatural spirit. Then, individuals verbally issue some (pre-programmed) directive to the voice assistant, which then carries out its directions—that is, as long as the smart speaker can understand the individual who is speaking. Returning to occult magic, high illiteracy rates in pre-industrial society often restricted access to alleged magical spells to the educated, privileged few. In fact, the word grimoire (i.e., a tome with magical spells and formulae) etymologically developed alongside the scholar’s “grammar” book. Filled with words and symbols indecipherable to the commoner (e.g., Latin), the books must have appeared to contain magical spells: alleged sources of power rendered inscrutable by unknown languages (Davies 2012). Like magical language, smart speakers are not universally accessible. Smart speakers are significantly more likely to understand the accent of someone from an educated, industrial region than the accent of either a non-native speaker or people from rural, less wealthy areas (Harwell 2018). Lima et al. (2019) found empirical evidence of an “accent gap” in the way that voice assistants, specifically Siri and Alexa, understood linguistic commands in Brazil. Researching a similar phenomenon in the United States, Palanica et al. (2019) found that Siri and Alexa exhibited lower comprehension of speakers with foreign accents. Also in the US, Koenecke et al. (2020) reported a disproportionately high error rate in automated speech recognition for speakers of African American Vernacular English. The occurrence of errors extended beyond language variety or accent, however. One study found that YouTube’s automatically generated captions had significantly lower accuracy for women (Tatman 2017). Another study reported that young children struggled to convey orders to voice assistants (Sciuto et al. 2018). In short, language “enmagicked” by voice assistants is not accessible to everyone, for these devices have difficulty comprehending the orders given by non-native English-speaking adults, women, and children. The technological sorcerer default appears to be the adult white male. The homology between voice assistants and alleged magical spells may be interesting in and of itself. However, this paper suggests that establishing a homology has a greater purpose. Homologies facilitate critical analysis; they recast familiar practices in different lights. When in newer social practices (i.e., those associated with voice assistants) we see homologous older practices (i.e., those associated with magic spells), we would do well to remember that many social practices disadvantage certain groups, perpetuate stereotypes, and reify the power of certain types of people (see, for example, the exploration of magic and academic grammar in Toncic 2020). Magic language has a lengthy history of 6 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research supposedly granting power—power that has been, in some contexts, praised (e.g., as religious miracle) and in others vilified (e.g., as witchcraft). In both cases, the presumption of magical power alone was sufficient to cast the alleged practitioner in a certain light. Magic Circles Figure 2: The cover of the 1620 edition of Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, featuring a woodcut illustration of a demon coming up through a trapdoor summoned by Doctor Faustus’s incantation from within a magic circle. Public domain. 7 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research
In supernatural magical practice, language alone would rarely suffice to perform a
magical incantation, however. Magical words were often combined with other
practices—such as ingredients, musical cadences, or bodily movement—to
allegedly harness supernatural powers. One of the most common practices,
particularly in the Western occult tradition, was the inscription of and recitation of
spells within magic circles. This section will first introduce a brief history of magic
circles and then argue that, homologously, smart speakers have also instantiated
circular iconography.
In Christopher Marlowe’s (1995) sixteenth-century drama The Tragical History of
the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, the titular Doctor Faustus, having reached
the limits of worldly knowledge, seeks to gain magical power. To summon a
demon to access this unnatural sorcery, Doctor Faustus first created a magic circle
from within which he will invoke the evil spirit (see also Figure 2):
Within this circle is Jehovah's name,
Forward and backward anagrammatiz'd,
Th' abbreviated names of holy saints,
Figures of every adjunct to the heavens,
And characters of signs and erring stars,
By which the spirits are enforc'd to rise
(Marlowe 1592, 1.3.8–13)
Magic circles like those in Marlowe’s drama were thought to be nexuses of power,
and only within these circles did the spellcaster’s magic have any alleged effect.
Marlowe’s use of magic circles likely was inspired by grimoires such as the Key of
Solomon (likely dating from the 1400s), which gave explicit, detailed directions for
the construction of a magic circle (Davies 2012). According to those instructions—
which indicated writing the “holy Letter Tau” and the “four terrible and
tremendous names of God” while reciting the text of specific psalms—magic
circles were human-made special territories in which magic words gained
otherworldly power. Circular magical rites remained vivid in the public
imagination even after the Industrial Revolution. English painter John William
Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886) notably depicted a witch inscribing herself
within a magic circle (see Figure 3). A few years later in 1905, a group of
professional stage magicians in Britain founded The Magic Circle, an organization
dedicated to advancing the art of magic—a society still in operation today (The
Magic Circle 2021).
8 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021Original Research Figure 3: A witch draws a magic circle with her wand in John William Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886). Public domain. 9 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research Magic circles are not solely a Western phenomenon. Some of the earliest artifacts of magic circles were incantation bowls found in the Middle East dating from the seventh or eighth centuries CE (Davies 2017). These bowls were often inscribed with an Aramaic spell encircling a demon; they were intended to lure and trap evil spirits (see Figure 4). In the medieval Indian Tantric tradition, a circular vidyadhara yantra (or “wizard’s apparatus”)—inscribed with geometric shapes, illustrations, and written text—was believed to proffer supernatural magic such as warding off evil or preventing illness (Khanna 2005; White 2012). Figure 4: Discovered in Mesopotamia, this incantation bowl dates from the sixth or seventh century CE and depicts a demon surrounded by an Aramaic inscription. From the University of Pennsylvania’s Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, used under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license. Photographed by Marie-Lan Nguyen (2011). Circles are integral components of supernatural magic ritual as generative spaces of occult power, to the point that much magic was not thought to be possible 10 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research outside of a circle’s circumference. Likewise, smart speakers instantiate “enmagicked” zones in which “magical” words take on supernatural power. They do so in a way that, like occult magic, operates within a circular frame. Figure 5: An original illustration by author of concentric wavefronts emanating from a smart speaker. To simplify a technical understanding, smart speakers operate by means of emitted and received sound waves. Uninterrupted sound waves originating from the smart speaker expand outward in concentric wavefronts, but as they expand (and increase in circumference), their strength dissipates. Likewise, for any given command, there exists a circumferential zone wherein that command can be received. Thus, simple sound fields like those from smart speakers are homologous to magic circles (see Figure 5). That is, they create a perimeter within which magical words can operate; outside of the circumference, these words will not have the same effect. Furthermore, smart speakers by and large have a circular design aesthetic. Looking at the smart speaker units that house the voice assistants themselves, Amazon’s Echo and Echo Dot, Google’s Home and Home Mini, and Apple’s HomePod all have a cylindrical motif. The circular iconography further extends to the branding logos of the leading commercially available voice assistants today (see Figure 6). Notably, the circular iconography in logo design occurs in voice assistants that constitute over 99 percent of digital assistant usage in the United States at the time of writing (Olson and Kemery 2019). The reasoning behind the circular motif may be manifold, just like the adoption of the circle in occult practices may have competing rationales. The point is not what led to the use of the circle, but rather that in both homologous instances the circle instantiates logocentric power. As David Noble pointed out, “technology is not an autonomous force impinging upon human affairs from the ‘outside,’ but the product of a social process” (1978, 374). The social processes that result in technological developments and invention manifest in other ways, too. Homology 11 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research is one way to look across fields and social practices to better understand that technology is but one result of larger social processes. Figure 6: An illustration by author of brand logos for voice assistants commonly incorporate circular elements, a symbol that seems to suggest a nexus of power or command. 12 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research In summary, voice assistants operate through practices and patterns that homologously resemble those of occult magic. Smart speakers create concentric wavefronts, reminiscent of magic circles, wherein logocentric commands take on magical capacity. The icon of the circle also often appears in both the design of the smart speaker unit and in the logo of the voice assistant. The assertion of homology I make here is not that occult magic circles somehow cause or are generative of circles in smart speakers. Rather, the purpose is to draw attention to circles as generative spheres of power in both contexts. The circle may originate from heliotropic iconography representing the disc and energy of the sun, perhaps. Or it may be that, like William Stahl (1995) pointed out in the mid-1990s, technological discourse has assumed the language and iconography of magic and religion. Magic and technology indeed have a lengthy history, for computer systems have been known to borrow from the lexicon of the arcana (e.g., “sprites” and “daemons,” see Aupers 2010; Thompson 2020). But the point of interest is that, in two homologous practices wherein delimited zones offer a human actor the ability to use logocentric magic, both employ similar circular symbolism. This all said, voice assistants are not passive recipients of commands, nor are they value-neutral tools, like hammers, that do not convey a perspective. The next section of this paper will discuss the gendered voice assistant and its placement in the home. To this end, I consider the feminization of magic use and the portrayal of domestic magic in the 1960s US television shows of Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie. Resummoning Witches Western stage magic is, almost entirely, performed by men; female magicians are rare. There are numerous explanations for this phenomenon. For one, stage magic secrets were often shared in closed, male-only groups, such as at the Society of American Magicians, which had renowned magician Harry Houdini as one of its officers (Fetters 2013). The Magic Circle welcomed only men until 1991— the shift in policy toward inclusion seemingly incited by magician Fay Presto, who had been a member of the club first as a man and then was, at least initially, asked to leave when she publicly identified as a woman in 1986 (Fitzsimons 2014). In addition, the dearth of female magicians may be partially attributable to the fact that, for hundreds of years, women who were accused of magic would be categorized as witches and subject to execution (Fetters 2013; Lax 2015). Heinrich Kramer’s (1487) Malleus Maleficarum emerged in the late fifteenth century as the “authoritative” theological tool for the classification and extermination of witches (Summers 2012). This misogynistic work vilified women, asserting that black, harmful magic was practiced by female witches alone (Broedel 2003). As Brian Pavlac (2010) pointed out, even Kramer’s spelling of “Maleficarum” with an “a” instead of an equally acceptable “o” intimated that black magic was perpetrated by women. Published with the witchcraft- 13 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research recognizing Summis desiderantes affectibus papal bull by Pope Innocent VIII (1484) as its preface, the Malleus Maleficarum became influential in perpetuating future witch hunts—which resulted in, from modern estimates, approximately 40,000 executions in Western Europe and colonial North America between 1450 and 1750 (Gaskill 2010). Although this paper will focus on Western society, it is important to note that executions of women accused of sorcery continue in countries such as Syria (Mezzofiore 2015), Papua New Guinea (McGuirk 2013), Nepal (Shrestha 2010), Nigeria (Houreld 2009), India (Saxena 2007), and Tanzania (BBC 2003). In the West, witchcraft accusations were usually directed at poor, older women, especially those from marginalized groups (Covino 1994; Schnoebelen 2009). In 1688, for example, Ann Glover of Boston was accused of witchcraft and executed. The Reverend Cotton Mather concluded that Glover had been a witch because she was "a scandalous old Irishwoman, very poor, a Roman Catholic and obstinate in idolatry” (1702, 73). But Boston merchant Robert Calef, interpreting the situation quite differently, wrote in rejoinder that Glover was “a despised, crazy, ill- conditioned old woman” against whom the proof of witchcraft was “wholly deficient” (1700, 299). This critique was not taken lightly, and Calef’s critical book More Wonders of the Invisible World was openly burned in the yard of Harvard College at the behest of the school president, Increase Mather—Cotton Mather’s father (Dijon 1905). The takeaway from this miscarriage of justice is clear. Glover became a victim not because of what she allegedly did but rather who she was: an indigent, elderly woman who perhaps had a mental illness. A witchcraft accusation thus became a tool whereby occult magic was transmuted from a practice that allegedly granted power to one that would circumscribe behavior—particularly female behavior—since accusations of witchcraft could be deadly. To be accused of being a witch likely meant that one was viewed as an outsider. And when the outsider was accused of witchcraft, the adumbration of the insider became clearer. The outsider-as-witch depiction is evident in Waterhouse’s The Magic Circle (1886), which featured a barefoot woman encircling herself with a line drawn by her wand (see Figure 3). The witch in the painting was portrayed by Waterhouse as an outsider to contemporary, nineteenth-century Western culture. She has “the swarthy complexion of a woman of middle-eastern origin,” “her hairstyle is like that of an early Anglo- Saxon,” and “her dress is decorated with Persian or Greek warriors” (Fowle 2000, para. 2). The assignation of “witch” thus carried two simultaneously feuding definitions: on one hand, it signified an individual of alleged power, capable of bending the forces of nature to her will; on the other hand, the same term signified a woman on the fringes of society associated with uncommon practices or behaviors, whose sheer difference from others resulted in her association with the demonic. Consequently, avoiding the appellation of “witch” required a woman to be perceived as “normal” in society, which, in patriarchal Western culture, came to be synonymous with adopting the role of the domestic housewife. 14 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021
Original Research
Many women, though, were unhappy with paternalistic social constructs. Building
upon centuries of growing domestic dissatisfaction, Betty Friedan’s (1963) book
The Feminine Mystique inspired a wave of feminism in many women who had felt
restricted in their domestic family lives (Sullivan 2006). The next year, Friedan
brought her critique to television, writing that the contemporary woman was
portrayed as “a stupid, unattractive, insecure little household drudge who spends
her martyred, mindless, boring days dreaming of love” (Friedan 1964, 6). Only a
few months later, a magical television housewife appeared who could represent
their discontent—Samantha Stephens (portrayed by Elizabeth Montgomery) from
the sitcom Bewitched (1964–1972). Samantha, a witch capable of eldritch power
with a twitch of her nose, is not persecuted and executed as was wont of an earlier
era. She was instead encouraged to condemn her witch ancestry and refrain from
casting magic, all to please her mortal husband’s ego as the patriarchal
breadwinner. Some readers of Friedan (1963, 1964) might recognize in Samantha
their own condition: housewives who felt stymied within domesticity from
deploying their entire capability.
In one episode, Samantha’s husband, Darrin, injures himself by falling down a
flight of stairs. To facilitate his convalescence, Samantha argues that she should
use her magic to enchant their suburban home so that it will obey Darrin’s every
command.
Darrin: I've told you 100 times, I don't want any of that nonsense.
Samantha: You'd rather I ran up and down stairs all day?
Darrin: No, of course not.
Samantha: Then, Darrin let me have the house cooperate with you.
Darrin: Cooperate?
Samantha: Please, darling? It would be so much easier.
Darrin: Well, what am I supposed to do?
Samantha: Ask for something.
Darrin: Anything at all?
Samantha: Anything we've got. Do we have any bananas? All right.
Darrin: Banana, come, Darrin.
15 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021Original Research
Samantha: You don't have to sound like Tarzan.
(Barret, Saks, and Lupino 1965)
With her enchantment, Samantha proleptically conjured what today we might call
the smart speaker voice assistant. Although Samantha is capable of performing
magic with the twitch of her nose, Darrin must use language instead to command
the home—a subtle but important difference. The title of the episode, derived
from a crossword puzzle that Darrin completes while recovering, is “A is for
Aardvark.” Alphabet primers, in a similar “A is for” form, are common in children’s
English-language development (Crain 2000), a subtle reinforcement of the
linguistic turn of domestic magic in this 1965 episode.
Although this wish-fulfillment episode ends with a return to the norm (i.e.,
Darrin’s anti-magic pleas), it also offers a glimpse into domestic magic that long
predated the practices associated today with voice assistants and smart speakers.
That voice assistants Alexa, Cortana, and Siri have been gendered as women
suggests that the two competing forces of circumscribed female domesticity on
the one hand and magical wish-fulfillment on the other, which appeared in this
sitcom over fifty-five years ago, have once again manifested themselves in our
newest technologies. It may also be worth noting that, in the tradition of Glinda
from The Wizard of Oz (Baum 1900), the showrunners of Bewitched also ended
witches’ names with the feminizing -a: Samantha, Endora, Tabitha, etc. The
feminizing “a,” which had also factored into the misogynistic title of the Malleus
Maleficarum, reappears in the names of the voice assistants Alexa and Cortana—
also magic-granting domestic servants with female voices. Certainly, one must
ask, A is for what?
Bewitched was not alone in its portrayal of a powerful magic woman limited by
suburban domesticity. A few months later, I Dream of Jeannie likewise featured a
woman with fearsome power ensnared by suburban America. In the pilot episode
(Sheldon and Nelson 1965), the titular Jeannie (i.e., genie or djinn) is discovered
on an island in the South Pacific when NASA astronaut Captain Tony Nelson
crash-lands after re-entry from space. He finds an ornate bottle and releases
Jeannie, who speaks to him in Persian. Tony realizes that he has found a genie,
but he is powerless to command her. He does not speak the language. Ultimately,
though, Tony manages to “reprogram” the genie to use English, and Jeannie
returns with him—still bound within her bottle—to his home in Florida.
Jeannie, however, cannot cast magic from within her bottle or leave it unless it is
uncorked from the outside, so throughout the series, she is often confined on a
table or credenza in her totemic bottle, capable of incredible magic, but utterly
impotent until released by her “master.” In fact, it looks (and functions) a lot like a
voice assistant smart speaker (cf. a similar line of inquiry into the spurious
16 | Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 7 (2) Jason Toncic, 2021Original Research
promises of "labor-saving devices" [i.e., new technologies] for domestic use in
Cohen 1983). The frustration of the domestic housewife embodied by Jeannie
would likely have been familiar to Friedan (1963, 1964), yet the same cannot be
said for Siri. Apple’s voice assistant was programmed to “deflect” questions about
feminism, women’s rights, or the #MeToo movement (Hern 2019). Thus, while
women have increasingly pursued their potential in education, careers, and
interests outside of the home, largely male-dominated tech companies have, in
the housewives’ place, installed female voice assistants—perpetuating an already
lengthy history of feminized technology (see, for example, Wajcman 1991).
Conclusion
Science and technology have resulted in undeniable advances to society; perhaps
by dint of that progress, though, science and technology are often conceptualized
as relatively recent developments with little in common with earlier social
practices. This paper demonstrated that—despite the feats in engineering,
artificial intelligence, and natural language processing that combined to create
voice assistants—the social practices instantiated in the use of those voice
assistants are drawing from some deeper tradition that has an origin in (or has an
origin in common with) some of the practices around occult magic. I offer the list
below as a summary of those homologous features:
• Smart speakers create a zone wherein logocentric magic operates,
instantiating a new occult word magic ontology.
• As in the casting of magic spells, users of smart speakers must speak a
prescribed syntactic form.
• Smart speakers best provide logocentric magic to those who speak
standard language dialects, much like how sorcery had been limited to
the literate elite.
• Occult logocentrism has often integrated magic circles as a means to
access power. Similarly, the totemic voice assistant originates its own
sound field of concentric circles.
• Within the magic circle of the smart speaker, users gain the ability to
use logocentric magic.
• The iconology of the circle is rife in the physical design of smart
speaker units and is seemingly ubiquitous in commercial voice
assistant logos.
• Mirroring the feminization of magic in the witch, voice assistants like
Alexa, Cortana, and Siri have default female names and voices.
• The feminization of voice assistants echoes earlier examples of wish-
fulfilling magical housewives.
The purpose of this paper was to draw attention, through structural anthropology,
the tensile threads that nevertheless tether science and technology to human
social practices. Scholarship continues to identify gender bias in voice recognition
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