2025
Luxury smartwatch copy reads uncannily like ankle-monitor copy. Luxury Desire Recording Machine is a text-generation experiment that fuses product blurbs for CCTV cameras, AI dashcams, smartwatches, and ankle monitors into one composite mega-product, paced by the repeated refrain, “I want.”
In “Luxury Surveillance,” Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia show how the same technologies split into two regimes: a paid, aspirational tier for the powerful and a compulsory, punitive tier for the marginalized. Smartwatches, wellness trackers, airport fast lanes, and smart doorbells sell convenience and self-care while optimizing data extraction and prediction. Their counterparts, such as court-ordered ankle monitors, e-carceration wearables and migrant tracking, apply the same logics with different packaging. Together, they expand surveillance capitalism and normalize unequal exposure to monitoring. Luxury Desire Recording Machine collapses these regimes, layering desire, privilege, status, and control within a single text.
The poem emerges from two computational steps. First, ChatGPT gathered concise, present-tense product descriptions of the devices. Then a simple Python script randomly recombined those verb-action phrases into a continuous narrative.
References: Luxury Surveillance by Chris Gilliard and David Golumbia, 2021.