Today, Explained - For whom the door bells

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

While the doorbell recovers from Halloween, Nice Try explains how it’s an essential part of the American dream. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. Stay Explained. I'm Sean Ramosurm and I love Halloween. But I've gone from being a Halloween reveler to more of a Halloween retiree. Instead of hitting Halloween parties or parades, I'm happy to just dress up and hand out candy to the kids and compliment their costumes. So that's what I was doing last night. But a thing I kept noticing is that kids wouldn't say trick or treat. They

just walk up to me and, you know, hold up their plastic pumpkin or their plastic bag or open up their pillowcase and wait for me to hand them candy. And eventually I realized that's because I was actually doing it wrong. I was standing on my stoop eagerly awaiting trick-or-treaters, but where I needed to be was behind my door waiting for them to ring my doorbell. Doorbell, open door, moment of suspense, they say trick or treat, you hand out candy or get egged. The problem is, I don't even have a doorbell, which means I'm really doing it wrong. At least according to the latest season of Nice Try. Nice Try's first season was all about utopias and the new one is all about the lifestyle products that have been sold to us over and over and the promises of domestic self-improvement they've made.

The first episode of the new season is all about the doorbell, the essential technology that serves as an entry point into the American home and the new season of the show. And we thought we'd bring you that episode today as doorbells across the country and continents recover from the return of Halloween. Nice try from the Vox Media Podcast Network. Subscribe for more. Hello, Avery.

Hello. Just go through the door, go to the elevator, and come up to the third floor. Thank you so much, Ruth. From New York Magazine's Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Nice Try. I'm Avery Truffleman. I want to start this with the act of entering someone else's home. An act that is at times mundane or exciting or transgressive, especially if one is barging in with a microphone. You're already recording? I am. You know, it's like, come on in. I'll tell you why. I usually don't like... Season one of Nice Try was about failed utopian experiments,

about the yearning for more beautiful, more equitable, more pleasurable ways of living across centuries and around the world. And even though so many of these utopian efforts fell apart, that hunger remains. This feeling that there has to be a way to a better, different lifestyle. So this season is about where all those utopian yearnings got channeled, at least in the United States. When I was a young adult, when I was your age,

I knew a fair number of people who were living in communes, but they didn't survive. There was communal living in Soviet Russia. It failed. There was communal living on the Kibbutzim in Israel. It failed. So I want to ask why, but can I first ask you to introduce yourself? Professionally, as an author, I'm Ruth Schwartz Cowan. Professor Cowan is a historian of science and technology, a big-deal Guggenheim Fellow sort of historian. And some of the communes Ruth Cowan saw firsthand in the 60s actually did chug along for a little bit.

I mean, they survived more than one summer. But three years, it didn't work. It just didn't work. Why? Is it just our fundamental inability to get along? Well, I'm not a psychiatrist. I can only tell you people have very, very strong feelings about their sexual relations. They have very, very strong feelings about their children. People care very deeply about what they eat, and they fight over those things.

But I mean, people come together in an industrial context, in an office, people do work together all the time in the name of capital. So why can't we work together in the domestic sphere? Because work is different from life, from domestic life. But that's like a cultural... We call it the doctrine of separate spheres. The doctrine of separate spheres. The doctrine of separate spheres

seems kind of obvious on its surface, but it's a bit of an insidious concept. It builds off this idea that life can be cleaved into. Into a public world and a private world. A clean separation. One that has been grafted onto another neat binary, onto this idea that women tend the home and men go out into society. Like, that's just the way it was or supposed to be throughout

much of the history of the West. And then, in the Victorian era, this concept of separate spheres took on another layer of meaning, a moral Christian one. The additional overlay that the home is the place that is pure, not sullied by the public world. This concept, or really this fiction, is that the currency of the home is love, not money. That home is a place for leisure, not labor. And that the home should aspire to be, both ethically and practically, a utopia. One that is deeply private and deeply personal.

The American home became a haven, according to Yale professor emerita Dolores Hayden. Professor Hayden studies architecture and how the American home was designed, and it is around what she identifies as the Haven Strategy. The Haven Strategy was certainly typical of the United States from the 1920s on, and that's the way a lot of our housing was designed. The haven strategy, also called the haven model, is this idea that the home is a distinct, separate world where you can totally retreat from business, from your neighbors, from public life, into a dominion all your own. And most obviously, this manifests as the suburban house with a white picket fence. Now, the haven was usually a haven for a male worker, but the haven was never a haven for a female who had to actually manage the husband, the children, the cooking, the cleaning, and every other thing

connected to making this private world. This sort of 1950s archetype is ostensibly outdated, but America is still grappling with the construct of the separate spheres. Even though if you have conducted any business from home over the course of the last year or two, you have touched the gaps in the porous boundary between the public and private spheres. And yet the haven model still persists in popular imagination, even if you don't have a house or a spouse. It's just this idea of a home that exists as a separate little dominion from the rest of the world. And like all utopian visions, the Haven model had its authors.

I think you can go back to the early, middle 19th century. Someone like Catherine Beecher, who was an expert and wrote a book called The American Woman's Home with her sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist. Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin. But let's focus on her older sister, Catherine Beecher, because Catherine is fascinating. And in the same way that her younger sister's book was intended to be abolitionist literature but ended up creating a racist caricature, Catherine Beecher had this early brand of feminism that by modern standards is a complete contradiction. Catherine Beecher was incredibly influential.

By the age of 35, she had founded and supervised two schools where Beecher wanted women to be able to study anything they wanted, to grow to their fullest selves. But the twist is that Catherine Beecher thought women didn't need to vote. Her 1841 book, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, was a huge booster for the doctrine of separate spheres because she was basically like, let's keep those spheres separate so that a woman can be lord of the private world. Like this was going to be the source of her power, deciding how her children and husband were to eat and present and sleep. She was basically the moral compass of the private world. And Beecher argued that this has more impact

than a position in public life. Apparently, a lot of people agreed because Beecher's book was reprinted at least 15 times. And I can't stress enough how different this was. It wasn't like, oh, a woman's place is in the home. Like, at the time, that was a given. This was uniquely American and Christian because Beecher was proposing that homemaking was a divine duty and that if a housewife did it well, it reflected upon her, the homemaker, as an individual servant of God. It was an expression of her soul. She was in that home taking care of her children, preferably without any servants, connected to the notion that the woman would be doing all of her own nurturing work and that she would be receiving her reward in heaven.

It's quite a remarkable thing to go back and read her writing because in some ways it seems all too familiar to us. Okay, bear with me. This might not sound exactly familiar just yet, but Beecher's words were a huge source of hope for many women, especially young white wives setting up households in newly colonized areas of the United States. to help them. And this is when doing a load of laundry with lye took like all day. So overseeing your entire household was a massive, massive workload. It was for this reason that Catherine Beecher was all about life hacks. And she was someone who was designing labor-saving devices for the kitchens and producing designs for ideal homes. Even though in Beecher's time, the mechanical equipment in the home was pretty basic. She had heating and cooling of a kind. She had some indoor plumbing of a kind. But all of that becomes much more developed and is sold much more aggressively.

So, the American dream is this turn of phrase that gets thrown around a lot. And it means the private home. This idealized separate space. And as antiquated and cliche as it might feel, it really has impacted our dreams. Or at least my dreams.

Around what we think a perfect place should be. And this dream is not a commune full of fellow believers or a big multi-generational family tilling the land together. It is a specific goal of an independent haven facilitated by a merry band of products. You might ask yourself what you're going to need to furnish your new apartment. My guess is quite a bit. Prosperity involves a lot of consumption. And home devices have become personal devices. Refrigerators and washing machines and kitchen aids are all sold as direct reflections of our personalities and our values.

And this hammers home the idea that the daily tasks of feeding and cleaning and washing are moral, personal decisions. The very choices that make you who you are. That make your life yours. And that is why Professor Ruth Shorts Cowan said, people can cooperate with each other on all kinds of things, but some of them are very emotional and they fight over those things. I guess, you know, the thing that we're seeking or that we're all seeking to answer in our lives and especially in this series is just are those things at odds? The idea of a utopia and the idea of the private home. Can the private home be a sort of utopia?

Well, that's a $64,000 question. I would say that everybody I know, including my children, on a journey into the private sphere, into the technology and products that have determined the ways we clean, cook, exercise, sleep, and shit as we attempt to sail to the unreachable shore of a better life, in our little homes or apartments or rooms, each, ideally, its own little fiefdom with its own culture and philosophy and rules. And each contingent, like any perfect utopia, on letting in only who they want to let in.

And that decision, who to let in and who to exclude, is aided by a technology that I don't often think of as a technology. But it's the first thing that you touch when you enter someone else's home. Once upon a time, I was throwing a party. And I remember I wrote in bold in the email invitation,

please ring the bell to get in, because I was hosting and I didn't want to have to keep checking my phone all night. I wrote in bold in the email invitation, please ring the bell to get in, because I was hosting, and I didn't want to have to keep checking my phone all night. But sure enough, everyone just texted when they arrived, and no one rang the bell. But I can't really throw stones, because I, too, am one of these people who would rather text than use the doorbell.

I was just like, I don't want to bother people. And I don't really have good associations with that buzz. At best, it's a delivery of some kind. But at worst, it's someone who's trying to sell you something, interrogate you, or bother you. It's obviously someone who doesn't have your number. And I'm not alone in my aversion to the doorbell. I mean, just ask someone who rang doorbells every single day working for the last census. I could do 20 to 30 places in a day. I would say like maybe half of the doorbells like didn't even work

or you couldn't figure out what unit they belong to. In her experience as a census worker in the Sunset Park and Borough Park neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Selena Jo noticed an obvious demographic disparity in doorbells. We talked about this with my team. The demographics are really different. The blocks with the nicer houses definitely had working bells.

And then on the other side of the coin, you have apartments that are above storefronts and sometimes they don't have bills or a lot of the time they had bills that didn't work at all. So Selena often had to just knock or give up and look like you're from the government trying to impose on them. Because even before they talk to you, I think there's just a split second of, do I even open the door for this person? A doorbell says a lot about one's relationship to the world outside your door and how welcoming you're able to be and to what degree your haven is your own. And so the confidence of a loud, resonant doorbell is powerful. I think ringing a doorbell

is bridging the outside and the inside and uniting a guest with the residents. And they say, welcome. Robert Dobrin is obsessed with doorbells. Door chimes, doorbells, everything about them. And I am obsessed with people like Robert Dobrin. I seriously believe that it's an underappreciated aspect of Americana, and I'm doing my best to keep it alive.

Robert has a collection of 500 doorbells from around the world. Wooden boxes inlaid with copper, engraved silver bells, plastic press buttons from the 1960s that are simple like the flag of Japan. And you can see these all online. If I can, my website is electrachime.com. That's all one word, electrachime. And can I make a request if there's anybody out there with a exhibit space that's interested in exhibiting door chimes, I would be amenable to that.

Although, be warned, if you are about to let Robert bring 500 doorbells into your exhibit space, know that a lot of it is going to sound really irritating. This particular bell that I'm going to ring is from the early 1900s. You know, it does the trick. It notifies you that there's somebody at the door.

There's nothing poetic about it. Early wind-up bells were mechanical, just a piece of metal hitting another piece of metal, just trying to generate a sound that was louder than a knock. And then battery-operated buzzers were soon to follow, which is kind of funny to think that you had to actively replace a battery to maintain something that might have sounded like this. In some ways, you can almost compare these to modern-day smoke detectors, like they were assessing a problem. Certain doorbells and

buzzers were meant to be deterrents and make alarming noises, especially in the era of door-to-door salesmen. It was the spam of the time. And you had to, you had unwelcome callers. Right. And somebody had even invented a coin-operated doorbell button that you had to put a dime in. And if you were a friend, you got your dime back. But if you were a salesman, you didn't get your dime back. Some doorbells were like pop-up blockers.

And this is just to say there's always been a modicum of anxiety around the door. And then around the 1930s, when electricity was more widespread in households and the real estate industry was ramping up and there was this interest in making lovely, aspirational home products, some doorbell manufacturers were like, hey, what if you could design a doorbell that didn't give you a heart attack? And they actually advertised these new singing doorbells like they were solving a major problem. Some of the creative marketing was like, prevent doorbell nerves, or doorbell noise is noise enemy number one. The doorbell manufacturer Newtone used the catchphrase, a cheerful earful. I thought that was kind of cute.

It was pretty cute. And they were definitely status symbols as well. And so the mellifluous door chime became a luxurious hallmark of a welcoming home. And this is the part of doorbell history that really gets Robert going. My real love is the long bell door chimes with long tubes that are kind of the grandest of doorbells. They're supposed to be electrically operated, but I'm going to cheat and just strike them with a mallet.

I think everyone would understand, though. I think it's pretty cool you're hitting them with a mallet. Can we say you're hitting them with a mallet, please? It's so cool. As long as you say that this is exactly how they would sound electrically. Okay, deal. So that is a long bell, eight-note melody, Westminster Peale, played on a vintage long bell door chime. The long chime is, exactly as you would imagine, long.

You can picture it as sort of a flat wind chime up against the wall. The bells are the real star of the show, the long tubes. And now we come to the part of object history where we have to mention World War II. Everything comes from World War II. Because in this time, doorbell companies, like a lot of American companies, pivoted to manufacturing military equipment. And so the two biggest doorbell manufacturers, Newtone and Rittenhouse,

had to learn more about electronics. And then out of the war, in the 50s, they realized that you could make reasonably pleasant electric sounds without actually using those long, cumbersome bells. You'll be very familiar with this one. Let me do that over again. The demise of the door chime was in the 1950s when things were meant to be heard but not seen

and houses were being built with as little ornamentation as possible to save costs. And so the doorbell kind of went the way of the clock, like how grandfather clocks used to be the centerpiece of a whole living room and then shrunk to wristwatches. And then as they got smaller and less grand, eventually it was like, okay, this device only does one thing, so what if we combined it with other features and stuff?

And they combined the door chime with an intercom and a radio and anything else they could think of to package it. And it was just, it was the predecessor to the smart doorbell, which we're seeing now. After the break, how the doorbell turned into the home security system and made the private sphere more protected

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Here we go. So first of all, the obvious question, how did you find out about Marie Van Britten Brown? There's like nothing out there. You know, so I'm a bit of a nerd, first of all. And my background, I have an engineering degree. I have a law degree. I've been a patent lawyer for about 15 years. So it started there, just learning about all kinds of Black inventors. And Marie Van Britten Brown is one of those.

Shontavia Johnson is Associate Vice President for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at Clemson University. And she is going to tell us about this little-known inventor and entrepreneur. So what is her story? Marie Van Britten Brown was a nurse. Her husband was really like an electrician or an electronics technician, and they saw a problem they wanted to solve. They lived in Queens. They lived right across from JFK Airport. And in the 60s at the time, this was not a great neighborhood. Marie Van Bitten-Bowne and her husband worked weird schedules, and she felt concerned for her family because they were in a dangerous neighborhood.

And in a story that's very similar to today, Black people who live in predominantly Black neighborhoods that can be considered a little dangerous can't always rely on law enforcement to keep the community safe. So she took matters into her own hands and invented the first home security system. There was a camera, there were television monitors, two-way microphones, and an alarm button. There was a radio-controlled wireless system. This was basically like closed-caption television in your house for a security alarm in the 1960s. They get the patent in 1969. Mrs. Brown is listed as the primary inventor.

So they got some great press. They get a feature in the New York Times in 1969. There's a whole segment on their invention. There's a picture of them in the newspaper. But what doesn't happen is what you hope happens when you get good press. Lots of people reach out to you. Maybe you do get a licensing deal or something like that. None of that happens. So they never see a profit from what they created. And you can guess why it's the 1960s. This is a Black woman and a Black man looking to enter an industry. But with patents, they typically last 20 years from the date you file an application. So with Marie Van

Britten Brown, for example, that means her patent expired in 1986. And this is what I think is the real tragedy, is the home security system industry takes off. 1970s, 1980s, it explodes using the technology that Marie Van Britten Brown and her husband created. Even today, we can see the legacy of Marie Van Britten Brown in technologies like Ring, which is a smart doorbell company owned by Amazon. Ring has a patent application where they cite back to this exact patent from Marie Van Britten Brown and her husband. And so the largest companies on the planet have based at least some of their technology on this exact invention. I don't even know how to open the gate. My friend Tammy invited me over to check out the ring doorbell her landlord had recently installed.

And even though I was there specifically to check out Tammy's ring doorbell, I couldn't figure out how to get past the gate, so I ended up having to do the, like, texting-that-I'm-here thing. I'm going to have to text. How does one get to the doorbell? Ring basically bridges the divide between ringing and texting. It's essentially a doorbell that alerts your phone, and it shows a video of whoever's outside,

and you don't need to be home to answer it and to talk and engage with whoever's outside. And by the way, I'm sorry if I'm mansplaining how Ring works, if you have one, because you very well might have one. Ring has sold more than 1.4 million video doorbells in 2020. So this is it. This is it. Is that the sound it makes?

That was that's the sound that there's motion. Oh, it caught me fucking with the gate. No, it caught you like just now passing the camera. And then can you see a video of me? Sure can. Sure can. Sure can. Is that the sound it makes? It caught me fucking with the gate.

No, it caught you, like, just now passing the camera. This doorbell caught me from pretty far away. Like, Tammy's gate is probably a solid seven feet away from her door, and Tammy's entryway is obscured by the stairs to the first floor. I just say this because, from the street, I could not see the camera. I didn't know I was being recorded. And, by the way, I did not look cute in this footage.

It is just funny that, like, everything looks sketchy with the fisheye lens. Yeah, it looks like you're trying to commit a crime. If everybody had a ring, we'd have, you know, a phenomenal neighborhood watch in every single neighborhood. And hopefully it would deter crime. Before I get too into this, can I ask you to introduce yourself? Sure. I'm Josh Roth. I'm the chief technology officer here at Ring. I've been here for about seven years.

If you see a Ring doorbell, you'll know it. Ring cameras say Ring on them. And there's a visible lens that is obviously a camera. We didn't want to be out of sight, out of mind. We wanted to be products, not just the doorbell, but the cameras that didn't hide, right? We weren't trying to be a spy camera. We were trying to help people protect themselves. But what is not obvious to the casual caller is that Ring owners have the option of saving the footage captured by their doorbell. And they also have the option of uploading it to a Ring app called Neighbors. I downloaded the Neighbors app just to see what's up. And so now I get push alerts about stabbings and carjackings and fires that scare the hell out of me.

And I also get occasional public safety updates about extreme weather and COVID stuff. But most of my fellow users, known only by numeric pseudonyms like Neighbor 43 or Neighbor 26, they mostly post videos of packages getting stolen with captions like this. Thief dummy. He came around 920 thanks to Amazon not informing us there was a package. Also hope it was worth stealing $10 charger SMH. These are real captions. We put them through a robot so you could hear them. This guy took our package in broad daylight, opened it in plain view of the camera, saw it was a water bottle for a child and took it anyway. Stealing package in the middle of the day. Hope the extra small petite black dress fits him. The bigger ones beyond package theft, which we've been really instrumental in, is we've helped solve kidnappings. We've been used by law enforcement when customers share their videos with them for

a variety of things. That law enforcement piece is very important, and we're going to come back to it. But I think a subtle yet key distinction in this development of the doorbell is this. Ring doesn't just capture video. It also captures sound. And it captures sound pretty well. Sure can. Sure can. Which actually captures sound pretty well. Sure can. Sure can.

Which actually caught me off guard. I mean, I went to Tammy's apartment in order to look at her ring camera, and I was still a little weirded out when, after we spoke, she sent me all the footage that her ring had captured. Like this moment when I left at the end of our time together, and her doorbell filmed me leaving, even out past her gate. Hi. Hi. end of our time together, and her doorbell filmed me leaving, even out past her gate. And practically speaking, just think for a moment about the nature of the conversations that happen in the doorway, in the coming and in the departing. The last words, the goodnight kisses.

Like, Tammy's doorbell picked up a parting pep talk from our mutual friend, Kapish. Just do life, you know? If you want to do something, go for it. Now's the time. And, of course, I had to ask Kapish for his permission to play that clip of him for you. I constantly have to ask permission to record interviews at all because there are states with one-party consent and states with two-party consent

where both people have to agree to be recorded. There are legal limits on what you can audio record and disseminate. But I didn't actually think about this in a doorbell context until ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley pointed this out to me. If I leave my voice memo function on my phone, I leave it running, recording,

and I leave it in the room with you and a third person, and you don't know it's there, and I walk out, that's a felony in most states. It's not just the government that's not allowed to bug people without a warrant. So I wanted to ask the CTO of Ring how Ring gets away with this. Because the fact that it has audio is what makes it so different from, say, CCTV. Legally, how does that work? Yeah, so I mean, we adhere to all the different standards that we're required to, whether it's states or countries. We provide controls for our customers to be able to disable or enable audio. You know, obviously, we provide the tools so customers can choose to adhere to the law.

But there are also tools for them to not adhere to the law. I can't always say that people are going to do the right thing. Let me give you a bad example. Your car goes above 60 miles per hour. Sure. There's no speed limit in the United States that is above 65, so why should it? The speed limit actually goes up to 80 in a few states, but whatever. No matter what the limit is, people are going to break it.

And the videos on the Neighbors app arguably serve as a feedback loop for a lot of long-held prejudices. What we've seen in the use of these doorbell cameras is new digital terrain in which anti-Black biases can play out. Chaz Arnett is an associate professor of law at the University of Maryland, and he focuses on criminal procedure, race, and technology. When we think about crime or, you know, we talk about a certain incident, for too many people, they envision a Black person. Professor Arnett lives in Baltimore. Here, there's a rebate program. City Council passed legislation which will offer people up to $150 to put toward a ring or nest doorbell camera. Right, you can get your camera for free as long as you sign that agreement to participate with local Baltimore police.

Participants will then register their cameras with a city program called City Watch Community Partnership. This program shows police where the cameras are and gives them the contact information to request video and images if there is a crime in the area. This March 2020 report from WJZ Baltimore actually shows ring footage of scary incidents, including a woman getting violently carjacked right in the view of the fisheye lens. It's pretty disturbing imagery to see in a short local news report. WJZ set this report in a neighborhood of Baltimore called Patterson Park, which actually had already been running its own community-led effort to share

doorbell footage. Now, Patterson Park is extremely, extremely gentrified, right? People want to be in the city, but they're also, like, scared of the neighborhood that they're gentrifying. Rebate programs like the one in Baltimore have happened in a number of municipalities, and they obviously benefit Ring. Even though Ring will have you know, many of them were facilitated by third parties and not by Ring directly, even though Ring did have various direct partnerships with law enforcement. We have, you know, I don't want to say no, no benefit in working with law enforcement directly that way. Of course we do. Ring's very capable and attentive PR person was quick to follow up with me to tell me that Ring ended device donations to law enforcement agencies in January of 2020, and they ended all remaining subsidy programs in April of 2020. We want to be helpful, you know, parts of society.

And therefore, we will comply with subpoena requests and search warrants and all the things that you have to do to be a legal entity. And even though ACLU policy analyst Jay Stanley is really not wild about rebate programs that spread private surveillance, he argues it might just be the lesser of two evils, as opposed to, say, a blanket government surveillance system. So I do think that there is a potential good here, which is that, you know, if we're going to have more cameras in our lives, and I think we are going to and we are getting more cameras in our lives, it's good for them to be decentralized.

Cameras under individual private control could be a buffer against abuse. If you feel like you can trust your neighbors to comport themselves like Jay would, you know, if Jay had a ring. If I have a camera on my front yard and a police officer comes and says, we wanted to get some footage from yesterday afternoon at three o'clock and I happen to know that there was a political march going by my house, I'd be like, uh, yeah, no, I don't think I'm going to share that with you. Although, side note, not everyone would feel as confident as Jay would standing up to the police. The notions of control and choice are a little murky here. Although Josh Roth of Ring would beg to differ. You know, look, it's a choice. No one is making anyone put a Ring video doorbell

on their front door. So at the end of the day, these are customer choice. Although you don't have a choice if you are, like, captured by Ring. Like, you have a choice to install it. I think you have a choice on what the action is that you're doing. I mean, I've seen videos that were sent to us over the years of gang initiation of people coming to a home and someone answering the doorbell and deterring that person from robbing that house. And so, you know, the fact that the person walked away and didn't break that house, maybe it did change their life. Maybe they did go down a path and, you know, for all I know, you know, now they, they work for ring and they're in a phenomenal employee and, and, and a productive member of society, and I hope that they are. I mean, nothing would make us happier than that. Ah, if only rehabilitation and reform were as easy as literally pressing a button.

This version of the doorbell is a projection of the private sphere into the public sphere. The haven is no longer only an inward-facing utopia. It's now a network with eyes out on the street. And to step out of one's own domain is to suddenly step into the domain of everybody else. Crime is connected to poverty. We know this. We know this. But instead of looking at how we can address poverty, we turn to, you know, surveillance cameras. And, you know, we have this belief that technology can address it or technology can save us or technology can keep us safe. Although, in all fairness to Ring, a lot of people just like it as a doorbell.

I actually have a Ring doorbell. You do? I do, yes. Chaz Arnett didn't opt into the subscription feature, so he can't save and upload footage. And I certainly didn't opt into, you know, allowing Baltimore City Police to access and leverage the camera. I guess it wouldn't work for them anyway because it's not recording anything. Or at least Ring says it's not recording anything. He just likes being able to answer the door

when he's traveling and not at home. So does Shontavia Johnson, the patent lawyer. I have three Ring doorbells at my house. You do? I do. And many people I know implement some type of home security technology for any number of different reasons.

How do you feel about your ring system? Has it changed your relationship to your home or your neighborhood? So this is an interesting question because the ring system actually recently this week caught a person breaking into our house, which is, I mean, there's no walls or anything. We're renovating it right now. We're literally in the process of renovating a 100-year-old house in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying with the only Black homeowners on my block. So he broke in, he slept, and he left. And, you know, we didn't do anything about it because, like, we're not trying to be the police. We just want to make sure that our house is safe and that the things that are in it are safe. So if you take a step back and think about the big picture context, the why, right?

And why Marie Van Britten Brown felt it necessary to create this technology. She wanted to feel safe in her own home. And I mean, everyone wants to feel safe. And everyone wants to feel free. And they want the freedom to be safe from the freedom of others. And so these devices have made the doorway a portal to traverse, a moat around each haven, and not the welcoming, visitor-centric experience that Robert Dobrin adores. That's beautiful. Thank you.

Robert told me something kind of obvious that I didn't realize, which is that the ding-dong sound is fully created by the visitor. Like, when they ring, they determine the tempo of the sound. When you push the button, you hear the first note. And when you release the button, it recoils to hit the second note. There's a little delay between the two. The dwell between the two notes is controlled by the caller. Wait, what? This is so cool.

I didn't realize that that's how it actually worked. That's also so beautiful that it's called the dwell in between the notes. Is that a nomenclature like specific to doorbells? No, it's not specific to doorbells, but dwell is just a word that just means the duration between two events. When somebody pushes your doorbell button and you hear a nice door chime, they hear it outside. It connects the caller with the residents,

the inside and the outside. The private and the public. The home and the society. The alignment of the spheres where we dwell. Next time on Nice Try. Think about the fact that you could go into any neighborhood or any apartment building and not know which ones are also workplaces, right? The workplace is scattered and hidden behind closed doors.

One of the most intimate, necessary, and loathed activities of the private sphere is cleaning. So who does this work? And how good do we have to be at it? When is it okay to depend on some kind of help? It's a story of community, labor, and love, as told through the lens of the vacuum cleaner. Nice Try is a collective effort from Megan Kinane, our senior producer, Diana Buds and Sarah Burke, our associate producers, fact-checking by Selena Solon,

Lisa Pollack is our editorial consultant, Alex Higgins sound designed and engineered this episode, Thank you. of Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Find us wherever you listen.