Guest Episode: The Doorbell by Nice Try!

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Speaker 6 Hello, Gastropod listeners. I'm Nicola Twilley, and I'm Cynthia Graeber.

Speaker 7 And this episode, we're not focusing on food through the lens of science and history. Instead, we're sharing an episode of a podcast we think you're going to enjoy.

Speaker 7 It's the first episode of the new season of Nice Try from the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Speaker 6 Nice Try's first season explored the search for utopias from Disney World to Levitt Town, including one of my favorite Quixotic projects, Biosphere 2.

Speaker 6 Their new season focuses on the everyday domestic products around us that we buy in order to create our own personal utopias.

Speaker 6 Whether it's mattresses that'll supposedly help you sleep better or workout equipment that'll unlock new levels of strength, Nice Try is asking, how much self-improvement can we expect to buy in a box?

Speaker 7 This first episode is all about the doorbell, the essential technology that serves as the entry point for both the American home and the brand new season.

Speaker 7 Check it out and then follow Nice Try to catch catch up on all the latest episodes.

Speaker 7 Hello, Avery.

Speaker 7 Hello.

Speaker 7 Just go through the door, go to the elevator, and come up to the third floor.

Speaker 4 Thank you so much, Ruth.

Speaker 4 From New York Magazine's Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Nice Try.

Speaker 4 I'm Avery Tuffelman.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 10 You're already recording?

Speaker 4 I am. You know, it's like, come on in.
I'll tell you why. I usually don't like it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 So this season is about where all those utopian yearnings got channeled, at least in the United States.

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 There was communal living on the Kibbutzim in Israel. It failed.

Speaker 7 So I want to ask why, but can I first ask you to introduce yourself?

Speaker 10 Professionally, as an author, I'm Ruth Schwartz-Cowan.

Speaker 4 Professor Cowan is a historian of science and technology, a big deal Guggenheim Fellow sort of historian.

Speaker 4 And some of the communes Ruth Cowan saw firsthand in the 60s actually did chug along for a little bit.

Speaker 10 I mean, they survived more than one summer, but three years

Speaker 10 didn't work. It just didn't work.

Speaker 6 Why?

Speaker 4 Just because, is it just our fundamental inability to get along?

Speaker 10 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.

Speaker 10 People care very deeply about what they eat and they fight over those things.

Speaker 4 But I mean, people come together in an industrial context and in an office, people do work together all the time

Speaker 4 in the name of capital. So why can't we work together in the domestic sphere?

Speaker 12 Because

Speaker 10 work is different from life, from domestic life.

Speaker 4 But that's like a cultural.

Speaker 10 We call it the doctrine of separate spheres.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like, that's just the way it was or supposed to be throughout much of the history of the West.

Speaker 4 And then, in the Victorian era, this concept of separate spheres took on another layer of of meaning, a moral, Christian one.

Speaker 10 The additional overlay

Speaker 10 that the home is the place that is pure, not sullied by the public world.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 and that the home should aspire to be, both ethically and practically, a utopia,

Speaker 4 one that is deeply private and deeply personal.

Speaker 4 The American home became a haven.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 15 The haven strategy was certainly typical of the United States. from the 1920s on,

Speaker 17 and that's the way a a lot of our housing was designed.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And most obviously this manifests as the suburban house with a white picket fence.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 4 This sort of 1950s archetype is ostensibly outdated, but America is still grappling with the construct of the separate spheres.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And yet the haven model still persists in popular imagination, even if you don't have a house or a spouse.

Speaker 4 It's just this idea of a home that exists as a separate little dominion from the rest of the world.

Speaker 4 And like all utopian visions, the haven model had its authors.

Speaker 15 I think you can go back to the early, middle 19th century, someone like Catherine Beecher, who was an expert.

Speaker 15 and wrote a book called The American Woman's Home with her sister Harriet Beecher Stowe, the novelist.

Speaker 4 Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Speaker 4 But let's focus on her older sister, Catherine Beecher, because Catherine is fascinating.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Catherine Beecher was incredibly influential.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 But the twist is that Catherine Beecher thought women didn't need to vote.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It was an expression of her soul.

Speaker 15 She was in that home taking care of her children, preferably without any servants.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 15 It's quite a remarkable thing to go back and read her writing because, in some ways, it seems all too familiar to us.

Speaker 4 Okay, bear with me.

Speaker 4 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, because they were suddenly far away from friends or family or amenities to help them.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It was for this reason that Catherine Beecher was all about life hacks.

Speaker 15 And she was someone who was designing labor-saving devices for the kitchens and producing designs for ideal homes.

Speaker 4 Even though in Beecher's time, the mechanical equipment in the home was pretty basic.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 the American dream is this turn of phrase that gets thrown around a lot, and it means the private home. this idealized separate space.

Speaker 4 And as antiquated and cliché as it might feel, it really has impacted our dreams, or at least my dreams, around what we think a perfect place should

Speaker 4 be.

Speaker 4 And this dream is not a commune full of fellow believers or a big multi-generational family tilling the land together.

Speaker 4 It is a specific goal of an independent haven, facilitated by a merry band of products.

Speaker 15 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And this hammers home the idea that the daily tasks of feeding and cleaning and washing are moral, personal decisions.

Speaker 4 The very choices that make you who you are,

Speaker 4 that make your life yours.

Speaker 4 And that is why Professor Ruth Schwartz-Cowen said.

Speaker 10 People can cooperate with each other on all kinds of things, but some of them are very emotional and they fight over those things.

Speaker 4 I guess, you know, the

Speaker 4 The thing that we're seeking or that we're all seeking to answer

Speaker 4 in our lives and especially in this series is just are those 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?

Speaker 1 Well, that's a $64,000 question.

Speaker 10 I would say that everybody I know, including my children, sets out to create a private home that will be a utopia and fails.

Speaker 4 And so, come along with me 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.

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 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

Speaker 4 but it's the first thing that you touch when you enter someone else's home

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 11 I could do 20 to 30

Speaker 11 places in a day. I would say, like, maybe half of the doorbells didn't even work, or you couldn't figure out what unit they belonged to.

Speaker 4 In her experience as a census worker in the Sunset Park and Borough Park neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Selena Joe noticed an obvious demographic disparity in doorbells.

Speaker 11 We talked about this with my team. The demographics are really different.
The blocks with the nicer houses definitely had working bells.

Speaker 11 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 bells that didn't work at all.

Speaker 4 So Selena often had to just knock or give up and she had to pay extra attention to the way she presented.

Speaker 11 Certain sections where we thought there might be more undocumented respondents, the idea was not to like be too buttoned up and like look like you're from the government trying to impose on them.

Speaker 11 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?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And so the confidence of a loud, resonant doorbell is powerful.

Speaker 19 I think ringing a doorbell is

Speaker 19 bridging the outside and the inside and uniting a guest with the residents. And they say, welcome.

Speaker 4 Robert Dobrin is obsessed with doorbells.

Speaker 19 Door chimes, doorbells, everything about them.

Speaker 4 And I am obsessed with people like Robert Dobrin.

Speaker 19 I seriously believe that it's an underappreciated

Speaker 19 aspect of Americana and I'm doing my best to keep it alive.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And you can see these all online.

Speaker 19 If I can, my website is electrachime.com.

Speaker 19 That's all one word, ElectraChime.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 19 This particular bell that I'm going to ring is from the early 1900s.

Speaker 19 You know, it does the trick. It notifies you that there's somebody at the door.

Speaker 19 There's nothing poetic about it.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And then battery-operated buzzers were soon to follow, which is kind of funny to to think that you had to actively replace a battery to maintain something that might have sounded like this.

Speaker 4 In some ways, you could almost compare these to modern-day smoke detectors, like they were assessing a problem.

Speaker 4 Certain doorbells and buzzers were meant to be deterrents and make alarming noises, especially in the era of door-to-door salesmen.

Speaker 19 It was the spam of the time.

Speaker 19 And you had to

Speaker 4 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 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?

Speaker 4 And they actually advertised these new singing doorbells like they were solving a major problem.

Speaker 19 Some of the creative marketing was like prevent doorbell nerves

Speaker 9 or

Speaker 19 doorbell noise is noise enemy number one.

Speaker 4 The doorbell manufacturer Newtone used the catchphrase, a cheerful earful.

Speaker 19 I thought that was kind of cute. That was pretty cute.
And they were definitely status symbols as well.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 19 My real love is the long bell door chimes with long tubes that are kind of the grandest of doorbells.

Speaker 19 They're supposed to be electrically operated, but I'm going to cheat and just strike them with a mallet.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 9 It's so cool.

Speaker 19 As long as you say that this is exactly how they would sound electrically, okay, deal.

Speaker 19 So that is a

Speaker 19 long bell

Speaker 19 eight-note melody, Westminster Peel, played on a vintage

Speaker 19 long bell door chime.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 19 The bells are the real star of the show, the long tubes.

Speaker 4 And now we come to the part of object history where we have to mention World War II.

Speaker 9 Everything comes from World War II.

Speaker 4 Because in this time, doorbell companies, like a lot of American companies, pivoted to manufacturing military equipment.

Speaker 4 And so the two biggest doorbell manufacturers, Newtone and Rittenhouse, had to learn more about electronics.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 19 You'll be very familiar with this one.

Speaker 19 Let me do that over again.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 4 And so the doorbell kind of went the way of the clock. Like how grandfather clocks used to be the centerpiece of a whole whole living room and then shrunk to wristwatches.

Speaker 4 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?

Speaker 19 And they combined the door chime with an intercom and a radio and anything else they could think of to package it.

Speaker 19 And it was just, it was the predecessor to the smart doorbell, which we're seeing now.

Speaker 4 After the break, how the doorbell turned into the home security system and made the private sphere more protected and the public sphere more public.

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Speaker 5 May I start recording?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 12 You know, so I'm a bit of a nerd, first of all.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 And Marie Van Britten Brown is one of those.

Speaker 4 Shantavia 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.

Speaker 4 So, what is her story?

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 They lived right across from JFK Airport. And in the 60s at the time, this was not a great neighborhood.

Speaker 12 Marie Van Bitten-Brown and her husband worked weird schedules, and she felt concern for her family because they were in a dangerous neighborhood.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So she took matters into her own hands and invented the first home security system.

Speaker 12 There was a camera, there were television monitors, two-way microphones, and an alarm button. There was a radio-controlled wireless system.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 11 None of that happens.

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 But with patents, they typically last 20 years from the date you file an application. So with Marie Van Britten-Braun, for example, that means her patent expired in 1986.

Speaker 12 And this is what I think is the real tragedy: the home security system industry takes off. 1970s, 1980s, it explodes using the technology that Marie Van Britten Braun and her husband created.

Speaker 4 Even today, we can see the legacy of Marie Van Britten Braun in technologies like Ring, which is a smart doorbell company owned by Amazon.

Speaker 12 Ring has a patent application where they cite back to this exact patent from Marie Van Britten-Braun and her husband.

Speaker 12 And so the largest companies on the planet have based at least some of their technology on this exact invention.

Speaker 4 I don't even know how to open the gate.

Speaker 4 My friend Tammy invited me over to check out the ring doorbell her landlord had recently installed.

Speaker 4 And even though I was there specifically to check out Tami'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.

Speaker 4 Gonna have to text.

Speaker 4 How does

Speaker 4 one

Speaker 4 get

Speaker 19 to

Speaker 17 the

Speaker 21 doorbell?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And you don't need to be home to answer it and to talk and engage with whoever's outside.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 10 This is it.

Speaker 4 Is that the sound it makes? That was.

Speaker 6 That's the sound that there is a motion.

Speaker 5 Oh, it caught me fucking with the gate. No, it caught you like just now passing the camera.

Speaker 10 And then can you see a video of me?

Speaker 9 Sure can, sure can.

Speaker 5 Is that the sound it makes? It caught me fucking with the gate. No, it caught you like just now passing the camera.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 I just say this because from the street, I could not see the camera. I didn't know I was being recorded.

Speaker 4 And by the way, I did not look cute in this footage.

Speaker 4 It is just funny that like everything looks sketchy with a fisheye lens.

Speaker 10 Yeah, it looks like you're trying to commit a crime.

Speaker 13 If everybody had a ring, we'd have a phenomenal neighborhood watch in every single neighborhood, and hopefully it would deter crime.

Speaker 4 Before I get too into this, can I ask you to introduce yourself?

Speaker 13 Sure. I'm Josh Roth.
I'm the chief technology officer here at Ring. I've been here for about seven years.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 We were trying to help people protect themselves.

Speaker 4 But what is not obvious to the casual caller.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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 Neighbor43 or Neighbor26,

Speaker 4 They mostly post videos of packages getting stolen with captions like this.

Speaker 23 Thief dummy. He came around 9.20 thanks to Amazon not informing us there was a package.

Speaker 23 Also hope it was worth stealing $10 charger SMH.

Speaker 4 These are real captions. We put them through a robot so you can hear them.

Speaker 14 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.

Speaker 22 Stealing package in the middle of the day, hope the extra small petite black dress fits him.

Speaker 13 The bigger ones, beyond package theft, which we've been really instrumental in, is we've helped solve kidnappings. We've been used by

Speaker 13 law enforcement when customers share their videos with them for a variety of things.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Ring doesn't just capture video, it also captures sound, and it captures sound pretty well. Sure, can, sure can, which actually caught me off guard.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Like this moment when I left at the end of our time together, and her doorbell filmed me leaving, even out past her gate.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 The last words, the good night kisses.

Speaker 4 Like Tammy's doorbell picked up a parting pep talk from our mutual friend, Kapish.

Speaker 14 Just do life, you know?

Speaker 14 If you want to do something, go for it. Now's enough.

Speaker 4 And of course, I had to ask Kapish for his permission to play that clip of him for you.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 21 If I leave my voice memo function on my phone, I leave it running recording, and I leave it in a 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.

Speaker 21 It's not just the government that's not allowed to bug people without a warrant.

Speaker 4 So I wanted to ask the CTO of Ring how Ring gets away with this. Because

Speaker 4 the fact that it has audio is what makes it so different from, say, CCTV. Legally, how does that work?

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 You know, obviously we provide the tools so customers can choose to adhere to the law.

Speaker 4 But there are also tools for them to not adhere to the law.

Speaker 13 I can't always say that people are going to do the right thing.

Speaker 13 You know, and I think that, you know,

Speaker 13 let me give you sort of a bad example, but, you know, like your car goes above 60 miles per hour.

Speaker 16 Sure.

Speaker 13 There's no speed limit in the United States that is above 65. So why should it?

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And the videos on the neighbors app arguably serve as a feedback loop for a lot of long-held prejudices.

Speaker 20 What we've seen in the use of these doorbell cameras is new digital terrain in which anti-black biases can play out.

Speaker 4 Chas Arnett is an associate professor of law at the University of Maryland, and he focuses on criminal procedure, race, and technology.

Speaker 20 When we think about crime or, you know, we talk about a certain incident, for too many people, they envision a black person.

Speaker 4 Professor Arnett lives in Baltimore.

Speaker 20 Here, there's a rebate program.

Speaker 26 City Council passed legislation, which will offer people up to $150 to put toward a ring or nest doorbell camera.

Speaker 20 Right, you can get your camera for free as long as you sign that agreement to participate with local Baltimore police.

Speaker 26 Participants will then register their cameras with a city program called City Watch Community Partnership.

Speaker 26 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 It's pretty disturbing imagery to see in a short local news report.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 9 Now,

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 13 We have,

Speaker 13 you know, I don't want to say no, no benefit in working with law enforcement directly that way.

Speaker 16 Of course we do.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 13 We want to be helpful, you know,

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 21 So I do think that there is a potential good here, which is that, you know,

Speaker 21 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.

Speaker 4 Cameras under individual private control could be a buffer against abuse.

Speaker 4 If you feel like you can trust your neighbors to comport themselves like Jay would, you know, if Jay had a ring.

Speaker 21 If I have a camera in my front yard and a police officer comes and says, we wanted to get some footage from yesterday afternoon at three o'clock.

Speaker 21 And I happened 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.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Although Josh Roth of Ring would beg to differ.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 4 Although you don't have a choice if you are like captured by Ring. Like you have a choice to install it.

Speaker 13 I think you have a choice on what the action is that you're doing.

Speaker 13 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 it deterring that person from robbing that house.

Speaker 16 And so.

Speaker 13 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.

Speaker 13 And, you know, for all I know, you know, now they work for Ring and they're in a phenomenal employee and

Speaker 13 a productive member of society. And I hope that they are.

Speaker 16 I mean, nothing would make us happier than that.

Speaker 4 Ah, if only rehabilitation and reform were as easy as literally pressing a button.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 And to step out of one's own domain is to suddenly step into the domain of everybody else.

Speaker 20 Crime is connected to poverty.

Speaker 1 We know this.

Speaker 19 We know this.

Speaker 20 But instead of looking at how we can address poverty,

Speaker 20 we turn to surveillance cameras. And we have this belief that technology can address it or technology can save us or technology can keep us safe.

Speaker 4 Although, in all fairness to Ring, a lot of people just like it as a doorbell.

Speaker 20 I actually have a Ring doorbell.

Speaker 4 You do? I do, yes. Chas Arnett didn't opt into the subscription feature, so he can't save and upload footage.

Speaker 20 And I certainly didn't opt into, you know, allowing Baltimore City Police

Speaker 20 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.

Speaker 4 He just likes being able to answer the door when he's traveling and not at home so does shantavia johnson the patent lawyer i have three ring door bills at my house

Speaker 12 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 or

Speaker 12 So this is an interesting question because the ring system

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 We're literally in the process of renovating a 100-year-old house in a neighborhood that is rapidly gentrifying. We're the only black homeowners on my block.
So he broke in, he slept, and he left.

Speaker 12 And, you know, we didn't do anything about it because

Speaker 12 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.

Speaker 12 So if you take a step back and think about the big picture context, the why, right? And why Marie Van Britten Braun felt it necessary to create this technology.

Speaker 12 She wanted to feel safe in her own home.

Speaker 4 And I mean,

Speaker 4 everyone wants to feel safe.

Speaker 4 And everyone wants to feel free.

Speaker 4 And they want the freedom to be safe from the freedom of others.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 That's beautiful.

Speaker 19 Thank you.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 19 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.

Speaker 19 The dwell between the two notes is controlled by the caller.

Speaker 4 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.

Speaker 4 Is that a nomenclature like specific to doorbells?

Speaker 19 It's no, it's not specific to doorbells, but dwell is just a word that just means the duration between two events.

Speaker 19 When somebody pushes your doorbell button and you hear a nice door chime, they hear it outside. It connects the caller with the residence, the inside and the outside.

Speaker 4 The private and the public. The home and the society.

Speaker 4 The alignment of the spheres

Speaker 4 where

Speaker 4 we dwell.

Speaker 4 Next time on Nice Try.

Speaker 4 Think about the fact that you could go into any neighborhood or any apartment building and not know which ones are also workplaces, right?

Speaker 4 The workplace is scattered and hidden behind closed doors.

Speaker 4 One of the most intimate, necessary, and loathed activities of the private sphere is cleaning.

Speaker 4 So who does this work?

Speaker 4 And how good do we have to be at it? When is it okay to depend on some kind of help?

Speaker 4 It's a story of community, labor, and love, as told through the lens of the vacuum cleaner.

Speaker 4 Nice Try is a collective effort from Megan Kinane, our senior producer, Diana Budds and Sarah Burke, our associate producers, fact-checking by Selena Solon, Lisa Pollock is our editorial consultant, Alex Higgins sound designed and engineered this episode, Theme Song by Greg Pluska, with additional scoring by Greg, Alex, and me.

Speaker 4 Special thanks to curbed editor Sukjong Hong. Our showrunner is Art Chung.
Our executive producers are Nishat Kerwa and Kelsey Keith.

Speaker 4 The news clip on the Baltimore rebate program is from WJZ Baltimore. Special thanks to Richard Lawler, senior news editor for The Verge, for his help on this episode.

Speaker 4 Special thanks as well to Emily Anthus, the author of The Great Indoors, as well as to Alice Wilder and Gene Coco. This episode was written and performed by me, Avery Shuffleman.

Speaker 4 Night's Try is a production of Curbed and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Find us wherever you listen.

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