By Colin Todhunter
Global Research
July 7, 2026
Traditionally considered a space of rest, intimacy and autonomy, the 'home' has been integrated into the market by capitalism and digital technology, becoming an object of surveillance and manipulation.
Smart speakers, security cameras and streaming devices, while masquerading as convenience, target every aspect of life for data extraction. Is the home now a place of self, community and continuity or merely a control unit?
The following article is an extract from the author's new open-access book: The Great Flattening: Enclosure, Extraction and the New Age of Concentrated Power, which can be read or downloaded here.
Take your pick: a multi-storey penthouse or a rural cottage ? A place by the sea or a mountain retreat ? The very idea of home is wrapped in sentiment, aspiration and fantasy.
Home is supposed to be the welcoming nest, the place of comfort, familiarity and return, the private refuge where one can relax after the day's labour and recover a sense of self. Yet this cosy image has long been cultivated, packaged and sold back to us as part of a wider system of social control and commercial extraction.
Over the years, our perceptions of home have been shaped by planners, designers, advertisers, estate agents, manufacturers, media and markets. Town planners know that spaces become places through their organisation, their use and the meanings imposed upon them.
But houses become homes in another way too: through the emotional and material investment people pour into them. That is precisely why the home has become such a lucrative site for manipulation.
Every perceived need within it can be monetised. Every dream about comfort, security or status can be turned into a product. Carpets, curtains, kitchens, bathrooms, soft furnishings, lighting, patios, smart speakers, security systems, streaming devices-name any area of domestic life and a market has been created to colonise it.
In this sense, the home is no longer merely a place of shelter. It has become a carefully curated consumer environment, a domestic showroom of aspiration. We are told not only how a home should look but what kind of home we should want, where it should be located, what social class it should signal and which technologies it should contain.
A home is increasingly defined less by the people who live in it than by the standards imposed on it from outside. The result is a domesticated imagination: an image of well-being mediated by the market.
That transformation has not happened in isolation. The home, like the city and the countryside, has been caught up in the larger social process described throughout this book: enclosure. The old idea of the home as a stable, separate domain has gradually been dissolved by the same forces that have standardised food, eroded local economies, flattened urban space and converted soil, labour and culture into manageable assets.
The domestic sphere has not escaped the logic of capital. It has been reorganised to serve it.
Homes have also been transformed by technology. Every new device that enters the front door changes what home means and what we do within it. Some technologies genuinely ease labour. Others restructure everyday life in ways that deepen dependence and erode autonomy.
Previous generations had a mangle and clothes rack; the washing machine and tumble-dryer made them obsolete. There was a hearth for coal in the living room; central heating displaced it. Families once made their own entertainment or simply talked. Radio and television altered the rhythm of domestic life, and now the internet has turned the home into a permanent node in global networks of data, commerce and surveillance.
At first glance these changes can seem like progress. But they also reveal something more unsettling: the home was never the sealed sanctuary some might have imagined it to be. The world has always been at the doorstep. What has changed is the intensity of its arrival and the scale of its penetration.
The old distinction between inside and outside, private and public, refuge and exposure, has been steadily weakened. The radio opened the front door to the world. Television widened the breach. The internet has gone further still, making the home porous to endless flows of information, advertising, entertainment, political messaging, tracking and algorithmic influence.
Contested Terrain
This is where the problem becomes political. In the classical liberal imagination, the private home was often treated as a space apart from public life, a domain in which one might withdraw from society and cultivate independent thought. But that ideal was always partial and uneven. Homes were never outside ideology, class, gender or power.
Even so, the current situation marks a deeper invasion. The domestic sphere is now a contested terrain in which corporations, platforms and states compete to shape perceptions and habits. The home is where we are continuously addressed, profiled and nudged.
German sociologist Jürgen Habermas argued that public discourse should be open to criticism and rational evaluation. Yet what reaches us through the screens in our homes is a managed environment of persuasion. We are not equal participants in the information systems that enter our living rooms and bedrooms. We are targets.
Politics has relied on marketing, media and image management. As citizens are encouraged to consume opinion rather than form it, passive consensus is manufactured through repetition and spectacle designed for emotional manipulation. The home becomes a site where public life is fed to us in slogans and moods.
This is why the domestic interior matters so much to the logic of power. What happens in the home no longer remains in the home. Our devices connect us to a vast apparatus that predicts behaviour and monetises attention. The promise of convenience masks a deeper surrender.
People give data away voluntarily. They furnish the home with smart products and networked appliances, while corporations learn more about them than their neighbours ever did. The old thief needed a key. The new one only needs our participation.
And so, the home becomes part of a broader architecture of enclosure. People are encouraged to personalise their spaces while being funnelled into standardised consumer categories. They decorate, renovate, stream, subscribe and upgrade in the name of individuality as the underlying systems become more uniform and more intrusive.
The home appears intimate, but its infrastructure is increasingly externalised, owned elsewhere and controlled remotely. Even the language of freedom is absorbed into the machinery of capture.
The internet has accelerated this process by turning domesticity into a digital identity. People now speak casually of online 'home' pages, feeds, profiles and platforms as though these are places where one can dwell.
People create web environments that symbolise belonging and identity, often in response to increasing rootlessness and fragmentation. In that sense, creating a place on the web is a kind of homemaking. But it is also a trap.
The more people rely on digital spaces to construct a sense of self, the more their intimate lives become legible to data systems built for extraction. Although the web may look like a personalised extension of home, it is also a surveillance medium and an enclosure of attention.
It all reflects a deeper social condition in which people are uprooted from community and place. When local life and community weaken, the home is asked to do more work. It must provide identity, comfort, entertainment, connection and emotional repair.
At the same time, it is subjected to an endless stream of external messages telling us who to be, how to live, what to buy and what to fear. The domestic sphere is therefore burdened from both sides: expected to be a refuge, while being dismantled as a refuge.
The concept of home also extends far beyond bricks and mortar. Home is a cultural and historical concept, bound up with birthplace, ancestry, language, citizenship, memory and ritual. People carry home with them in ways that cannot be reduced to property ownership or postal address.
Some yearn for a return to a homeland. Some defend a place against occupation. Some are displaced and carry a portable home in language, faith, custom and memory. Some lead nomadic lives and understand home in the broadest possible sense, as relationship rather than residence.
This is why home can become a site of conflict. It becomes a claim by marking belonging and identity. In many parts of the world, struggles over home are struggles over land, nation, religion and survival. From Palestine and Kurdistan to Kashmir and Manipur, the demand for a homeland has been tied to questions of sovereignty, memory and the right to exist on one's own terms.
Religion has often played a central role in this deeper psychology of home. Peter Berger's notion of the sacred canopy reminds us that religion gives people a universe of meaning, a framework that ties personal life to wider social and cosmic order. When such frameworks erode, people can experience a sense of homelessness, not merely in the physical sense but in the mind.
Berger's 'homeless mind' captures the existential disorientation that follows the decline of shared meaning and the rise of individualism, secularisation and fragmentation. In that situation, people search for belonging wherever they can find it.
Resisting Homelessness
But the substitutes offered by modernity are thin. Consumer culture promises fulfilment and delivers distraction. Shopping becomes a civil religion of sorts, but it cannot answer the deeper existential questions. Nor can the ideological systems of the twentieth century, however grand their claims. The Soviet Union's symbolic universe did not resolve the human need for ultimate meaning, and the modern marketplace fares no better.
The sacred has not disappeared so much as has been displaced, commodified or replaced by branding and lifestyle. In the absence of rooted meaning, people turn to any number of partial substitutes-nationalism, sectarianism, wellness culture, online community or the endless feed.
This helps explain why home can still exert such powerful emotional force. The search for home is not really the search for a building. It is the search for continuity and belonging in a world that keeps breaking itself apart. That is why migrants, refugees and diasporic communities often recreate home through shared customs, food, language, worship and neighbourhood life.
Italians in New York did not abandon their roots on arrival; they reconstituted them in Little Italy. In London and other British cities, South Asian, Caribbean, African and other communities have built their own forms of continuity, often around religious institutions, shops, rituals and mutual support. Leicester's Diwali celebrations, for example, can be regarded as acts of public belonging.
This also explains why debates about national identity are so often heated and defensive. When in the 1980s UK politician Norman Tebbit once questioned the loyalty of British Asians supporting India or Pakistan in cricket, the issue was never really sport. It was belonging. Who gets to define home ? Is it merely the country into which one has moved or does home continue to live in ancestry and inherited attachment?
Such questions cannot be resolved by passports alone. Home is history and memory. It is the accumulated life of generations.
And yet the contemporary world relentlessly weakens these bonds. The homogenised city, the digital platform, the branded shopping environment and the surveillance state all contribute to a condition of placelessness. The apartment block, the gated development, the retail park and the smart home all risk becoming non-places: environments of convenience without intimacy and functionality without rootedness.
This is why the question of home is a question of power. Who controls the conditions under which people live ? Who designs the spaces in which attachment forms ? Who profits from the emotional labour of domestic life?
Who decides whether home is a place of selfhood, community and continuity or a managed unit of consumption and data extraction ? These questions go to the heart of what kind of society we inhabit.
Home, then, is not simply a place we occupy. It can shelter and humanise. But it can also be enclosed or colonised and monitored. The sentimental picture of home as a self-contained haven is increasingly untenable. The world is in the home, and the home is in the world. What matters is whether that connection supports life or reduces it to dependency.
That is why millions still struggle to assert their right to home, in every sense of the word. They are defending memory, belonging, dignity and the possibility of living in a world that is recognisably theirs. Home is where the heart is, yes-but only if it has not already been fenced off, priced out, digitised or given away.
The original source of this article is Global Research.
Renowned author Colin Todhunter specialises in development, food and agriculture. He is a Research Associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization (CRG). Visit the author's substack, substack.com.