Just watched Kimi (2022) for another class. The film offers an ambivalent commentary on virtual assistant and home surveillance technology, valorizing the “human element” in the operation of algorithmic machine intelligence as redemptive. The film's story, which explores the pervasive digital surveillance of private, corporate and public spaces, is set in motion Blow Up (1966) style, when our hero overhears a murder in recordings from a virtual assistant product. Angela Childs works for Amygdala, the corporation behind the product, and her job is to train language processing algorithms to interpret questions that they failed to properly account for in the first place. Her job involves moving through an endless stream of clipped recordings of Kimi, the titular product, failing to work. This intervention at the site of error leads her to uncover a violent crime. Her responsible attempts to pursue justice, via the FBI, are thwarted by the company she works for, which is eager to cover up the crime to protect its IPO. On the one hand, this locates the algorithm in a socio-technical system similar to that in the de Lara and the Gillespie. On the other, the film produces the problem of algorithmic surveillance as one to be solved by proper human oversight (obscuring the development of the product itself within power relations and the production of certain bodies– say, racialized bodies– as threats).
The decision to make the drama one of seeking out law enforcement (the FBI) in order to expose the guilt and negligence of a tech company is also interesting, given the penchant of the operators of adjacent products (like Amazon Ring) to proactively share data with law enforcement. The film also ends with the hero’s removal of Kimi from her own home, despite the fact that her own responsible stewardship of this technology has just saved the day.
I haven’t seen Kimi, but your analysis of the film is super interesting. In particular, it made me think about our class discussions regarding the “gap” that can sometimes occur in relation to digital technology. Specifically, we have discussed how such gaps can become sites that allow us to maneuver, negotiate, and potentially implement alternatives to current systems. If I understand correctly, the story of Kimi essentially emerges from the gap between what Kimi’s algorithm is supposed to do and what it actually does. This makes the presence of the FBI in the story all the more interesting. The film would appear to envision a gap in the technology – a gap that could allow both the protagonist and the spectator to imagine something new – and then forecloses any radical possibilities by immediately resorting to the dominant power structures represented by law enforcement.
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