A content analysis of the Amazon Astro ad
I recently discovered that Amazon has released a new robot called Astro. Astro rolls around your house on wheels and provides a live feed of important and intrusive personal data directly to Jeff Bezos. To support the release of this robot, Amazon created this ad, which seems to me like an abbreviated episode of Black Mirror. Here is my content analysis:
The video opens with an upper middle class couple staring at the robot, which makes a beeping noise. The woman — in unimpressed deadpan — says ‘a robot’. I love this woman. She is my spirit animal so far in this video because she is clearly bored and annoyed at the pointless machinery rolling around her floor. As far as I can tell, the Astro doesn’t have cleaning tools like Roomba or whatever cleaning machine it is that my friends own which I have named Beryl.
Her husband is excited. She asks the obvious question: “what are we going to do with a Robot?”, to which he replies “well, Astro, follow me”. So he doesn’t actually answer her question, but we learn that the primary function of the robot is to stalk its owners. Which shouldn’t be surprising given this is a device built by Amazon.
The robot rolls into a child’s room for a video call, and the child tells it to follow her — again reinforcing that the robot is a stalker. Why would a person buy this digital stalking machine?? Well one person asks the robot to dance with her, which it does by rolling in circles while she awkwardly bops across the room from the robot. So loneliness may be a factor.
A clearly gay couple sits in a park, phone out, looking at the video stream of their home provided by the robot. Amazon is here nodding to diversity by including gays who aren’t sure if the oven is switched off. DO NOT WORRY — the robot has a periscope which extends up to the stove to confirm their baked goods will not burn the house down. “And now I totally believe you,” minces one gay to his smug looking partner. And then a nearby barbecue inexplicably explodes in flame. Clearly they needed the robot in this park.
Smash cut to a kitchen, where an old man is eating a literal bowl of green goop. It is unclear what the goop is, but the robot kindly advises this senile old man to ‘eat plenty of greens’. The robot is clearly referring to things like broccoli and asparagus, but this demented geriatric is delighted and tucks into the unknown slime. “CHECK!” he screams as he shovels more of the gunk into his mouth.
The texture of this slime is really weird too — it doesn’t slime off the spoon, but rather strings out like some form of superdense semi-liquid green fairy floss. I don’t understand the physics of it, and I’d be worried if a relative of mine were eating it. I certainly don’t want robots egging them on. Actually, the more I think about this scene, the more evil and insidious the robot seems. “Eat plenty of greens” sounds like a command, as if this robot has assembled some kind of green poison which it is now tricking its owner into consuming. Scary shit, Amazon.
It is night time. The robot rolls past a sleeping dog and connects to its charger. The dog is bored that it was cast in this video. The robot falls asleep.
But suddenly it is AWAKE and “INVESTIGATING possible unknown person”. Which means that Amazon has sensed a potential customer. The robot sweeps through the house looking for holders of credit cards, while the owner of the robot — who is not home — gazes anxiously at the camera. It’s just her son returning the dogs, which is something she probably should have known was going to happen regardless of the robot. She smiles happily and places a plant in the back of a van for some reason.
It is night time again. The robot is patrolling the house rather than charging, which is what it was doing at night a moment ago. It turns out the robot never sleeps, and the music has changed to a darker tone indicating that the robot is now protecting us against THREATS. Some glass smashes somewhere in the house. A thief? The robot investigates for possible customers and uses its periscope to scan the kitchen.
All good, it’s just a raccoon. The robot scans the raccoon for credit cards, and suddenly we cut to a guy in a restaurant who is not sitting at dinner or smoking, but simply staring at the video stream of his home with a huge glass of wine. “Thought we weren’t home, huh?” he says aggressively to the raccoon. I don’t think the raccoon can respond, but I guess the robot is playing this message to it via the built-in screen-face.
Why is this man so invested in his conversation with a raccoon? He looks committed, he’s holding his wine pointedly. He looks smug, like he’s about to teach that fucking raccoon a lesson. Why does everyone in this ad look smug? Is it because people who own robots are entitled to feel smug? His eyes widen and he has a dramatic stare-off with the raccoon, before whispering “you thought wrong”. He pushes a button on his phone, which sets off a fairly quiet alarm to scare the raccoon away. The raccoon steals a cupcake and leaves calmly. “Good try though” says the man as he looks up in victory, wine in hand.
Good try? His opening gambit was that the raccoon ‘thought they weren’t home’ — is he saying that it was wrong to think that? They weren’t home. And also, doesn’t his use of the word ‘we’ imply that he is with somebody else? Where is this person? This guy seems to be standing all on his own, with his wine, far from the tables, talking to a raccoon by FaceTime. That’s pretty antisocial.
And did he even defeat the raccoon? Like, all well and good, the raccoon only managed to take one cupcake, but the window is still smashed, every other cupcake is spilled on the floor (for the dog to eat), and the raccoon couldn’t really have carried more than one or two cupcakes anyway, so I think in this Mexican stand-off (it’s just a stand-off), the raccoon is probably the winner.
Smash cut to the robot carrying a beer to the unimpressed woman from the start of the clip. She’s sitting on a lounge staring straight ahead at absolutely nothing. It’s a genuinely weird thing to do. I love her, but she’s seriously sitting in a chair contemplating nothing in particular, staring at nothing in particular. The robot brings her a beer, which suggests to me that its AI is learning very quickly how this woman rolls. She is overjoyed by the prospect of alcohol and decides that they can keep the robot.
What’s the lesson in all of this? I think it’s that Amazon has a bizarre understanding of human behaviour, although maybe I just have a bad understanding of American culture. Do people really do these strange disconnected things? Is life really like this pastiche of pseudo-practices? Each of these interactions with the robot is anchored by simulacra of real social existence: a generic glass of wine, a nondescript park bench, a beer and a good stare into the middle distance. It seems like Amazon went out of their way to populate this video with human beings that have even less personality than the robot. Maybe that’s the point: if it’s too hard to make the robot more like people, just make people more like the robot.
Would I buy one? No, not yet. I have too many stairs in my house. But I wouldn’t mind the beer.
