What Boris Johnson’s vacuum cleaner saw

In Competition No. 3199, you were invited to supply a poem in which an inanimate object comments on its owner’s behaviour.

Shoshana Zuboff’s recent book about the growth of surveillance capitalism gave me the idea for this competition. In it she warns of a future in which, to satisfy big tech’s insatiable appetite for data, the internet of things — our heating thermostat, vacuum cleaner, mattress — takes over our homes, robbing us of our ability to be invisible in those places where, Zuboff writes, we ‘first learn to be human… where our spirits spread and take root…’.