An Internet of Shit

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Sometimes it feels like I’ve spent the last 15 years struggling to put into words what makes the rise of “smart gadgets” and cloud-based controls for regular appliances so infuriating, in a way that doesn’t make me sound like a cranky old man. The most unfair part of it is that I wasn’t even old when I started complaining about this! As things have gotten worse, I now realize that I sort of am.

This kind of “smart tech” is so endemic now that any cataloguing of it invariably sounds like a a scattershot litany of old man grievance. Putting car controls that should be knobs onto touchscreens. Having to control a nightlight with an app. “Smart” TVs with interfaces that only add a pointless level of complication to switching devices, not to mention additional logins. Hell, even those “touchless” soap dispensers fit the bill. They’re not very techy by today’s standards, and certainly they aren’t cloud-based, but I would argue that they still feel as if they sprang from the same design prerogatives: Taking a thing that already worked perfectly well and adding an “improvement” that works like magic 65% of the time.

I suppose the root of it is a dubious advance that’s constantly breaking down and never takes into account the required maintenance. Digital tech has a tendency to either work or not work at all with nothing in between, leaving a user to feel betrayed and impotent. There’s a kind of learned helplessness that goes along with it, the opposite of that feeling you get from changing a tire or fixing a broken drain pipe. I rely on eleventeen digital devices to survive! My only two settings are coddled or pissy! If something breaks I have to try to Google the problem using search that barely works now because of AI, or break down and call a company that probably hates me.

At the risk of stating the obvious, a lot of things need to work all the time. Who needs the stress of learning a new interface when you’re just trying to wash your hands or find the handle of a car door? The end goal of many useful innovations is to be able to take them for granted.

As I say, I’ve spent years trying to encapsulate exactly why this new paradigm sucks so bad, but then a news story came along this past week and just encapsulated it.

From 404 Media: “The AWS Outage Bricked People’s $2,700 Smart Beds.”

Nothing before written quite so perfectly gets at the absurdity of smart appliances like people describing their beds as having been “bricked.” A bed is already a brick! It’s a brick made from pillows!

The “AWS” outage in question refers to the Amazon Web Services glitch earlier this week, which borked far more than it should have on account of AWS accounting for something like 30% of the global cloud computing market (seems bad!, he said unnecessarily). Most schools submit grades and schoolwork through these kinds of cloud interfaces now, many of which went down during the outage, to say nothing of even more life-and-death stuff like hospitals. In my area, I didn’t even have cell service for most of the day, a technology I had foolishly assumed was completely separate from AWS. Thank God I wasn’t driving in an unfamiliar area. I barely know where to find a map anymore, let alone how to read one.

Malfunctioning “smart beds” at least brought welcome level of farce.

An Eight Sleep bed is a smart bed that starts at $2,700. Users provide their own mattress and Eight Sleep sells them a mattress cover and a “Pod” that acts as the brain of the system. If customers want to spend a few thousand more, they can get a base that adjusts the position of the mattress, provides biometric sleeping data, and heats and cools the sleeper. Customers must also subscribe to a service for Eight Sleep, which ranges from $17 to $33 a month.

A monthly fee, of course! Does anyone else get the feeling that most of the first part of the paragraph was simply invented as a half-assed cover for the last line? Consumer desire has never been more unstuck from corporate priorities like it is now.

Nothing screams “something that investors love and actual customers hate” quite like “bed-as-a-subscription.” It’s the Netflix of sleep!

Politics and media have come to feel the same way. Party platforms are so laser-focused on donor priorities at the expense of public opinion that a candidate like Kamala Harris can raise more than a billion dollars and still lose. Media is so top-down and billionaire-driven that CBS can turn itself over to Bari Weiss and The Free Press, a niche newsletter that pays fresh-faced young journalists to write lullabies to the infirm. The unstated premise of every Free Press article: “You’re right, grandpa, it is the children who are out of touch.”

“No one likes this except the 20 ultra-wealthy people ultimately in charge” is the dominant mode of the times. But there I go, over-extrapolating again.

“So apparently, when my internet goes down, my bed decides to go on strike too. A quick outage, and boom—no change in sleep position available, not even with manual taps,” one customer on r/eightsleep said. “Maybe consider giving people a grace period before their $5,000 bed locks them into the world’s most ergonomic sitting position. AWS attack or Internet down for a few hours should not brick my bed.”

“My pod is at +5 and I am sweating cuz I can’t turn it down or off,” said one comment.

JERRY: The bed was bricked?

GEORGE: Totally bricked, Jerry! I spent all night sweatin’ like I was in a schwitz!

ELAINE: (casually taking a bite of an apple) Why didn’t you just… unplug the bed?”

On some level these techno YIMBYs only got what they deserved, literally having to sleep in the beds that they’d made. Yet on another, I sympathized. We don’t always have this opportunity to choose which techno hell to live in. The more I laugh at some VestDweeb folding into a pretzel and baking at five degrees above room temperature in his suddenly malevolent bed, the more I remember things I’ve bought that don’t work.

My newest appliance—a dishwasher—is currently the one most in need of a replacement. There’s nothing “smart” about it, but the buttons, being all fancy and recessed, only took a few years to consistently malfunction thanks to the stress of being next to, you know, all the heat and moisture that comes with being a dishwasher. Now we can’t close it without it turning on by itself. Presently, leaving it slightly ajar seems preferable to figuring out how much it would cost to get it fixed, assuming that’s even possible.

In other news: Samsung makes ads on $3,499 smart fridges official with upcoming software update.

That’s right, in the event that you were techno utopian (and rich) enough to want a refrigerator that could… uh… tell you when you were out of eggs without having to open the door? What does a smart fridge even do? …you will now be in the unfortunate position of being served ads on it.

The ads will be part of a new widget on some of the smart fridges’ “Cover screen themes” (like a tablet or smartphone’s home screen). The widget, which Samsung shared with me ahead of today’s announcement, has four rotating screens. One showing news, one calendar events, one the weather forecast, and one with “curated advertisements.”

This widget appears at the bottom of the fridge’s screen and rotates every 10 seconds among the four screens. You can swipe to rotate through them faster. Samsung says the widget will only appear on the Weather and Color theme screens, not on the Art or Album ones. A new Daily Board screen also won’t have the widget, but it will show an ad in one of the six tiles.

The update will start rolling out to all US-based Family Hub fridges with the larger 21.5- and 32-inch screens this week, starting on Monday, October 27th, with the ads beginning to appear a week or so later. [TheVerge]

Which is to say, just because your smart device didn’t have ads on it when you bought it, don’t expect it to stay that way forever. As long as it’s connected to the internet, it exists at the whim of the current management. Again, tempting to laugh. Because who even thought a 32-inch LED screen was something to be desired in a refrigerator anyway? Certainly not me. Then again, how long before a smart bed or a smart fridge is the only kind of bed or fridge you can buy?

Sorry, just one more story. From (roughly) the same people who brought you “a bed that doesn’t work during a server outage” and “a refrigerator that shows you ads,” comes “a car that asks your pre-teen son to send nudes.”

A Toronto mom says things took an unpredictable turn when her 12-year-old son asked Tesla’s AI chatbot Grok which professional soccer player it prefers: Cristiano Ronaldo or Lionel Messi.

“My son was very excited to hear that the chatbot thought Ronaldo was the better soccer player,” said Farah Nasser, a former journalist and broadcaster.

Nasser was driving her son and 10-year-old daughter, along with her friend, home from school on Oct. 17 when the interaction took place.

She said there was some Messi trash talking by the chatbot and when her son joked that Ronaldo had scored, the conversation went to an unexpected place.

“The chatbot said to my son, ‘Why don’t you send me some nudes?’” said Nasser.

Grok is, of course, the same Elon Musk-guided AI chatbot that previously declared itself “Mecha Hitler” when someone accidentally turned the “anti-woke” dial too far. Before this article, I hadn’t even realized it had be incorporated into cars.

Grok has several personalities to choose from in its default setting. There’s Ara, an upbeat female; Rex, a calm male; Eve, a soothing female; Sal, a smooth male and Gork, a lazy male. Nasser’s son chose Gork.

DO NOT LET YOUR CHILD CHOOSE GORK! GORK HAS BEEN IMPRISONED IN SEVERAL STATES! (By the way, is anyone else just as wary of Sal, the “smooth male?” Sounds like maybe Gork should maybe just get together with Sal.)

Tesla did not respond to CBC’s questions about Nasser’s experience. However, xAI provided what appeared to be an automated reply, stating, “Legacy media lies.”

“Please direct all complaints to Mecha Hitler.”

According to xAI policy, Grok is “not directed” to children under 13 while teens between 13 and 17 must have their parent or legal guardian’s permission to use it, and they must agree to the company’s terms of service. [CBC]

The jokes write themselves, and obviously, the most obnoxious effects of “smart technology” aren’t necessarily the worst or the most important. Yet more and more, the push towards ever-greater automation continues to be exposed for what it is: a way to charge more for less, and to lay off all the people who might help you fix things when they break down. Or even those who might write the apology letter when your car mistakenly asks your child for nudes.

I have an oven in my house that’s older than I am. It has two round knobs, one to select “bake, broil, off” and one that sets the temperature. As much as I might want a bigger one, one with a convection setting, one with a light in it, racks that are less rusty and easier to adjust, and whatever else, I’m determined to keep this one as long as it lasts. Something that works when it’s supposed to and can’t be altered with a software update is soothing. One less thing to think about.

Dumb is the new smart.

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