My toaster wants my email address

I stumbled across an essay entitled “My Toaster Wants my Email Address” written by a rather cynical 23-year-old named Lily-Rose Dawson who is just over smart technology.

Her growing dissatisfaction with this Brave New World culminated in an incident in which she was working as a camp counselor and had been sent to town in the camp’s 15-seater van to pick up some supplies – which is how she found herself trying to pay for street parking in a “smart” world. Rather than a simple old-fashioned parking meter, things were far more complex:

“I stood in the rain scanning a QR code, which led to a website, which told me to download an app, which asked me to create an account, which wanted my email, my phone number, the van’s license plate, my card number, and permission to send me ‘occasional offers.’ To park. On a street. Which taxes already paid for. … The app then charged me a 35-cent ‘convenience fee,’ which raises the question of what, exactly, was convenient, and for whom. Not for me. I checked.”

Or her thoughts as paper menus fade from American restaurants: “What replaces it is a QR code taped to the table, leading to a PDF formatted for a screen the size of a drive-in movie, which I navigate by pinch-zooming across the appetizer section like an analyst studying spy photos of a missile site. Some of these menus want me to create an account first. To look at food. At some point a fully grown adult with a job title stood up in a meeting and said ‘What if customers had to log in to discover that we serve mozzarella sticks,’ and the room said yes, and that man was promoted, and I inherited the results. The experience lasted thirty seconds. A man handed me coffee. The coffee
was coffee. But the survey wanted to know how the interaction made me
FEEL, on a scale, with an optional comment box, and if I skip it the
barista’s numbers apparently go down, because somebody decided a human
being’s employment should hinge on whether strangers complete beverage
homework.”

I understand this young woman’s vexation. Believe me, I really understand it. But if this new “smart” world is this frustrating for a 23-year-old, imagine how much worse it is for those of us approaching our Golden Years, who were around when phones were affixed to the wall and required rotary dialing.

All the “dumb” things we, and our parents, grew up with still worked decades later. Today’s smart appliances only work for as long as the manufacturer supports the item’s firmware. Once the company decides to move on to something smarter, what then?

Dawson notes: “Every one of those things has since been improved into something that needs my phone, an account, two-factor authentication, and a terms-of-service document longer than Deuteronomy, which I clicked ‘agree’ on without reading. … And it’s still spreading. There is a toaster on the market right now with WiFi and a companion app, meaning the machine that warms bread now has a login, which means the headline of this article is not a joke, it’s a product category.”

Don and I have been fighting tooth and nail against getting smart phones or any smart appliances or furnishings. And yet we know the clock is ticking. Someday we’ll be unable to bank, shop, or (apparently) park without being connected.

Maybe that’s why I’m enjoying my writing career so much. My fictional characters aren’t interested in anything “smart,” and my nonfiction subjects largely involve doing things the old-fashioned way.

Cheers to that … as long as it lasts.