Hey folks, welcome back to the Garage Corner.
My refrigerator threw an error code yesterday. Not a hum, not a rattle. It didn't leak water on the linoleum. No, it sent a push notification to my smartphone while I was at work, telling me that its water filter was at 10% capacity.
When did our kitchen appliances become anxious overachievers?
I walked into the kitchen last night, stood in front of this metallic monolith, and realized it has more computing power than the Apollo 11 lunar module. It has a touch screen on the door. It connects to the Wi-Fi. It tracks the expiration dates of my mustard. Why? If I want to know if the milk is bad, I don't need an algorithm to send me an email. I use the test God gave me: I open the lid and take a sniff. If my eyes water, it goes in the trash. Simple.
We’ve reached a weird point in society where we are fixing things that were never broken. A refrigerator has one job: keep the beer cold and the meat fresh. That’s it. It’s a cold box with a compressor. It doesn't need to stream a podcast. It doesn't need to know my calendar. And it definitely shouldn't be suggesting recipes based on my "mood."
But the real kicker happened this morning. The Wi-Fi router went down for ten minutes. Suddenly, my stove couldn’t clock in for work. My oven refused to preheat because it couldn’t "verify the network connection." Imagine that. I couldn't fry an egg because a server in Silicon Valley had a hiccup. Our ancestors built the Hoover Dam with slide rules and grit, and I'm getting outsmarted by a breakfast appliance.
Every time we buy a "smart" version of a dumb object, we exchange a little bit of our control for a lot of needless complexity. A dumb toaster lasts twenty years because there's nothing in it but a spring and a heating wire. A smart toaster lasts until the manufacturer decides to stop updating the app. Then you’re left with a three-hundred-dollar paperweight that can't even brown a piece of sourdough.
Technology should serve us, not supervise us. I don't want a house that thinks for itself. I want a house that obeys a physical switch.
So next time you're appliance shopping, look for the machine with the fewest lights. Buy the one with the heavy handle and the analog dial. Let's make appliances dumb again.
I’m going out to the garage to look at my 1970s chest freezer. It doesn't know what the internet is, but it keeps my venison frozen solid.
Until next time, keep it simple, and keep it manual.
