Your Home Doesn’t Need to Be "Smart"

I recently got one of those fancy ice makers that make that great crunchy pellet ice, like you get in drinks at Sonic. This was a splurge; I already own not one but several ice trays that are perfectly capable of making ice. But I wanted the great crunchy pellet ice, because I live in Los Angeles, which is very hot for most of the year, and, look, I wanted the ice maker, so I got the ice maker.

When it arrived, I unpacked it, put it on the counter, and filled up the water tank. At first it didn’t work, so I figured I might as well look at the manual to see if there was any preuse cleaning or anything I was supposed to do.

In the troubleshooting section, it asked me to download an app.

This app, which is called SmartHQ, joins several others in an illustrious line of apps that are attached to items in my house that in many previous iterations did not have apps and that continue to not need apps and whose apps I have downloaded and then deleted. My air conditioner has an app, my toaster oven has an app, my stereo and the lights that line my dangerously uneven front stairs have an app. Other items that have apps, which I neither own nor download, include dead-bolt locks, cars, lights, toilets, sink faucets, aromatherapy diffusers, thermostats, security cameras, and a weird motor thing that clips onto window blinds to tilt them open and closed. "Took me about 45 minutes to install since I went step by step very carefully so as not to mess up," says one Amazon reviewer of said weird motor thing. "Discovering that the firmware was out of date was disappointing but Wonderlabs took care of that literally overnight."

The argument for the smart home comes in two real forms. One is that, theoretically, it can be accessible to those with impaired movement or other disabilities; many smart items allow you to control them with your voice, for example. The other one, I think, is that the smart home has always been one of those Jetsons-style American dreams that either doesn’t really exist (flying cars, robot butlers, jet packs) or exists but turns out to be kind of disappointing (smartwatches, 3D printing, holograms).

The concept of the smart home has been around for quite a long time; the exact date gets fuzzy, depending on how you define the term. Today, it generally refers to appliances or other household items that can be, and sometimes must be, connected to the internet and controlled with a phone. But the smart-home concept predates the smartphone. "For years," wrote Chris O’Malley in the Tampa Bay Times in 1999, "homeowners have been dreaming and reading about ‘smart’ homes that water the lawn while you’re on vacation, lower the heat when you open a window, or warm up the hot tub the second your car enters the driveway." Prior to the creation of the smartphone, a smart home often required clumsy and expensive systems that necessitated serious construction and a large, primitive remote control. Much of today’s smart-home tech wasn’t possible in any form. Once Wi-Fi established itself in the mainstream with the Apple iBook in 1999, the hardware and software required to wirelessly connect devices evolved rapidly. Today’s Wi-Fi transmitters are incredibly small and inexpensive; with the decreasing price of components, any appliance company can cheaply add Wi-Fi to its device and theoretically charge much more for the premium of a smart-home appliance.

Devices use a huge number of different apps, which vary dramatically in quality. Buying a smart plug from a company called something like Aoycocr or Crestin or Dewenwils (these are real examples, and highly rated ones, from Amazon) requires the download of an equally anonymous app that is not likely to feature an elegant user interface. Even my ice maker’s app, which was made by one of the most venerable corporations in American history, sucks. The app is largely superfluous: Basically, it lets you turn the ice maker on and off or schedule it to turn on and off or turn its unnecessary lights on and off. (It does, though, offer a feature called Flavorly AI, which provides recipes created by Google’s artificial intelligence. I typed "ice" into it, as this is the only food my ice machine makes, and it suggested several dishes the ice maker is not capable of creating, including an ice cream sundae.)

The smart home has always been one of those Jetsons-style American dreams that either doesn’t really exist…or exists but turns out to be kind of disappointing.

It’s easy to criticize the fact that most smart-home devices are just kind of dumb and pointless. As I write this, I’m cat-sitting for a friend of mine, who texted me to say that his cat’s robotic litter box alerted him that the litter needed to be changed. My own cat’s litter box, which is a plastic bin that cost seven dollars, also alerts me when the litter needs to be changed, by being stinky or having visible cat poop in it. His cat’s robotic litter box, when I visited, had frozen and needed to be restarted, and the litter was inaccessible to the cat. This is unlikely to happen with mine.

Some of these devices are, of course, slightly useful, if misguided. There are smart backyard irrigation systems that connect to a weather service and pause watering when it rains or increase the amount of water when it’s especially hot and dry.

Smart air conditioners allow you to run them only at certain times or turn them on remotely before you get home so the house will be cool. Also useful! Of course, good insulation can save more energy and money than a smart thermostat: According to the Energy Star program run by the EPA and Department of Energy, consumers can save an average of 15 percent on heating and cooling costs by air-sealing homes, adding insulation in attics, and using other basic, cost-effective tactics. Smart thermostats save, according to the same Energy Star program, about 8 percent on average. Insulation is more annoying to install, sure, but more to the point: Building shoddier, less insulated homes provides greater profits to construction companies, and then selling quick-fix thermostats provides nice profits to electronics companies. This is not a step forward.

One thing that The Jetsons did not predict, at least in my memory, is that smart-home devices would turn out to be valuable tools for tracking their users. These devices are collecting an astounding amount of data, ranging from millions of hours of voice recordings to video footage of your front door to all the personal data you grant access to in order for these devices to work, kind of badly, together. Amazon’s Ring system of security cameras and doorbells has been colossally worrying, with, as Max Read puts it in New York magazine, "sloppy security practices, secretive police partnerships, and many potential privacy violations." As of June 2023, Ring must pay millions of dollars in FTC settlements over privacy violations with these products.

The fact that the ice maker has a really dumb app is not a major problem in my life. I deleted it from my phone and very much enjoy crunching on the ice. But keep an eye on the news for articles about how much data you’re giving to truly terrible corporations and militarized police forces. Take a look at your Dewenwils app and see if it’s actually, like, good. The doubts you have about whether the smart home is actually a positive in your life—don’t ignore those.

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