Rage Against the (Smart) Machine

(Press ‘Play’ to hear the author’s narration.)

R age Against the Machine often traffics in a sophomoric brand of left-wing nu-metal music, but the group’s raw fury summarizes much of how I felt when setting up a smart TV in the aftermath of Black Friday. (“Smart Bulbs on Parade,” anyone?)

I despise “smart” home devices. Their snoopery, their incomprehensible terms of service and incessant nattering about a loss of wireless connectivity and subsequent hard resets — it’s all infuriating. Like a man dealing with a home invasion of toddlers trailing proprietary power cords, I move throughout the house, tending to tantrums and spills. The devices are arrantly incapable of telling me what’s wrong beyond a nod to vague F.A.Q. pages compiled by a man who must own a device different from mine. Robotic vacuums look to end their self-aware existence by tossing themselves down the basement stairs, and the fridge reproaches me for not updating its defrost function.

But what’s worse is that these devices broadcast my technical ineptitude to headquarters while also reporting how often I warm my cup of coffee or rewatch The Grand Tour. HQ can then turn around and, after a mutually beneficial transaction to which I am not a party, inform Folgers of this dunce over on Dumbarse Lane who drinks five cups of coffee a day. The roasted-bean conglomerates then start sending advertisements and door-to-door baristas to extol the virtues of their coffee-credit program, which allows one to split payments on a $15 bag into five parts at 15 percent interest.

I decry the smart device, but do not think me an outright Luddite. It’s just that smart devices take more than they give, a perfect example being the modern TV. At first blush, a smart TV makes all sorts of sense for the consumer. We watch streaming services, so why not incorporate a chip into the TV that can facilitate that? No dongles or other nonsense, just an honest chip to do the Lord’s work of providing limitless entertainment to the snuggled masses.

But smart TVs suck. They’re dreadfully slow, their menus are not optimized, and the only thing they manage to pass along adequately is your personal information while shows buffer. And it’s not like the uber-cheap sets are the only ones that suffer this stupefaction. Our Sony Bravia has the higher-end Android TV; it’s still miserable. After ongoing annoyance, we purchased an Apple TV for around $150 — a proper streaming machine with a powerful chip and better user protections that can actually run what we ask of it, connected to the back of the TV via HDMI. It may be an old-fangled fix, but it works.

My National Review colleague Dominic Pino would probably say something about the merit of specialization here, and I agree with him wholeheartedly. Apple makes a fabulous streaming box because it is monomaniacal about user experience. Sony sells a splendid television because it has devoted years of research and development to making high-end displays and accurate color replication — it’s no accident that the company also produces exquisite cameras. Better to have a TV designed to be the best visual product at a specific price point than a smart one with bloated software and the cheapest hardware designed to harvest my information to make some money back. In other words, the TV should be designed to sell because it produces an image, not because it is an all-in-one miracle machine that maximizes passive ad income.

While some might argue that almost all snooping features can be turned off, it’s not obvious to the layman what he’s agreeing to during setup. Manufacturers use vague terms and lean hard into the value of recommendations for why customers should keep data collection on. If there was even a semi-honest “here are the tradeoffs” screen, it would be fine. But that’s not how the information is presented. Manufacturers toggle data collection to “on,” and it takes conscious intervention to undo that setting. Disconnect the smart TV from the network, and it’ll send irksome popups to inform you that it has lost contact with its overlords, like a flat-panel E.T. who must phone home to notify LG that I’m into baking shows now.

I want my TV to be dumb. Charge me more; I’ll buy more coffee on layaway to compensate. Use the Amazon Kindle discounted-rate model for ad-supported devices; just let me buy a display without the forensic fluff. Right now, the only such options on the market are a few chintzy outliers. As more consumers move from their simple TVs to a first or second smart TV and find the latter devices invasive and frustrating, I do expect demand for simple TVs to return. The question is whether manufacturers can prise themselves from the teat of user information. For what it’s worth, they may not have a choice, as Roku and Amazon are taking losses undercutting one another on price to get their respective smart platforms into homes.

There is no more noble hill to die upon than that of opposing intelligent technology. Will you join me? Or will you sell your soul to see your smart laundry hamper trundle into the banister — as it notifies Pfizer of your XXL bloomers and the resulting need for heart-medication advertisements — on its predetermined route to destruction? It is the question of our age.