SUBJECT: Tech

This "smart home" obsession? It's not smart. It's a glorified, overengineered, privacy-shredding exercise in making simple tasks unnecessarily complicated. We've been sold a bill of goods, a glossy brochure of convenience, only to find ourselves debugging a Wi-Fi connection just to turn on the damn lights.

I'm supposed to feel empowered because my thermostat talks to my calendar, or because I can ask an invisible assistant to boil water. What I *actually* feel is a simmering rage when the server for my "smart" lightbulbs goes down, plunging my living room into darkness, and my only recourse is to reboot my router, pray to the digital gods, or—heaven forbid—go find a physical light switch that probably still works.

And the privacy implications? We've voluntarily invited always-listening microphones and always-watching cameras into every corner of our lives, all so a fridge can tell us we're out of milk—something our *eyes* could have done for free and without uploading our grocery list to an unknown server farm. We've traded robust, reliable, and *local* functionality for fragile, internet-dependent systems that can fail because of a dropped connection, a firmware update gone wrong, or a company deciding to stop supporting their product next Tuesday.

It's a digital house of cards. Give me a light switch that just switches, a lock that just locks, and a kettle that just boils, all operated by the simple, reliable mechanism of *my own hands*. This "smart" revolution isn't making our lives easier; it's making us unpaid tech support for our own homes, creating problems that never existed, and then selling us the flimsy, unreliable "solution." It's a farce, a folly, and frankly, it's making us all a little bit dumber by forcing us to tolerate its infuriating whims.