Six "smart" devices whose very existence seems dumb
Please behold six of the gadgets we are supposed to rely on to keep the economy growing and generate lots of well paid jobs:
- the “Simulated Sunset” nightstand light
- the earphones for listening to music while swimming
- the Electronic Baggage Tag
- the trolley with integrated tag display
- the most useless fridge ever
- the ultimately stupid passport cover
The first two gadgets “simply” shield and alienate their users from the environment around them:
And good luck if they break, they both look as (uselessly) cool as NOT serviceable.
The “smart” tags and displays for baggages…
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<a href="/img/4-multiwheel-with-electronic-tag-bolero.jpg" target="_blank">click for detail</a>
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Here are two gadgets smart enough to make objects that never had those problems much harder to recycle, if recyclable at all, and hackable, to “steal” personal data or generally create disservice in airports.
That fridge. THAT fridge!
The fridge… you pay more than 2500 Euros to have:
- one more way, right in your home, to have your passwords stolen, unwillingly help criminals to make money or damage you in several other ways
- “controllable via your smartphone” (how could you possibly live without that?)
- with “more than 180,000 recipe ideas”: that is, one hundredth of the recipes you already can have in your smartphone, right in front of your eyes, instead of a monitor that may be unreadable from your kitchen counter where you actually execute recipes
- with a monitor likely usable only for those pictures, and as a calendar. No, wait,also as…
- a “family hub”? If you need a fridge as hub of your family, you and your family need counseling much more than a smart fridge
- summing up, lots of extra expensive stuff, for no good reason other than wasting hard to get minerals, instead of making useful stuff with them
And all this, just to do stuff you already can do better with any smartphone. But wait, there also is…
The perfect passport cover to match that fridge
You can’t make this stuff up. But, sadly, you may buy it. Behold the “first ever traceable passport cover”:
You read that right. Get that thing, and you, and everybody else of course, may be able to know where you are while traveling, even if you turn your smartphone off. No, wait. The tracker only has a range of “up to 60 meters”. This means that (thanks heaven!) the cover would almost never be usable for actually tracing a stolen passport (which, again, is marketing lingo for “let us know wherever you go”).
In other words, this means that the only use of that (non-fully-recyclable) cover is to spare you what, 30 seconds? of rummaging into your bag to find your passport. After you have spent 30 seconds to get the phone and start the app that tracks the cover, of course. But at least you will look real smart and trendy to all those deplorables next in line at the passport check. I really can’t imagine a better way to spend one’s money.
Who writes this, why, and how to help
I am Marco Fioretti, tech writer and aspiring polymath doing human-digital research and popularization.
I do it because YOUR civil rights and the quality of YOUR life depend every year more on how software is used AROUND you.
To this end, I have already shared more than a million words on this blog, without any paywall or user tracking, and am sharing the next million through a newsletter, also without any paywall.
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