Is Big Brother taking over your refrigerator and other appliances?

By David McElroy · May 8, 2013

Many of us have thought that Big Brother might arrive in our homes through TV sets, but what if we had the wrong appliance? What if Big Brother is really coming to control your refrigerator and oven and other very mundane appliances?

In Great Britain, the National Grid — the group that runs the power grid — has proposed that all appliances be required to have special sensors that give the power operators control to shut appliances down temporarily if they need to manage shortages of electricity. (I don’t like to link to RT.com, because it’s a propaganda organ of the Russian government, but this story appears legitimate.) The plan is also backed by power operators across the European Union, who want it adopted all over the continent.

Here in the United States, some power companies are adopting what they call “smart meters.” Who could oppose a “smart” meter? It sounds great, doesn’t it? For a power company, smart meters provide obvious benefits. They can monitor your power usage remotely, so the company no longer has to send someone to your house to read the meter. Just as important to the company, though, these meters give a power utility the ability to shut off your power remotely and “manage” your usage in other ways.

If the utility is having trouble supplying enough power, it can choose to cut back on your usage during peak periods. In other words, you’re giving a company (or a municipal utility) the right to shut your power off when it’s convenient for them.

In theory, it sounds good. In practice, it might even work as advertised for the time being. In some places, companies are offering financial incentives for them to have the right to cut your power off at certain peak times. It’s the implications for the future that scare me.

(Let me also mention that some people have worries about health problems because smart meters send their data back using radio waves. Some are even being arrested trying to block the installation of the meters, for both safety and privacy reasons. I think the safety issue is nonsense and I don’t take it seriously. The atmosphere is full of radio waves and they don’t hurt us. This is no different. It’s just like the people who were scared of WiFi signals and claimed they harmed health, too.)

A connected world — an “Internet of things” — is the wave of the future. Devices are going to have sensors and IP addresses and they’re going to talk to each other. I see that as almost inevitable. What I don’t like is that we aren’t going to be in control of our own devices. Companies and governments are going to have the technical capability to remotely control major aspects of our daily lives.

Even if the current uses of the technology are fairly benign, are you comfortable giving government the power to control what you’re using and the information about what devices you’re powering? What if you’re using power to grow plants indoors? Is that going to be enough to trigger a drug raid? (Buying indoor growing equipment is already enough to justify such a raid.)

I like technology and I like being connected, but I like to have control over my own devices. Maybe it’s already too late to stop this. I honestly don’t know. But I do know that a wave of major change is coming — and most people aren’t even going to know it’s coming until it’s too late to stop it.

I’m not happy about it, but I have no idea how to deal with this one.

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On a live awards show Sunday night, one man made a joke about a female celebrity. The husband of the celebrity was offended and hit the man who made the joke. Or maybe it was staged for entertainment. Who knows? Who cares? Social media is full of discussion — and even arguments — about this idiocy today. This baffles me. Let’s assume for a moment that the event happened as reported. People have been having such idiotic fights ever since there have been humans. Half the bars in the world see such brief dustups regularly. It simply doesn’t matter. The fact that so many people believe they need to talk about this — or even need to have opinions about it — is more evidence of the bizarre media brainwashing that convinces many to care passionately about brain-dead trivia. Your life will be happier and saner if you focus on yourself, your family and your friends, not on whatever scripted (or spontaneous) bilge that the media wants to pipe into your home.

I’m in the middle of migrating this website to new servers this week. This means you might encounter some unexpected behavior until I get all the bugs worked out. Clicking on my links (including this one) might cause your browser to give you the message that it’s a site without a current security certificate. It’s not actually unsafe, but there’s something which isn’t yet set up for the security certificate. I apologize for any such errors you might encounter while the process is going on. If you notice any problems with content which didn’t migrate properly, I would appreciate you letting me know the details at davidmcelroy@mac.com. Thanks for your patience.

I often wonder what animals think when they look at us and consider the society we’ve created. Yes, I know this is fanciful and unrealistic, but what if they could? Would they be astounded at how we treat each other? Would they be disgusted by the ugliness and pettiness which fill so many of our daily interactions? The truth is that I’m feeling pretty disgusted with humanity tonight. I made the mistake of reading some online interactions that I should have avoided — and it sickened me. The people involved appeared to be vile and stupid and arrogant. I wish I could pretend they’re a tiny minority, but I know better. It’s times such as this when I most need to escape much of “civilization” and disconnect from their world. If humans are going to be worthy of “ruling this planet,” we have a lot of growth to do. And I fear that growth is nowhere in sight. So my buddy Thomas, above, and all of his friends would be right to judge us harshly — and to think, “Why do you folks get to be in charge?”

I should have expected this, but I honestly didn’t. The article I wrote last week about disagreements over treatment for autistic children brought me angry emails. You could almost call it “hate mail.” Of the five emails about it so far, two have been to tell me that I’m wrong to even listen to critics of the most popular therapy for autistic children — and the other three tell me I’m wrong for not condemning the treatment as the “obvious” abuse it is. If you read the article, you know I didn’t take a position on the issue, because I simply don’t know enough to have an opinion. But by talking about the issue, I stepped into a heated controversy. The emails from the two sides convinced me of nothing. But they did give me even more empathy for the unfortunate parents who have to figure out for themselves where the truth lies for their children.

Have you ever had what you thought was a new idea — and then discovered that “old you” had the same idea years ago? I had that experience tonight. And it’s been wonderful. I came up with an idea tonight for a very short satirical film that would be a promotion for a fictitious college. The point is to make the college promote — as good things — everything which is actually terrible about most modern colleges. Then I remembered a fake college that I invented back when I was in college. I had created student recruitment brochures and various newsletters back then, so I decided to call my “new” college by the same name I’d invented years ago: Ochita College. As I searched my computer for any old material I might still have about Ochita from the past, I discovered an email I sent to someone in 2009 — outlining essentially the same idea which I came up with tonight. Since I didn’t remember writing that, it felt like magic. So my next film project just might be this one instead. If all goes well, you might soon see “Ochita College: Your Future Starts Here.” This should be fun.

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