So Google bought Nest last Monday. $3.2 billion, all cash, for a thermostat company. I keep seeing that sentence written like it's supposed to sound insane and I guess it is, a little, but mostly what I felt reading about it wasn't shock, it was this weird tired feeling like oh, right, of course.
For anyone who somehow missed it: Nest Labs, the company that makes that thermostat with the copper ring and the little screen that shows a friendly blue or orange glow depending on whether you're heating or cooling, is now a Google company. Tony Fadell started it, the guy who used to run the iPod division at Apple, and before the thermostat they'd already put out the Nest Protect smoke detector last fall. Now it's Google's. Everybody on my Twitter feed had a hot take within about four hours of the announcement, half of them about "the internet of things" finally arriving and the other half immediately doing the privacy math out loud (does Google now know exactly when nobody is home in your house, etc). Both of those takes are correct and also kind of exhausting to read fifteen times in a row.
Here's my actual thermostat. It's a dial. You turn it and a little needle moves and somewhere behind the wall a switch clicks. I genuinely do not know how old it is because it was here when I moved into this apartment and my landlord, who I have met exactly twice, does not strike me as a guy who's replaced a thermostat voluntarily since maybe the first Bush administration. It works fine. It is not connected to anything. Nobody, including me, has ever once wished it could learn my schedule.
And that's kind of the thing that bugs me about the whole Nest-mania. I don't dislike the product, the Learning Thermostat is by every account a genuinely nice piece of hardware and the software behind it is apparently smarter than most thermostats have any right to be. My complaint is narrower than that: I'm tired of being sold the idea that my radiator has been secretly incomplete this whole time and only a $250 device with wifi can fix it. I rent. My heat situation involves a radiator that clangs at 6am like it's trying to summon something, and no amount of machine learning changes the fact that the actual problem is a hundred-year-old pipe, not a lack of sensors.
A friend of mine got the Nest Protect for Christmas and brought it up at a party a couple weeks ago like she'd adopted a very smart pet. It talks to you before the alarm goes off. It can tell the difference between smoke and steam so it doesn't scream every time you make toast, which, fine, that's a real problem with regular smoke detectors and I'll give them that one. But she also mentioned, kind of offhand, that it can send her a notification on her phone if it goes off while she's out, and I remember thinking: so now there's a company that knows when there's smoke in your kitchen. And as of last Monday, that company is the same company that already knows what I search for at 2am and reads my Gmail to serve ads next to it. That's the part that actually gives me pause, more than any "IoT revolution" headline does.
It also happened, in the same stretch of this month, that a federal appeals court threw out the FCC's net neutrality rules, the Verizon case, the one that had been dragging on for years. I'm not going to pretend I fully understand the legal reasoning (something about the FCC classifying broadband providers in a way that meant it couldn't actually enforce the rules it wanted to enforce, is the gist I've picked up from smarter people than me), but the practical version is that Comcast and Verizon and the rest now have a lot more room to decide which traffic gets treated how. Which, combined with a week where the biggest headline was "Google buys its way further into your house," made for a slightly unsettling few days if you sat and thought about both stories at once instead of each one separately.
Anyway. My thermostat is still a dial. I turned it up two clicks this morning because it's nineteen degrees outside and the radiator hasn't started clanging yet, which either means it's broken or about to start, and there's no app that's going to tell me which.