Day by day, appliance by appliance, “the internet of things” – that utopian notion that one day all objects, people and data will be interconnected online – quietly works its way into our quotidian routines, the clicks and whirrs of gleaming automata replacing that gurgling noise your dad used to make when he couldn’t get the VCR to stop blinking “00:01”. As Wired magazine and those Apple adverts where people dance to vintage soul in converted loft spaces keep cheerfully telling us, this march of progress into our homes should be regarded as a “good thing”. Yet surely I’m not alone in feeling utterly sodding terrified by the potential applications of this internet of things.
Take Hive, the app that allows you to remotely tweak the temperature of your home via your smartphone. On the face of it, it’s a neat little time-saver. But already I’ve envisaged a scenario where terrorists use Hive to hack into a skyscraper’s central heating unit and boil everyone inside. (Think John McClane‘s going to save them? Think again: he burned to a crisp while crawling through an air duct.) Hive recognises such luddite concerns.
In its latest ad, gadgetry is kept to a minimum. Instead, the twee thermostat has been turned up to full. In the ad the Bard, a happy chappie with the face of Jon Ronson and the voice of Minty from EastEnders, breaks into people’s homes and lets them know, via the medium of indie-folk, how much less shit their lives would be if they warmed up their house via their phone. In a sense the ad’s gambit works – by its end, any fear toward Hive has dissipated, like heat from a badly insulated room. In its place: annoyance.
