The house has a pulse
It isn’t sentience—it’s timing. The mesh router logs retries; the voice assistant mishears your sigh as a wake word; the TV suggests a documentary about penguins because you paused on sadness.
We invited cheap convenience across the threshold and now it watches us rehearse small talk with delivery drivers.
Privacy isn’t a setting. It’s a relationship with who gets to infer your mood from latency.
What to do without moving to a cabin
Segment IoT onto a guest network.
Mute mics by default; reward companies that put hardware switches on cameras.
Assume your TV is a billboard that occasionally plays prestige drama.
The goal isn’t purity. It’s refusing to let your worst night look like a segment in someone else’s dashboard.