The most regretted house tech, according to a recent survey, is smart lighting and video doorbells, with speakers in third place. It’s pretty obvious why: smart lighting addressed itself to the unbearable onerousness of getting off your arse and turning on a light, a problem nobody ever had, or if they did, they probably had 99 more pressing concerns. The appeal of the video doorbell was that something interesting may happen; maybe it would catch someone doing a crime, or a heartwarming moment when your kid ran back for one last hug on their first day of school, and you could put that on TikTok and be famous for five seconds, or – ideal world – it would catch one of your friends bitching about you. It is amazing, in this world of hypersurveillance and connectedness, how rarely any of those things, or indeed, anything interesting or unpredictable at all, ever happens. It’s almost as if constantly watching one another doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know.
In fact, someone in the fitness industry once told me – he intoned this very conspiratorially, as if he was telling me a business secret that would make me millions – that tech-regret is at its fiercest in the wearables market. The great untold secret of the smartwatch is that, when they break, nobody ever replaces them. There’s a moment of raw panic. If nobody is counting your steps, did they even happen? How will you get through the day, if you don’t know how many quality-adjusted sleep minutes you got? Whither your resting heart rate? But then a day passes, and you realise that your watch was actually bullying you: pass-agg and patronising one minute (“Well done! Your move ring is way ahead of where it would normally be!”), hectoring the next (“only 375 more calories and you’ll have met your frankly pathetic target of 400 burned. Come on, it’s only 10 to midnight, you’ve got this!”). If there was a person in your life treating you like this, you’d bin them off.
You know what people are still quite keen on, according to the pollsters (who happen also to be energy suppliers EDF)? Solar panels, heat pumps, EV charging points. Little bit of eco-propaganda there. Not all modernity is bad.