We Used to Worship Electricity
Now We Give It to Toasters That Don’t Need It
A Tennessee farmer once told his congregation that electricity ranked just below the love of God. Not far below, either — close enough that neighbors would find him sitting on a hill after dark, just staring at his own farmhouse glowing in the black fields, doing nothing, saying nothing, simply watching light exist where there had only ever been darkness.
That’s not hyperbole for a sermon. That’s a man who understood, in his bones, what he was looking at: proof that the impossible had arrived at his address.
Getting there took actual effort. Convoys of open-bed trucks grinding down dirt roads. Circus-sized tents pitched specifically to show rural families what a refrigerator was, because plenty of them had electricity running to the house and genuinely no idea what to plug into it. Someone had to explain, patiently, tent by tent, town by town, why this mattered. Electrification wasn’t a feature. It was a civilization-level event, and it had to be sold to people like one.
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Now scroll forward about eighty years, and the same species that once treated a lightbulb like a minor miracle is currently giving Wi-Fi to a toaster.
Nobody had to convince anyone this was necessary. Nobody pitched a tent. It just happened, quietly, on a shelf at a big-box store, next to a blender that also, somehow, has an app. The toaster does not need to know your Wi-Fi password. The toaster has one job, and it has had that one job since 1893, and it was extremely good at that job before anyone gave it the ability to receive a firmware update.
This is, if you think about it for more than four seconds, a genuinely strange arc for a species to have run. We used to require a demonstration tent and a live band to convince farmers that a washing machine was worth the wiring. Now we hand internet connectivity to a $30 kitchen appliance and nobody in the room asks why, because asking why feels somehow more exhausting than just letting the toaster have its main character moment.
Somewhere between the tent shows and the smart toaster, the bar for “worth electrifying” quietly dissolved. It went from “this will change how your family lives” to “it was cheaper for the manufacturer to just include the chip.” We didn’t ask for the toaster’s opinion on anything. It’s going to give us one anyway, eventually, in an app, with push notifications, probably about your toast doneness preferences, which — respectfully — it has known since the second time you used it.
The Tennessee farmer sat on that hill because he understood he was witnessing something rare: technology arriving with weight, with meaning, with a story attached to every wire. We’re the generation on the other side of that story, the one that inherited all that hard-won electrification and immediately started spending it on nonsense. He’d have sat on that hill for the lightbulb. I don’t think even he could sit through the toaster’s onboarding flow.
So here’s what I actually want to know: is this progress running out of good ideas and just filling the gap with gimmicks, or is smart-everything actually going somewhere useful and I’m the one being the grumpy farmer this time?
What’s the dumbest “smart” version of a normal object you’ve personally seen? I need to know I’m not alone in this.
