The case against smart speakers

Every time we’re at my parents’ house, my sister and I go to war over who gets to control the playlist on my parents’ Alexa. “Alexa, play Michael Jackson,” I’ll shriek, and a few bars will play before my sister bellows “Alexa, play N’Sync,” until I interject with a request for Ed Sheeran three seconds later. Usually it goes on like this for a few hours until we come to blows or my dad yells at us to stop being idiots, whichever happens first. I am therefore of the opinion that smart speakers like Alexa and Google Home exist almost exclusively to bring pain and discord into the world. It is an opinion that was cemented by reading Kaitlyn Tiffany’s in-depth (and out-loud LOL-worthy) piece on [how voice assistants have come to dominate the holiday season](, and why you should resist the urge to buy them for your loved ones. Her piece makes a convincing argument for avoiding the temptation of marked-down pre-holiday sales, citing data breaches and companies sharing information with advertisers as potential risks associated with buying “high end air fresheners.” So as much as you may love asking your voice assistants questions like “what’s the capital of Bolivia” or “how tall was Andre the Giant” you too can resist the steady creep of corporate infiltration into your private life. —[E.J. Dickson](, reporter for The Goods Smart speakers are everywhere this holiday season, but they’re really a gift for big tech companies [Amazon Echo]( Amazon Everyone knows that there is, each holiday season, a gift that says, “I know nothing about you, but I love you, I mean, you get it.” For a very long time, this present was an iTunes gift card; Apple is the richest company in the world, and I am pretty sure this is exclusively thanks to the fortune it amassed from iTunes gift cards purchased for nephews and hairdressers in the first decade of the millennium. Prior to iTunes gift cards, the gift was maybe a sweater. Now, I’m sorry to say, the comparable gift is a smart speaker. We keep purchasing them for each other, buying into the fantasy that Siri or Alexa or Google can make someone’s life easier by scheduling their appointments and managing their time and telling them how to put on makeup or make a butternut squash lasagna. Though, at the moment, [reports say]( that people mostly just use them to listen to music, check the weather, and ask “fun questions.” As nondescript gifts, smart speakers make a lot of sense: Both Amazon and Google have options that are around $50, there is at least some novelty factor that pokes at adults’ memories of receiving toys, and they are far less rude to give than a Fitbit. Plus, for Amazon and Google in particular, with 64.5 percent and 19.6 percent shares in the category, respectively, the point isn’t really to make money off selling hardware. The point is to beat the others at integrating their services into the lives of the population. In other words: You’re not gifting an Amazon Echo; you’re gifting a relationship with Alexa. Amazon can later sell that relationship to brands that hope Alexa users will order their products with their voice. You’re not gifting a Google Home; you’re gifting a closer entwining with Google Search and all the strange personalized add-ons to Calendar and Maps. This expansion of the voice assistant ecosystem is crucial to almost every major tech company, far more so than getting sticker price for devices that look like high-end air fresheners, and if you don’t believe me, please peruse the ridiculously marked-down Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals they offered this year. [Read the rest of the story >>]( Hangovers are not a new problem. Why don’t we have a solution yet? [a tray of drinks]( Spencer Platt/Getty Images For the past decade, Canadian journalist Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall has been on a quest to find a cure for the common hangover. To this end, he consults remedies both medical and folk: He undergoes an IV treatment at a medical institution in Las Vegas called Hangover Heaven; consults with a menagerie of academics, a Druid, several doctors, and the CEO of 5-Hour Energy (among others); participates in a glacial New Year’s polar bear swim; absorbs the beer-soaked wisdom of the English countryside; and ingests any number of curative concoctions, with varying degrees of success. These experiences become fodder for [Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure,]( a book that is as concerned with the science and culture of hangovers as it is with relieving them. I called Bishop-Stall to find out what we know about hangovers, why we don’t know more, and why — if hangovers are so miserable — people keep drinking. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity. How did you end up spending a decade researching hangovers? The more that I started to look into the science of it and the history of it, the more I realized that, first of all, no such large endeavor had ever been undertaken. There were no books about hangovers, really. I mean, there have been jokey coffee table books or some sort of ancient, obscure references, but there was really so little for what became, to me, such a large part of human experience. That disconnect was just too obvious, and so I just became more and more fascinated by it. If it’s such a core part of human experience — drinking too much, feeling physically wrecked the next day — why hasn’t it been studied more? I think there’s something mysterious about the phenomenon. It’s a sickly, crummy, negative feeling, for the most part, and how much do we really want to focus on that? That may be one part of it. Even for me, it took a long time to realize what a wealth of fascinating stories come out of miserable aspects of life. Also, there’s just been so little focus on it in the medical and scientific communities, just because there’s a very easy way to dismiss it: Well, you did it to yourself. It’s your own fault. You drank. If you didn’t drink, you’d be fine, so why even try to look into it anymore? It’s a phenomenon that is scientifically and culturally fascinating, but we just say, “Oh, you know, it’s easily solvable.” The strangest thing is we believe it’s easily solvable because we did it to ourselves, but we also feel like we can’t actually solve it. Hangovers are so dichotomous in that way. It’s the same thing for cures: Everybody either thinks they have a cure and they go around telling everybody about it, or they believe that nobody has one. [Read the rest of the story >>]( More good stuff to read today - [Who is J.D. Power, and what do his associates do?]( - [Sex doll brothels are now a thing. 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