i want to live in a dumb house.

opting out of home automation.

I was on the brink of being too old for the made-for-television Disney movie, Smart House when it came out in 1999, which is to say that I’m certain I watched it at least once while home sick from school and anytime I could convince my little sisters to watch it with me after that.

The movie peddles in the kind of gendered tropes that teenaged Erin was especially pissed off about and watching it provided ample fuel for my burgeoning feminist rage. Hapless Widowed Dad (™) can’t do much of anything. Beleaguered eldest boy-child, Ben, is tired of doing care work. Dad can’t tie hair elastics or feed children, because Man! Brother must play basketball, not take care of sister, because Boy! A family needs a wife and a mother to function, nay, a robot!

In the film, with help from some ethically questionable computer programming, Ben wins the family the chance to move into a futuristic computerized house. It’s a home that’s been programmed to do the drudgery for them. Once they move in and get the robot they all yearn for, there are snacks on demand! There’s automatic cleaning and dietary advice! Everyone wakes up on time thanks to custom full-room alarm wake-ups! Later, in an effort to thwart his dad’s romance with the house’s inventor, Ben reprograms the house to be more…motherly. Who needs a love interest, he figures, when the chief reasons for having a woman around are being performed by a robot? He trains the computer on a loop of 1950s housewife propaganda and she becomes so annoying unleashing increasingly nagging reminders about basic hygiene and responsibilities. A robot woman’s work is never done! When things go predictably awry and the robot goes full-on berserk, it does so in the form of a headband and apron-wearing hologram, projecting, quite literally, midcentury feminine ideals gone mad. So much misogyny, so little time.

I wasn’t only hate-watching though. The futuristic programming of the house was legitimately mesmerizing, especially for a young teenager with a bottomless appetite for cupcakes. A house that can make cupcakes and smoothies on demand? Movie-theatre sized screens on the living room wall? Elaborate dance parties and floorboards that suck the mess right out of sight? Truly the stuff of sci-fi dreams. Twenty-six years later, lots of the movie’s more tantalizing features are still firmly futuristic. Would that the floorboards sucked away all my messes! Others, of course, have become bizarrely quotidian: screens and machines in houses that listen and talk back to the people inside them, virtual assistants that set reminders and keep track of grocery orders and doctor’s appointments, coffee makers and lights that flicker on and off without being touched.

Now that it’s here, I don’t want any of it.