Keep your Internet out of my things.

Look, we love neat tech stuff. Gadgets are our life, our livelihood, our mistress, our obsession. But can we talk about the “Internet of Things” for a minute?

Connected-home evangelists want you to feel like you’re practically Amish if your can opener merely opens cans, or your shower just sprays water. Everything has to be connected to the Internet because efficiency or something. Just think of all the little household aggravations you’ll be eliminating by turning your house into a computer. We all know computers never do anything aggravating.

So now our refrigerators have to suggest recipes. Our forks have to chart our calorie intake. We have to be able to check the humidity at home while we’re at the office. Our toasters have to… well, what they actually do with this connectivity isn’t really the point. The Internet of Things is the ultimate solution in search of a problem.

OK, that’s harmless (though expensive) enough if everything works perfectly. But the more complex a system is, the more it can do - and the more prone it is to breaking down. It seems like pure cyberhubris to replace simple, reliable systems like your faucet or your light switch with an infinitely more complex system of connected circuits and sensors and apps and devices and network switches.

Old-fashioned Luddite smoke detectors only give false alarms when there’s actual smoke in the air from cooking or something. Now, thanks to the Internet of Things, at least two people on our staff are regularly awakened in the middle of the night (along with their spouses and young kids) by wailing sirens for absolutely no reason. Turns out the future sounds a lot like screaming babies.

We’re not immune to the allure. It sounds kinda cool to have windows that get darker or lighter according to the time of day and our learned preferences. But one call to the customer service line and there goes all that time we would have saved opening and closing curtains ourselves.

Think of everything that annoys you about your computer or your phone. Every pop-up “reminder” that you can’t turn off. Every automatic update at the worst possible time. Every mysterious crash, every unexplained service outage. Every hour you waste circling the hell of patches and updates and Service Packs. Now imagine that as your entire life.

Welcome to the Blue House of Death. They’ll probably get the bugs worked out eventually. Well, most of them. After a few years. And that’s pretty much the best-case scenario.

The horror of the worst-case scenario might include literal death. The problem with being connected is, you don’t always get to choose who’s connected to you. Smarter, crazier assholes than you have already taken over countless wireless routers and baby monitors and webcams. But with the Internet of Things giving them easy access to all of your connected appliances, privacy is the least of your worries.

Those worm-spawners will be only too happy to take the temperature controls on your shower. Or call down a SWAT team through your connected security system. Or lock you in your garage with the car running. Or run your bidet 24/7. Or, as Wired’s Mat Honan hilariously suggests in his own dystopian vision, blast deafening dubstep at you at four A.M. and set off your fire sprinklers on Christmas morning. Imagine the lulz0rz!

Well, there are always risks involved in taking a giant leap forward, you might say. Maybe we just don’t get it. This is all so we can… what? Be a little less thoughtful and a little more pampered? Is that all there is? “You won’t have to set your thermostat yourself” is the necessary precursor to “You won’t be able to set your thermostat yourself.”

So what’s the alternative? Look, we’re no Grizzly Adamses. We’re not about to go bounding through God’s country drunk on our hand-brewed cornmash, gnawing on squirrel jerky we speared ourselves. We’re squishy and indolent same as you. We like our air conditioning and our arch supports and our Netflix.

We’re just willing to expend a little bit of effort sometimes, maybe sacrifice a little efficiency, to keep it absolutely clear who’s in control of all this technology.

That’s why we’re stocking up on the Panasonic Sonic Vibration Toothbrush. It moves its four triple-edge brush heads at 28,500 strokes per minute. Yay technology! But nobody has yet crammed a Bluetooth chip into it, so it’ll never be hacked, or stop us in the middle of brushing to make us download an OS update, or snarl obscenities into our children’s darkened bedrooms.

And when old-fashioned electric toothbrushes are discontinued or outlawed, we’ll go back to the stick with bristles in it. Anything but connect our mouths to the Internet. We’ll take their connected toothbrushes when they can pry them into our clean white teeth.