I don’t like to brag but I have joined the future. After several years of admiring the technology from afar, most of the lightbulbs in my house are now the kind that connect to the internet.
Installation was surprisingly straightforward. You screw in the new digital lightbulb and turn on the light the old way. The bulb then begins to flash on and off alarmingly, as though it should be accompanied by a klaxon and people running around ineffectually shouting panicked instructions at one another. We do not have a klaxon, but panicked shouting of ineffectual instructions is something that happens here often enough that we have a system for dealing with such things.
I fumbled with an app that is not especially intuitive nor written in what I would describe as 100% successful English and eventually managed to get the light bulbs connected to the home Wi-Fi. At this point the alarms stopped flashing and shrilling and I was able to control the light bulbs through the app.
I got to cycle them through a full range of colors, which is the second-biggest reason why I wanted the fancy bulbs in the first place. I had seen my colleagues — who as a general rule are 15 years younger and far, far more interested in new technology than I am — installing these fancy light bulbs and then doing cool stuff with them like red and green lights at Christmastime or linking their lights to music so they blink and change colors in rhythm with music, which turns their apartments into dance clubs. I didn’t want to turn my apartment into a nightclub as it has been many years since I enjoyed the Studio-54ization of a room in which I’m also trying to sleep, but I coveted the ability to fiddle with the lights whenever I wanted to make them interestingly different colors.
You can also control the precise degree of luminositude (or whatever is the measure for the brightness of a light bulb) so that the lights are exactly as bright or dim as you want them. Starbucks built an empire on the ability to precisely and extensively customize something mundane, so as we move on to interior lighting it becomes clear that this a rich new vein of revenue extraction and you should go ahead and get used to it.
The largest part of what made this clear is the price of the new light bulbs. I may have confused them with the kind that are supposed to last for decades and decades, but they didn’t strike me as all that different in expense. I think it’s 30 bucks for a pack of three of four, if you’re buying the cheapest light bulbs that can be controlled with an Alexa. This expense would upset both of my parents deeply, but that was and is true of the price of everything. Bananas and a gallon of milk incur just as much horror at current market value and you can’t even control them from an app.
Not that the app is perfect. It is, as I mentioned before, clearly something that was not built by a company worried about the trifling rules of English or grammar, which is kind of fun, truthfully, because neither am I.
I, too, get some good stylistic flair from disregarding the rules. Also because you never quite know what’s going to happen when you start trying to install and manipulate things. I was very able to control individual light bulbs as long as I was prepared to remember names like “Globe Light 3” and “Candelabra 2,” but it took quite some time to figure out how to simultaneously control all three of the bulbs in a fixture that has three bulbs in one light, a la ceiling fans. (Much of the convenience of controlling light bulbs with an app is admittedly lost if you have to turn every light on and off three times and re-adjust the color in each case.)
The convenience of them is especially on display if you feel like doing something that is kind of neat but more or less useless, like turning the bedroom lights green when you’re not home. (The cats don’t seem to care and I am told that the dogs, who are generally more appreciative of things that interest me, have limited color vision.)
You can adjust the lights when you are not home, presuming you have managed to shed the habit of turning lights on and off the old way — with a switch, that is. If you turn the lights off with the switch, as has been your habit for half a century or so, you can no longer control your lights from anything other than the light switch.
This would seem readily apparent, and yet I still insist on unthinkingly flipping lights off with a switch like a chump when instead I could use the app on my phone.
None of this will be addressed, or probably even improved, by eventually connecting my new light bulbs to my Alexa. I have witnessed the miracle that is Alexa turning the kitchen light on or off or red or blue in other homes, and I am profoundly covetous of this ability. I want to be able to direct Alexa to do things and have my vision visibly responded to in a positive manner swiftly.
It would be such a nice change of pace from how things seem to go the rest of the time.