Toaster. A small, electric appliance that turns bread slices into toasts. As long you call it that way – “an appliance” , everything will stay as it should: you put a slice of bread into the appliance, and after some time, a toast pops out. Brown, hot and ready to be eaten.

You are satisfied.

One day, however, someone will look at the toaster and say: “the thing…”. A magic word that attracts specific kind of businesspeople. They believe that you can turn any data into money. Big data equals big money, so they keep searching for things, which can be used to produce the data. They will stuff your toaster with tens of sensors, connect it to the Internet and turn your simple bread browner into a smart AiToastComposer Plus 100 (first-month subscription for free).

Goodbye warm sandwiches. Welcome “Software update in progress. Toast preparation can take longer than expected..”. Whoever prepared a toast in his life, knows that the word longer combined with a red-hot coil cannot end up well.

You become irritated.

But this is not the end. One evening, eating a cold, fluffy sandwich, you read in the news that the data of all toaster users leaked from cloud servers. Now everyone in the world knows how many toasts you eat, what kind of bread you use and what color socks you wear on Mondays. “How the hell my toaster knows that?”. It knows much more, but you have something else to be worried about right now: Hackers gained backdoor access to ‘make my toast’ application. There might be a hacker hiding inside your toaster! Suddenly all the smart lights go down, the fridge starts shouting something in a foreign language, and the heater decides to turn your apartment into a sauna. Pop! And there comes a toast out.

Now you are terrified.

Welcome into the new reality. You are surrounded by things that collect and sell your private data. Things that can be misused to access your property, create an army of zombie bots, or simply ruin your breakfast. Things that someday may decide that they don’t want to be called things anymore.

The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of “My boss is plotting against me,” it would be “My boss’s phone is plotting against me.” Objects sometimes seem to possess a will of their own anyhow, to the normal mind; they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, they get in the way, they show an unnatural resistance to change.

Philip K. Dick