How Smart Devices Became Our Digital Parasites

Tethered by Tech: How Devices Have Become Our Digital Parasites

Remember when a phone was just a phone? When you could leave the house without feeling like your lifeline to existence was left behind on the kitchen counter? Yeah, me neither. Because now we live in an era where we’re not just carrying our devices—we’re wearing them, sleeping beside them, and basically giving them VIP access to every second of our lives.

Smartphones, smartwatches, smart rings, Echo devices with cameras, and Google Hubs with facial recognition tech—these aren’t tools anymore. They’re digital parasites, latched onto our habits, our homes, and our heads, feeding on our routines like it’s some all-you-can-eat metadata buffet.

We’ve traded convenience for constant surveillance, and somehow convinced ourselves it was a fair deal. Want to check your heart rate? Great. Now your smartwatch knows exactly when you get anxious—right before every meeting, right after every text from your ex, and oh, during that one ad you skipped that you swear was listening to you. Guess what? It probably was.

Let’s talk about location tracking. Your smart ring knows when you sleep. Your phone knows where you sleep. Your Echo Show knows who you’re sleeping with. These devices are collecting, storing, analyzing, and God knows what else—every single pattern you make, down to when you get up to pee at 3:17 a.m.

And don’t even get me started on Google’s Hub or Amazon’s Echo with a camera. Cameras. In. Your. Home. Watching you cook, talk, argue, pace around in your boxers at midnight. Who needs curtains anymore when your whole damn life is a livestream to the cloud?

Here’s the kicker: we let this happen. No one forced this tech into our hands or homes. We bought it. We updated it. We connected it to everything. Why? Because it’s “cool” to dim the lights with your voice or track your steps while pacing during anxiety spirals. Meanwhile, the companies behind these gadgets are swimming in your data, repackaging your habits into profitable little trends, and selling you back your own personality in targeted ads.

We’re no longer the users—we’re the used.

We’re sleepwalking through a technological hostage situation, throwing our data at corporations like confetti and thanking them when they toss us a feature update.

But hey, as long as we can unlock our phones with our face and change the thermostat without moving an inch, who cares, right?

Wrong.

Wake up.