Hey Alexa, Do I Need to Call an Exorcist?
Our new house is haunted by the dark witticisms of a robot
I write about the dark side of Google marketing. So I feel like any day now, I’m going to be black-bagged and tossed in the back of a Google Street View car.
My wife is as paranoid as I am. But she hasn’t asked me to stop writing. Instead, when we moved, she asked that we not bring any of our “always listening” gadgets with us.
We’ve been living here, in our new house, for four weeks now. This is usually the point — in all those clichéd haunted house stories — when the husband discovers some weird hidden room, scrawled with a child’s writing. Or he learns about the evil history of the previous occupants, alongside some waterlogged and ancient Time magazines.
But what my wife and I are living is a modern haunted house story. I have not found a hidden room. Rather, I’ve discovered a particular horror in our Amazon Alexa (the only “always listening” tech that made my wife’s cut). Things are so dire that I recently walked in on my wife, day drunk with a screw gun in her hand, telling Alexa to “never speak to me or my husband again.”
The young couples in those haunted house stories love to drink wine among their half-unpacked boxes and make lists of all the things “wrong” with…
