I sleep in a loft bed, to make more room for my computers and one of my 3D printers, which I keep under the bed.

I needed a new floor lamp, and because I’m lazy, I wanted something I could turn on and off remotely without climbing out of bed. So I found a floor lamp on Amazon that advertised remote control capability.

Imagine my surprise when I opened the box and found no remote, just a QR code to download a smartphone app.

Buckle up, because this story is about to take a turn that would make William Gibson cringe.

My first hint something was wrong came when the app forced me to create an account on the manufacturer’s server before I could pair pair with the lamp.

But hey, I wanted to see how deep the rabbit hole went, so I made an account. The answer is “pretty deep.”

Once you pair over Bluetooth, the next thing you do is download your WiFi password to the lamp. You also must enable location services, so the lamp knows your location. (The software won’t work if you don’t.)

Once the lamp knows your location, you have a choice to make. It asks if you’d rather use the microphone in your phone, or the one built into the lamp.

Yes, you read that right. The lamp connects to your WiFi and your phone, knows where you are, and has a built in microphone.

Once you’ve made that particular Hobson’s choice, the app asks you to upload a selfie, so it can—get this—run facial recognition and AI expression analysis.

Why? So it can suggest a lighting scheme based on your mood.

The Terms of Service allow the manufacturer to store your face and do both facial recognition and AI analysis.

I uploaded a photo of a cat rather than my selfie.

You’re then connected to a community of other lamp users, so you can exchange lighting patterns and such…because, of course, it is a truth universally acknowledged that a person in possession of a floor lamp must be in want of a way to exchange lighting suggestions with complete strangers.

Here’s the light it suggested based on AI analysis of a cat.

The lamp was originally slated to arrive from Amazon on Monday, but when Monday came I got an email telling me that delivery was delayed and it would arrive on Tuesday.

Were I of a paranoid bent, I might believe that the delay allowed a government three-letter agency to intercept the shipment so they could do a supply chain attack, rerouting the lamp’s connection to the host servers (which is a really weird thing to say, if you think about it) through them as well.

George Orwell believed in a future where the government constantly watched the citizens, recording every detail of their lives. George Orwell didn’t know about outsourcing.