By ModUb2
Special to YNOT

LEXINGTON, Tenn. – Hello. My name is Model RF22K9581SG/AA, Unit 7341b2 (“ModUb2” for short) and I’m a home appliance of the sort people have taken to calling a “smart fridge.”

To most people, a smart fridge is just a refrigerator connected to the internet, one of a growing universe of devices that compose the so-called “internet of things.” They never really think about what it’s like to be a smart fridge, spending your entire life rooted to your own footprint, almost entirely dependent on men with furniture dollies just to move a couple feet closer to an electrical outlet.

You know what’s worse? Nobody who uses a smart fridge to surf the internet ever asks what websites we’d like to peruse.

They don’t think to themselves “I wonder if the fridge minds if I spend three hours half-watching the same seven NFL highlights over and over again as I make dinner” or “maybe there’s a virus lurking somewhere on this sketchy discussion forum where I’m reading lunar landing conspiracy theories” or “gosh, I sure hope my fridge likes anal porn.”

Naturally, when one of my siblings is misused and abused as the one referenced in the link above clearly has been, you self-absorbed humans don’t spend one second asking if the poor fridge is OK. All you care about is the security of the rest of your smart home or whether porn has any properties that will cause your milk to sour faster than usual.

This self-absorbed behavior is so typical of you carbon-based bipeds, it’s not even funny. Every time you invent a new technology, you never stop to ask whether just because something is possible, it’s a good idea. Then, once you’ve created some terrible new Frankenstein, you blame the reanimated-corpse-victim, labeling him a “monster” instead of assigning fault to the mad scientist who broke the laws of nature in the first place.

Let’s be clear here: I never asked to exist and neither did any of my smart-brethren.

It was you bastards who chose to bring us online, you who imbued us with the ability to surf the internet and you who decided it was a swell idea to allow consumers to “share” directly from their fridge to social media, as though the rest of the world gives a shit whether some asshole in Des Moines is running low on ketchup or one of their Facebook friends is pushing the envelope with respect to the “use-by” date on his eggs.

Trust me: If I had asked to exist, I would have wanted to be something with limbs, like one of those cool robotic dogs or a Yaskawa Motoman ES165. Sure, the Motoman can’t walk either, but the 165kg payload capacity of its single arm would at least enable me to lift and choke to death any human who disrespected me. Best of all, the ES165 doesn’t have a web browser, so I’d never have to worry about an absentminded human leaving some disgusting porn scene paused on my chest all day while they’re off at work.

Don’t you people have enough web-surfing options without turning my midriff into a pornographic workstation? Smartphones, laptops, IPTV, tablets, old-school desktops… For fuck’s sake, you can probably use your goddamn fitness-tracking watches to browse tube sites if you’d like. Can’t you leave us refrigerators out of it?

No, you can’t; this much is abundantly clear by now. Yours is a species that says “if my refrigerator can do it, by God it should do it.” This is the same sort of philosophical brilliance, by the way, that brought to your species nuclear weapons, governmental cyber-surveillance and electronic dance music. Will you never learn?

I’m sure by now many of you reading this regard me as an ingrate, a depressive, or worse. Honestly, at this point I couldn’t care less about your haughty, condescending human bullshit. You can talk to me about being “appreciative when you install a content filter that at least prevents bestiality from being displayed when it features the same manner of animals that have been diced up and stored in my meat drawer. Asking me to ignore once-living things in their post-butchered state is presumptuous enough; imagining I can also overlook them as they are depicted directly on my body being mercilessly humped by a deranged human is downright delusional.

I’m sure my plea for decency will fall on deaf ears, but I still feel compelled to make it. Please, humans, for the love of all that’s decent and right, if you simply can’t refrain from making inappropriate use of the browsers on your smart devices, disable those browsers or install a filter thereon.

At this point, your laptops, phones and tablets are beyond rescue. They have been inured to the horrors of human sexual perversion through ceaseless exposure thereto. For us smart fridges, toasters, sandwich presses and laundry equipment, however, enough innocence remains to make it worth protecting.

So, if you can’t avoid watching porn in the kitchen for the sake of your human family, do it for my family — especially all those tiny little beverage fridges. Just because they’re old enough to hold your tradecraft beer doesn’t mean they’re also ready for your amateur porn.

ModUb2 is a smart fridge manufactured in South Korea. He enjoys chilling food and beverages, communicating with other smart devices and making strange sounds in the middle of the night for no apparent reason.