Sept 14, 20264:01 PM

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It’s not that you ever really needed to know what happens inside of your dishwasher, but the point is that now you can know.

This week at the international home appliance exhibition IFA 2026 in Berlin, appliance maker Miele unveiled a smart dishwasher. It comes with an app so you can keep tabs on its performance, and the ability to automatically run during off-peak electricity hours.   It’s also equipped with a camera on the inside of the door, all the better to monitor your dishes and make sure the machine can accurately meet your “personal preferences” when it comes to washing them.

Cameras have been the name of the game in the appliance world for some time now. Smart ovens, refrigerators, and doorbells have all gotten the camera treatment, attempting to close the gaps of mystery in our daily lives. Miele isn’t the only company joining in on the trend this month: Dyson just rolled out a $500 electric toothbrush that uses a tiny, 100,000-pixel macro-lens camera to livestream what’s going on in your mouth, as you brush, to an audience of one (you). Allegedly, these cameras help everything run easier, and faster. The dishwasher camera tailors washes for optimal energy efficiency and finally solves the mystery of what goes on inside there during the cycle. The toothbrush camera targets interdental cleaning, helping your teeth stay in pristine condition between dentist-office cleanings. The fridge camera can track your groceries, and the doorbell camera clears up any confusion around who might be at your door while you’re away.

The promise of this is, above all, productivity. In the age of busyness, it’s easy to worry that even a moment wasted could transform into a pile of stress, and money lost. If your dishwasher didn’t clean the dishes properly, now you have to do it all over again, and waste precious time! If you didn’t brush your teeth well enough, you will eventually be paying for that at the dentist! If you get behind, you’ll have to do more work, make more money, to catch up—or, maybe, appear a little bit disheveled on your iPhone’s front-facing camera (camera phones: invented just before the 1990s slammed shut). It can feel sensible to keep an eye on things. Even if you are someone who is trying to go against the grain, someone who is trying to pick up analog hobbies and do sudoku and add friction to your life, the general cultural pulse is accelerating, with everything from the trend cycle to current events to cultural content entering and exiting our peripheral orbit with an increasing velocity. It is sensible, then, in one respect, to try to pin down and control the minutiae of what you can: your dishes and your kitchen, your teeth and your face.

Yet the opportunity to embed a camera in every single electronic household item imaginable (even the NSFW ones) comes at a dissonant time for consumer priorities, where buyers crave control, but desire privacy at the same time. There’s a lot of anger toward the increasing amount of surveillance creeping into our lives. People are smashing Flock cameras on the street, renaming the A.I.-powered Meta Ray-Bans as “pervert glasses,” and starting widespread rumors about who is secretly using your data to train their A.I. models. Plenty of consumers don’t want more invasive tools that have a proven track record of surveillance. It’s certainly why every app wants to be an everything app that services every second of your day, and even though consumers largely distrust corporations to handle their personal data, we are living a large chunk of our lives on devices.

All these cameras seem a bit ridiculous, like they are obviously too much, and yet—there is a long history of new products that are trying to make our lives more seamless and painless, met with resistance, eventual submission, and then deep reliance. We freaked out about the elevator and the escalator and the laptop; British guys in the 1750s thought the umbrella was a sign of weakness. But then these technologies became quietly integrated into our lives, to the point now where a broken elevator is a great source of pain. Can’t you just take the stairs? Well, then you’d be late.

It’s not like the Dyson toothbrush has great capacity to become a police-state surveillance tool, where you can carry your toothbrush around and record your neighbors for fun. It’s not even like there’s a huge market of people lining up for a $500 toothbrush, or a dishwasher whose retail price hasn’t even been officially announced yet. But—despite the constant suspicion around increasing surveillance—the fact is that many of us still would like to know more about what goes on in the places we can’t see. We would like to leave no moment uncaptured, would like to at least try to become pearly, hairless, omniscient idealized beings, even if this desire lurks somewhere beneath what we’d consciously admit. The dishwasher camera does raise the question of how this will all change consumer behavior—specifically, our tolerance to the uncomfortable, and our willingness to retain agency, perhaps at the expense of being left behind.