https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/v74mga/we-buy-gifts-that-surveil-our-loved-ones-because-there-is-nothing-else-to-buy

Every year for Christmas, we buy ourselves and our loved ones gadgets that will spy on them. We buy DNA tests from 23AndMe that could one day end up in a police database, we buy Amazon Echo and smartphone technology used to target us with ads, and, increasingly, we are buying Amazon’s Ring doorbell cameras that are being used to watch ourselves and our neighbors, create a warrantless police surveillance apparatus, and serve as an attack surface that can allow hackers to enter our homes.

Much has been written about why we do this to ourselves: Ring’s advertising campaigns focus on selling fear, making it so we don’t trust our neighbors or our UPS drivers. That is surely part of it, but I have another theory that is perhaps a bit simpler than the idea that we have been conditioned to fear everyone and everything. We buy products that actively harm us and our loved ones because there are simply fewer things to buy, but we have not adjusted for this fact as a society. We still have Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales and affiliate marketing from every website we visit, and we have to buy our loved ones something for Christmas, or their birthdays. And so we eventually buy a video doorbell or a smart speaker or a DNA test because what else are we going to do?