Silicon Valley's latest "innovation" watches you poop, scores your stool, and has hotter takes on your colon than your gastroenterologist. We are so cooked.
by Madison Garcia, Technology & Gaming Correspondent, IRREVERENT Magazine
LAS VEGAS — There is a toilet at CES 2026 that knows more about my insides than my mother, my doctor, and that one wellness influencer I accidentally followed during the pandemic combined. It has cameras. It has microphones. It is called the Throne, and the worst part — the genuinely, existentially haunting part — is that the investors are excited.
I came to Vegas looking for hype, and I found the end of everything.
The Throne is, in the company's own carefully chosen words, "a toilet-mounted computational health platform that uses multimodal biometric sensing to identify early markers of digestive and metabolic disruption." In human words: it is a computer you strap to your toilet. It watches. It listens. It judges. And then, presumably, it sends you a push notification that reads Have you considered more fiber? like it's your passive-aggressive aunt texting from Phoenix.
UNBOXING (Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Surveillance Commode)
The demo unit arrived in packaging that looks like it was designed to sit on a shelf at the Apple Store if Apple had pivoted to gastroenterology. Sleek. Matte white. A little glowing ring around the rim that pulses soft blue, which I can only describe as ominous wellness energy. There's a fold-out quick-start guide. Step three literally says "allow the Throne to complete its baseline calibration period." Bestie, my toilet does not need a calibration period. My toilet needs to be left the hell alone.
The setup app is clean. Intuitive, even. I paired it with my phone in under two minutes, which is more than I can say for my AirPods. The Throne connected, blinked its little blue light at me, and I swear — I swear — the UI said "Welcome. We're ready when you are."
I was not ready.
THE FEATURES (They Call Them 'Insights')
The camera array is, per the spec sheet, "non-visual in the traditional sense," which is tech-speak for "we know you're freaked out, please don't sue us." It uses some combination of infrared, thermal imaging, and acoustic analysis to build what the app calls your Gut Profile — a running dossier on your digestive health that updates in real time and can flag anomalies consistent with conditions like IBS, early colorectal issues, or what the demo rep cheerfully described as "suboptimal transit."
The microphone situation is where I lost the plot entirely. The Throne listens to your bowel movements. It has trained on acoustic pattern data presented in company materials to identify patterns associated with inflammation, motility issues, and stress responses. There is an AI on the other end of your bathroom door that has listened to more people poop than a gastroenterologist with a 40-year career and a very specific fetish. It has a dataset. It has a cloud subscription. It has opinions.
The data lives in the cloud because of course it does.
THE PITCH (They're Serious, By the Way)
To be fair — and I am deeply, constitutionally uncomfortable being fair about this — the underlying problem is real. Colorectal cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in the U.S. Early detection is genuinely life-saving. Digestive disorders affect something like 60 to 70 million Americans and take years to diagnose properly.
So yes, in theory, a device that catches something early is good, actually.
But.
The quantified self movement has been telling us for a decade that if we just measure enough things, we'll achieve optimal human function, and so far the primary outcome has been that we're all anxious about our sleep scores at 3 a.m. We gave our wrists to Fitbit. We gave our faces to Face ID. We gave our location to seventeen apps we don't remember downloading. And now, inevitably, they have come for the one orifice we swore was off-limits.
They want the bathroom.
They have the bathroom.
THE VERDICT
The Throne is probably inevitable. It will find its market in the wellness-obsessed, the chronically ill, the genuinely scared, the people who already sleep with a CGM and an Oura ring and have a relationship with their HRV that I can only describe as codependent. Some of those people will catch something early because of it. That's not nothing.
But I am not buying one, because I believe — philosophically, spiritually, as a person who still has some concept of a self — that my bathroom should be the one place on Earth where I am not being rated, analyzed, or cross-referenced against a dataset.
My toilet does not get to have opinions about me.
My toilet does not get a Substack.
My toilet does not get a Patreon.
My toilet does not get to read me ads for BetterHelp while I am actively in need of help.
We are not doing this.