“The Veldt,” a story written in 1950, centers around a version of what can be called a smart home. In “The Veldt,” the smart home symbolizes both convenience and danger, and it ultimately consumes its adult inhabitants. The story thus showcases Bradbury’s wariness around the excessive use of technology. While the story is disarmingly prescient—a home with smart lighting and other features is common more than half a century later—it is not just about the future. Bradbury’s views in “The Veldt” and other works he wrote in the 1950s were a response to the increasingly consumerist culture of the United States. By 1950, World War II had ended and the American economy was booming. America was entering a golden period of advertising, attractive and convenient consumer goods, and entertaining TV shows like I Love Lucy (1951-1957). This was the period where magazines were dotted with advertisements for appliances and conveniences like toasters and whipped cream in a can. Families gauged their worth by the latest appliances they owned. The love for things was accompanied by a strain of cultural conservatism and anti-intellectualism. In “The Veldt,” Bradbury considers what happens when consumerism is left unchecked. When does technology become too much technology?

In “The Veldt,” the entity most affected by consumerism and technology is the family itself. As the family at the center of the story relies more and more on technology to supplant human roles, the ties among members break down. The primary bond between parent and child itself gets corrupted, and ultimately technology figuratively and literally consumes George and Lydia, as well as the innocence and empathy of their children. The fate Bradbury imagines touches on contemporary concerns about screen addiction, the devaluation of empathy, and humans being made redundant. George may draw pride in the trademarked “soundproofed Happylife Home, which had cost them thirty thousand dollars installed,” but it also means he is beginning to view his achievements in terms of consumer products and brands. When Lydia expresses her worry that their efficient home is making her feel “unnecessary,” George responds that the reason he brought the house was so that they wouldn’t have to do anything. Even after he senses the danger of the nursery, he admires the “mechanical marvel” it represents. Thus, George in particular is oblivious to the perils surrounding him until it is too late. Here, George represents the hypermasculine ethic that the goal of life is to gain wealth and status. Lydia, representing a more natural wisdom, senses that technology is making the family less human, but she too late second-guesses her own intuition.

Unknowingly, the parents lead the children into addiction to technology. Peter and Wendy are only ten but stay out late at a carnival, where they take helicopter jumps for fun and eat unlimited fast food and candy. Thus, they are immersed in a heady rush of fun-filled, expensive adventures. For Peter and Wendy, the only reality they have known is one of extreme convenience and immediate wish-fulfillment. With their home anticipating and meeting their every need, the children forget what it means to make an effort. They turn into passive consumers. When George tells Peter there are other things he can do apart from playing in the simulation of the nursery, Peter responds, “I don’t want to do anything but look and listen and smell; what else is there to do?”

When this reality of passive consumerism is threatened, the children turn violent. The children can sense that their parents, especially their mother, are growing concerned about their attachment to the nursery. They begin resenting the parents for this concern, projecting their anger onto the simulation of the veldt. The more the parents worry, the angrier the children appear, and the more dangerous the veldt becomes. Thus, the family gets caught in a vicious cycle.