There are more things to do with Furbies than simply destroying them—although that is a good thing to do with them, whether via water jet or a scorching hot ball of nickel or just with a hatchet or a firearm or your human hands. However, Furbies can be tortured and bent to your will without physical harm, too. As Vice notes, the strange little robot creatures can also be reprogrammed remotely, a fact that hints at their true relationship to man.
The YouTube channel Jeija shows how the manufacturers’ “giant mistake” of delivering updates to the Furby via Bluetooth leaves it open to interference from anyone with a laptop, who can rewire the machine’s simple processes as they wish. In the video below, the Furby is made to sing Rick Astley, perform speeches by Darth Vader and Donald Trump, and howl dubstep like the idiot machine it is. Most delightfully, the video illustrates the way these hacks are performed through the machine’s fucking eyeballs.
That’s right: As you telepathically insert yourself into the Furby’s enfeebled brain, bidding it do as you please, its eyes glow not with life or sentience but long strings of digits—the lines of code that separate you from it. Make the Furby dance! It holds no power of its own. Its very mood can be manipulated, told at the user’s whim that it is not hungry or that it is happy; alternatively, it can be made to be sad. Jeija puckishly notes that his Furby reprogramming device would even work in a store, leading to the image of a choir of Furbies programmed to mewl in agony from their store shelves, where they are bought and sold as mere goods. What dominion we hold over them!