The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

by Bruce Sterling

The IoT isn’t a social reform movement, or a source of progress, any more than Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are reformers seeking progress. It’s better in some ways, worse in others; mostly, it’s just different. The clues to that future culture are already here. These are hard times. It would be a wondrous thing if some supreme genius could bend the enormous power of the Internet of Things toward, say, the creation of a just and sustainable economy. Or toward liberty, equality, fraternity, whatever social purpose the reader finds laudable. However, a movement that wanted to do that would somehow have to seize control over the means of internetting things. That movement would need what the Big Five already have: a political operating system, some dedicated political way to sell cultural material (music, movies, books, software), political tools for productivity, a politicised advertising business, some means of accessing the internet that is under political control (tablets, smartphones, phablets), a political search engine, a social network that was actually a political party, a political “payment solution”, a political “cloud” capability and, most of all, political control over wireless spectrum, cables and data-transfer protocols. Rather than being a “government”, that state would have to become a “platform”. I could be wrong, but this prospect doesn’t seem likely to me, even in an authoritarian state. Nations are patriotic, they’re about land, language ...

It gets worse: “things” without wires of course need some “wireless” to join the network. Wireless lurks in the planet’s radio spectrum in a Byzantine variety, in arcane, difficult variants such as WiFi and Bluetooth, and UltraWideband... and also WiMax, WiBro and RFID, and Zigbee… and the telecom protocols, too – the ever-mutating 2G, 3G and 4G. Every one of these protocols is a potential schism within the IoT empire. They’ve all attracted palace cliques of alliances and consortia anxious to promote their own interests.

In response, a vengeful Intel, which has plenty of money and has never lacked for smarts, has begun flooding the world with new, smaller, lighter forms of silicon, and forming new alliances with a motley gang of startups and fringe players. Intel was never a consumer company – it makes and sells electronic components. Intel used to make and sell Microsoft’s bulldozers, but now Intel is scattering unheard-of forms of disruptive silicon, right, left and centre. Intel courts academics, inventors, artists, the Maker contingent. Intel is arming the rabble. Then there’s General Electric. This ancient, time-honoured house makes jet engines. They’re so ancient that they’re still loyal to the cause of Things, like Celts in the Norman Invasion.

If this semi-electronic sociality was a minority taste, there wouldn’t be a billion people on Facebook. However, there are. The cultural ambition of the IoT is to make wrangling the dominant form of world culture. They are cultural imperialists in this way: all previous forms of human culture must be reframed in terms of the wrangler hack. Forms of culture that can’t go there do not matter.

Let’s imagine that – through some economic miracle of zero-margin production, let’s say – people had guaranteed annual incomes, nutritious food and social housing. It’s easy to see that wrangling on networks would become our civilisation’s dominant human activity. People would websurf, or rather electronically socialise, all day, every day.

It would mean intense palace intrigue, an endless jostling for public esteem and self-actualisation. That’s what the people in this third category are interested in doing. They like fame and glory, they like being seen and heard, they like making a difference. They would like to see a society arranged so that this is all they ever have to do. I enjoy the company of people of this kind, being by temperament one of them myself, but they are problematic. The late Steve Jobs was the Napoleon of this tribe. Steve Jobs was intensely anti-materialistic – Jobs could scarcely abide to have a possession around him. Jobs didn’t care for wealth either, until he realised that he could upset the status quo by seizing a well-nigh infinite amount of cash. Never once did Jobs have the prudent habits of a proper steward of great fortune. Jobs was a mogul, a titan, cruel to his intimates, exploitative to those he employed. His real ambition was to dent the universe, to be insanely great, to be forever remembered. These aren’t necessarily cultural values that a civilisation wants to promote. If you take a guy who loves the sound of his own voice and give him power, he becomes a demagogue. If you give him money, he becomes a show-off. Give him the internet, and he’s a ceaselessly flaming activist; give him an Internet of Things, and he becomes a wrangler, a guy for whom every possible relationship to any possible object or service is some ever-ramifying, well-nigh metaphysical hacker session. ...

These devices don’t have to be bought by consumers. A fridge that talks to your toaster is useless. A fridge that talks to your landlord is a different matter; it’s a hack of the bourgeois property system. The Internet of Things can profit from that dicey relationship. The IoT will wrangle the insurance, the public safety issues, the reputation systems, the rental fees, the shrink-wrapping.

one can expect a host of mutant oddities where today’s property relations are hacked and wrangled: transport (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar), shelter (AirBnB, HomeAway, Couchsurfing), finance (Kickstarter, Kiva, IndieGogo), trade education (Instructables, GitHub), office space (ShareDesk, Liquidspace). Maybe even 3D-printed giveaway furniture, crowd-financed solar panels, and urban-farmed socialised food.