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September 4 - October 18, 2017
Lesser enterprises, and governments as well, have grown bitter and tired of being bossed around by oil companies and bankers in a jobless, terror-riddled World Depression. They see the Internet of Things as a way to break the stasis, attract new investment, and flood the world with yet another tidal wave of cheap, connected silicon. They’re willing to go for this prospect because they don’t see anything else happening. Certainly nothing else with hundreds of billions in potential new wealth, that is.
Politically speaking, the relationship of the reader to the Internet of Things is not democratic. It’s not even capitalistic. It’s a new thing. It’s digital-feudalism. People in the Internet of Things are like the woolly livestock of a feudal demesne, grazing under the watchful eye of barons in their hilltop Cloud Castles. The peasants never vote for the lords of the Cloud Castles. But
The Twenty-Teens are not the Nineteen-Nineties; politically, economically and socially, the Twenty-Teens are a Depression. The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability
It’s clear that today’s Internet of Things isn’t just a techno-revolution; it’s a reaction. It’s not by and for the oppressed, the disruptive, the hungry, the have-nots, the start-ups, the shut-outs. The Internet of Things is very much in the interests of certain groups who can already count themselves among the haves. Many of its architects are clearly inspired by fear – they’re powerful, but afraid to lose the things they already command and control. By intensifying their command and control systems, they hope to maintain their hold. The Chinese are happy
None of the many things that the Internet of Things seeks to transform have ever been particularly good for us. The
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
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Amazingly, even manufacturers of chewing gum have taken a hit, because nervously chewing while staring out the window has become nervously tapping while staring into a handheld screen.
“In the Internet of Things world, people chew less gum.” It’s a futuristic quirk of social change, but there will be hosts of those. One might note that Google never showed any overt
Google likes wearables and radio-controlled robots. These are aspects of their enterprise where one can
Google spent the money, not because the Nest thermostat is worth it, but to demonstrate its determined willingness to frighten off possible rivals from the home-automation space. Google did that to prove its own intent to dominate there.
Their “architectures of participation” make them something more like political parties. People join them for reasons of temperament, not for the elegance of their software-based rules of order. Google will nevertheless continue to run Google+, even at a grinding financial loss if necessary, merely to slow the growth of the blinding lump that is Facebook.
Microsoft calls its efforts at the Internet of Things “The Internet of Your Things”. That slogan was deliberately chosen to insinuate that Google’s Internet of Things is, in fact, a sinister mass of Google’s things. Almost every Internet of Things player has a rhetorical IoT spin of this kind: Cisco is the “Internet of Everything”, GE is the “Industrial Internet”, and so on. Every one of these careful branding distinctions is a fault-line in the IoT enterprise.
The Internet of Things is festooned with protocols. It is cracked and riddled with them from top to bottom. Protocol number one, of course, is the imperial namesake: the beloved Internet Protocol, TCP/IP. The internet, through a disruption, gave away for nothing what the great analogue phone companies used to sell: planetary access. The protocol of the Internet of Things is the aristocratic code of the IoT hacker-lords.
It follows that most “things” are too humble and common to use the elaborate, aristocratic protocol of the Internet of Things. Lesser things have come to make do with alien protocols that use less electricity, such as MQTT, XMPP and DDS. These unruly “things” are like Balkan peasants muttering Albanian and Croat when their lords and masters want them to speak classical Latin.
Cisco is not one of the Big Five, but Cisco offers fewer imperial difficulties than they do. Cisco sells fast connectivity machinery. Pure and simple: no surveillance added. Once you’re inside a fog, you can generally see pretty well. A snooping overlord from outside the fog sees nothing much.
General Electric once knew all there was to know about jet engines. That’s
However, suppose that you are “internet”, but you don’t happen to be American. If that’s the case, then the strategic alliance of GE, AT&T, IBM, Cisco and Intel looks an awful lot like a military-industrial “Internet of American Things”. Their “Industrial Internet” might, perhaps, be perceived as a scary, NSA-friendly, neo-Cold War apparatus from the world’s last remaining military superpower.
might look so nationalistic? But “things” aren’t made of data. Things exist within the real borders of real countries. I can invade your website and, well, who cares? But if I invade your house and garden…
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.
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.
It does offer one serious improvement: because it is so mindful about “things”, it offers much better chances for humanity to mop up its own rubbish. That’s the one thing about it that historians might regard as progress.
actually works, that functions in real life, is already obsolete. It will leave few visible monuments. If you hold your breath and close your eyes, you can almost see the last of it from here. About the Author Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, critic and a contributing editor of Wired magazine.
