The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

by Bruce Sterling

The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.

Despite selling memory by the bucket-full, the computer business has a very short memory,

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation.

Google sells network surveillance and collective intelligence. This is Google’s actual, profitable, monetisable product. “Search” is merely Google’s front end, a brilliant facade to encourage free interaction by the public. People are not Google’s “customers” or even Google’s “users”, but its feudal livestock.

“In the Internet of Things world, people chew less gum.”

This activity supplies most of the satisfactions of triumphant cleverness, without the pangs and hazards inherent in human relations.

A fridge that talks to your toaster is useless. A fridge that talks to your landlord is a different matter;

Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand. It’ll have its day for better or worse, but it is most certainly heading, at its own due pace, for that all-devouring junk heap that swallowed French Minitels, Japanese Walkmans and a hundred million bulbous American black-and-white vacuum-tube TVs. 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.