Between 2012 and 2015, I interviewed 52 data scientists and specialists in the “internet of things.” They came from 19 different companies with a combined 586 years of experience in high-technology corporations and startups, primarily in Silicon Valley. I spoke with them about the prominence of inevitability rhetoric among the purveyors of the new apparatus, and I posed the same question to each one: why do so many people say that ubiquitous computing is inevitable? The agreement among their responses was striking. Although they did not have the language of surveillance capitalism, nearly
...more
