The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things Quotes

“Google and Facebook don’t have “users” or “customers”. Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“politically, economically and socially, the Twenty-Teens are a Depression. The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“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.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“An Internet of Things is not a consumer society. It’s a materialised network society. It’s like a Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape.  Google and Facebook don’t have “users” or “customers”. Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The Internet of Things is not about a talking refrigerator, because that is the old-fashioned consumer retail world of electrical white goods. It’s an archaic concept, like software bought in a plastic-wrapped box from a shelf. The genuine Internet of Things wants to invade that refrigerator, measure it, instrument it, monitor any interactions with it; it would cheerfully give away a fridge at cost.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“Google created Google+ as its effort to steal Facebook’s oxygen, but it turns out that social networks aren’t commodities.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The reader is not a “customer” of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook’s genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the “Big Five” of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“But of course Google doesn’t want the thermostat as a mere consumer-electronics device – it wants to amass and analyse the records of millions of interactions with millions of thermostats. That becomes a stack of Big Data that Google can bundle and sell to interested parties. 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.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The Internet of Things makes no attempt to redress, or even address, the many real problems that the internet brought to the world. On the contrary, it’s an international effort to bring everything that wasn’t internet within the purview of the techno-elite that currently dominates the internet.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“Microsoft, for its part, will cheerfully run the search engine Bing at a loss, for the sake of hampering Google’s freedom of action.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“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.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The Internet of Things has a slight utopian tinge, but mostly it has a certain melancholy, even grim air. It’s not some psychedelic exploration of the cyberspace of the digital. It’s material labour, it’s hardware, it’s a hard slog.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“There is no power-group of consequence in the world today that successfully renounces smartphones. No one who matters refuses what they offer.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“That doesn’t mean that the Internet of Things will triumph, because, in some ways, it can’t win. It’s too broad and vague to win; it’s a huge, looming infrastructural phenomenon, much like “electrification” or “automation” once were. People never voted to become electrical or automated.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It’s a new platform for radically broadening digital activity.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“It’s no secret that the bourgeoisie is going, but it has been alleged that it would have a successor group called the “creative class”. The Internet of Things rewards wrangling, not “creativity”. It shows little pious regard for time-honoured creative pursuits such as ballet, opera, poetry, theatre and art cinema. Those time-consuming, attention-demanding, creative pursuits are obliterated by the allure of handheld interaction. The Internet of Things does grant forms of cultural fame and influence, even lavishly, but only when those are channelled and expressed through itself, on its own terms.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“People who might once have bought a newspaper to beguile themselves now look at their Android. Magzines readers look at their Android, too. Amazingly, even manufactures of chewing gum have taken a hit, because nervously chewing while staring out the window has become nervously tapping while staring into a handled screen.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

“The internet brought many laudable things, but prosperity, stability, accountability and honest politics were not four of them.”
― Bruce Sterling, The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things