A few months ago, when we started to work on the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium it took me a while to get into the language (ubiquitous findable objects- UFO, geo-locative systems, context-aware/ ambient/ ubiquitous/ invisible/ continuous/ pervasive computing, locative media) and the unfamiliar context of architecture. I was more into all things networked and did not immediately see the connection. But soon I realized that The Internet of Things offers a captivating angle on the "electricity" of future participation in online sociality; may that be through the hardwired or the wireless Internet. 

Over the past months on the iDC list we started to talk about networked objects and "The Internet of Things." Things? Things are not a species of their own making. So, why talk of "things" instead of objects? There must be more than semiotic cuteness at play; the term Internet of *Things* can't just be about anthropomorphizing artifacts, machines, products, and gizmos.

The sandbox of the future. Not long ago only few people saw much of a future in reading and writing and video production. It was a consumer's world in which we were all "end-users" (I have to shut up and settle for what comes out of the assembly line. Sterling in Shaping Things, p78) But that has changed with what some call the relationship revolution. There is a participatory turn under way. Bang!!! and you have 100 million MySpace members, 600 billion web pages online, and half of American youth contributing content online. (Well, it was not quite so sudden.) Now, the projection expands to participation/content production beyond the screen engaging humans with networked objects.

Do you have a good ear for restless manufactured environments (?); do you hear objects whisper to other networked objects? (A tête - à - tête of things?) Are we drifting amidst airwaves filled with feeds, streams, permalinks, and blog posts exchanged between these objects? Do they fly through the ether with only the password-empowered being able to interpret these "voices" (and get access)? Are we facing a “Babel World of Things” that puts up new fences in the public sphere(s)? Are we blind to the miracle of the Internet of Things or is it just for the geek elite? Do we all fail to see what is going on? Or, do we look for answers about the future in the wrong places?

Well, we already co-inhabit, co-perform in one world with all these networked objects. We experience the convergence of web technology, wireless networks and portable devices. We take our online friends with us whenever we are leaving the house. Online resources traditionally accessible only through "heads-down computing" on our desk, now become available in the urban context.

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When I walk through the streets of Brooklyn my cell phone gets short SMS reminders from the land of Google calendar that get me going.

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In Brooklyn, an older Hassidic man makes his way up the road on a bike. It's dusk and the dark suit of the man blends into the background of trees, the street and the park. But suddenly when the man is already fairly close to me, a blue shine radiates through the curls that cover up his ears. A cyborgian-looking mobile phone antenna is clipped on the man's ear. His thing talks to the object on the next cell phone tower.

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Sitting on my desk at home I can follow the flickering of my wifi signal, almost as if the machine is breathing, I sense the presence of my neighbor sharing our bandwidth.

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A symbol of a strange translucent object appears in the middle of my screen signaling that my computer lost touch with my wireless mouse. The mouse is out of range.

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I take my online sociality with me in my bag, a bit like Vilem Flusser, who describes a bag full of files. The device is right there, in my reach, always. I take my online pen pals with me when I wander the streets or when I pass through airports or foreign cities. I may be writing them on my "Personal Data Assistant" in the subway and shoot out the message when the train surfaces going over a bridge.

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Then I sit in the park or cafe and enjoy the availability of a free wireless network. Its node just communicated with my laptop, both are amenable to each other until there is a stronger commercial signal that may overwhelm them. This battle over free or for-pay wireless network matters- free networks set expectations. Why would I go to elsewhere when I can get access here for free?

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The Fedex delivery guy brings up that package from the gallery and I sign for it, meeting him half way down the stairs (the heat must kill the poor guy). I sign on a magic device that beams my signature right to the Fedex mother ship.

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Walmart tags all their merchandise with little RFID tags. Containers are moving and are tracked globally. Or, put little tags on Coke cans and the world of computers would wake up to their presence, wherever they migrate, a CNN article suggests. 

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For the obscenely wealthy- Rem Koolhaas' Broadway Prada store offers a service that charges the object of your desire to your credit card merely by exiting the store with it.

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A friend from Delhi told me that in India biometric identification currently becomes popular in the context of large religious events, pilgrimages.  'Crowd control' is enabled through objects that talk to each other.

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Objects are deeply informed by the social understanding of those who programmed them, technology is soaked with ideology: Technologists shape things in the way that they know the world.

Bruce Sterling's Shaping Things
Futurity is good business ("the future is yours to make"). The market thrives on feelings of excitement about novelty and near-future scenarios. On the other hand, there is honest concern about a sustainable world coupled with a hope for a future in which objects and humans stand united for a better world. (The 20th century's industrial infrastructure has run out of time. It can't go on; it's antiquated, dangerous and not sustainable. Shaping Things, p131.)

That may be so but consumers love to get entrenched in speculation forgetting the clumsy reality of the technology at the bottom of their feet or on their desk. ([T]he industrial system cruelly sacrifices human flesh for the sake of dysfunctional machinery. p. 133) Sterling calls the evolved “descendents” of artifacts, machines, products, and gizmos: "Spime." The artist and technologist Julian Bleeker later introduces the term “blogjects,” perhaps attempting to frame a kind of feasibility study of future-day “spimes” for his present-day practice.

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Datablogging is a collaborative blogging platform that allows for extended data fields to be added to blog posts.

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Objects are "impregnated" with understanding, sensors; they are tracked, they "remember" their own histories of movement and encounter with other objects. We deeply engage with these objects; we interact, we feel them. Sterling talks of dogs injected with radio frequency tags (RFID: finally, a technology that China loves). Bleeker talks of kids with RFID tags (…It's 10pm: do you know where your child is?). He pushes us further into tomorrow's tomorrow: The only sane way out of technosociety is throughout it, into a newer one that knows everything the older one knew. And knows enough new things to dazzle and dominate denizens of the older order. That means revolutionizing the interplay of human and object. Shaping Things, p132

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Wireless Location Services

Kids buy lunches with scans of fingers

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Sterling is aware of the netherworld of networked labor when he draws parallels to coal miners, clarifying that today's coal miners of sorts may well have pristine white skin. (They sit, type and stare at screens. All day, every day. It ends up hurting them. It hurts them in ways that are slow enough and subtle enough to steal up on them. p134)

Sterling appropriately emphasizes the downside of Spimes: in engaging with a technology so entirely toward surveillance, spying, privacy invasion, and ruthless technical intrusion on previously unsoiled social spaces, we are playing with fire. (Shaping Things p13). But while there is outspoken consumer skepticism, eco-awareness, and a very genuine questioning of true societal progress throughout the book, this is pretty much where he stops. Is that all there is to be cautious about?

The Pew Internet and American Life Projects surveyed more than 1200 professionals in 2004 about their prediction of the next decade of the Internet. They saw a more ubiquitous Internet embedded in miniaturized devices, clothes, cars, appliances, and they thought that "these networked devices will allow greater surveillance by governments and businesses."


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CCTV cameras to track passenger movements in busy airports

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Will objects carry our histories reflected in their own? Technology writer Kevin Kelly says, What will most surprise us is how dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third time rather than remember it ourselves.

Will my PDA remember my life better than I do? Will the memory of the linked-up collectivity of devices challenge the way history is written? Things become the fly on the wall with a brain of an elephant.

Kelly continues: The more we teach this megacomputer, the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.

Bruce Sterling, with marvelous heartfelt language, dreams of an Internet of Things that links to satellites, sky-high. They could eye down on myriads of networks of things. The Internet of Things promises that we can outsource our memory; but not to Flickr and Archive.org or Del.icio.us but to our material companions: the objects of our everyday life could keep track of our travel photos. Things, in Sterling's proposal, know what they cost. They know who they are and where they are and they know when it is time to check themselves in at the junkyard to face their (by then) biodegradable destiny.

I like Sterling's book but I question his reliance on design(ers) and the things they create as key determining force for a future world. For now, it rather looks like most objects are rather intentionally restricting the way the user can behave, or enforce certain modes of behavior. Networked objects are not 'baloney" but they are also not the sole future hope. What is missing for me in Sterling's quite wonderful, inspiring book is a deep socio-political analysis. While I agree that the interaction between humans and networked objects is important, I lack gripping examples that convince me of its power in changing the world.

Already in 1776 the Atlantic Telegraph posed that the electric telegraph will make muskets into candlesticks. Two authors at the time wrote: It is impossible that old prejudices and hostilities should longer exist, while such an instrument has been created for the exchange of thought between all the nations of the earth. (The Victorian Internet, p 83) And in 1858, upon completion of a transatlantic telegraph cable, the British ambassador at the time said: What can be more likely to effect [peace] than a constant and complete intercourse between all nations and individuals in the world? (p90)

The belief that more information, more connectedness, more communication will somewhat automatically make for a better world is not new and should be questioned. Also an overemphasis of networked objects as being part of a larger converging sociality is important.  

This is not a lament of a “thing-ly” takeover. Sociality between networked objects and humans is a core question. Who is served by such mythologizing rhetoric with terms like "co-inhabiting"? These, ___ (fill in the blank) are just pieces of metal and silicon... They are around and they make some things easier and they join our conversations by contributing data. We often attach affect to these networked things. How do all these things make us feel? Will children demand even more “screen time” from their parents? The ethics of love in relation Aibo or Paro are endlessly fascinating.

What would an emancipatory relationship with a networked object look like? Should we assume that there would be no exploitation of labor, no class differences, no poverty, no people without heath insurance, and no people without access to hardware or the network of networks in that near future scenario? What would a "unaligned alliance" of networked objects look like?

In a 2nd grade art class we were asked to visualize the city in the year 2000 (“Die Stadt im Jahre 2000”). I made a drawing that I was fond of: buildings connected through intertwining tubes, cars that looked like a combination of 1950s chevies (fueled by rocket engines) and dragons. In 2000 I looked back and realized that things more or less looked the same. The future, today, is just what it just used to be, to borrow from "historian of the future," Barbrook.