The "electricity" of near future participation (p2)
For science fiction writer Bruce Sterling The Internet of Things is about the distant future, which he does not see dominated by slick networked "everyware" objects as Adam Greenfield calls them. Sterling does not believe that networked objects will be everywhere. The future for him is not all about ubiquitous computing. And that's not just because the word is too long and hard to spell but it has to do with the technology being all too clumsy.
Instead, Sterling lights up over cheap everyday objects that are traceable in space and time, objects with unique identity (SPIME). His vision is all about searchability. These pime objects begin and end as virtual data. They are virtual objects first and physical things second. His hope is that in the age of the The Internet of Things, three decades from now, we will be able to relate deeper to objects. This is not a call for a renaissance of objects/things. It does not signal that "Things" are the new "Internet." It also does not indicate that the net failed.
*
Flagr, bookmark the real world and share cool places from online or right from your mobile phone!
<http://www.flagr.com/>
*
It simply means that we can engage with objects in more complex ways. From the moment of their invention to their doomsday of decay we could sort, trace, and search objects. It's 6 am and you don't know where your shoes are? Just google them. The Wall Street Journal talks of the Google Economy. Now add the ability to find out everything about the objects in our material world to this search power. When where they fabricated? Where did they move? Which objects did they encounter?
*
Semapedia
With Semapedia you can connect Wikipedia knowledge with relevant places in physical space.
<http://semapedia.org>
*
Link the frame of the photograph on your wall to the Internet and ask it where it was built, where the tree came from and who designed it, how much the workers were paid to manufacture it. Or, do you need a new mattress because you got bed bugs (like so many people in Manhattan right now). If you could Google all new thermopedic mattresses in your vicinity you could call up their owner and ask if they are for sale. It's CHEney¹s dream of Craigslist on steroids.
*
BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books. It lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
<http://bookmooch.com/>
*
Sterling wants to outsource his brain. The best thing about the Internet of Things is that I no longer need to inventory my possessions in my head, he says. They are automated through an 'auto-magical inventory voodoo' of machines, which work down far beneath my notice. I don't need to remember things about things any longer, what something costs or where it is located. Objects become 'auto-googleable.' Things just sit there and 'ordinate' (French for computer). The Internet of Things sorts, ranks, and shuffles these things and we get at ease with them, we just ask them what we need to know about them.
*
SynapseLife is an online life manager.
<http://synapselife.com/>
*
All this object mining and love for the object hyperlink (or: "thing link") is of course a dream scenario for any authoritarian regime that wants to control its citizen and their objects. (Remember the Stasi smell archives?)
Sterling has no problem admitting to that: The Internet of Things would be great to run a concentration camp, he says in an interview with RocketBoom: You can't have the good without the bad. Perhaps the advantages of networked objects would far outweigh the horrible horribleness of the surveillance that would doom on us.
*
Spy Chips: Russian charges against UK secret service
*
When I first listened to the venerable cyberpunk Sterling I was totally sold. He is a fantastically charismatic, superbly witty and quirky speaker without ivy snobbiness but with a justified skepticism of academia and an air of anti-status-quo oppositionality. Poster child of the early Wired magazine, he is now blogging on their turf. You just want to believe him (or write him a check) after listening for a while. His technological projections are informed by the current-day realities in the inventor's lab, his metaphors are sharp, his language is a joy. His emphasis on language reaches beyond creating a new secret code for the techno-priesthood. He wants to find trackable word containers for new concepts that can be communicated to newbies in the field.
But there must be a way to add to his visions of the future. Sterling opens up some of Al Gore's concerns (i.e. ability for reuse, eco-aware tracking of fabrication history of a shoe).
Let's add 360 degree awareness to Sterling's techno-snapshot of the future. What does The Internet of Things do about the AIDS crisis, unemployment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, __, minimum wages, and 47 million U.S. citizens without health insurance? Just look at the stark economic differences in Mexico or Brazil. The poor and ridiculously oppressed in these countries will kick out the fat bastards who keep them in such conditions! What do philosophers of The Internet of Things have to say about -- that --?
In addition, The Internet of Things is merely one more piece in the puzzle of Howard Rheingold's sketch of the landscape of Technologies for Cooperation; the concept of The Internet of Things does no more (and no less) than adding another component to this picture.
What does really matter about the future? Is the ecology of a thing, like a shoe, all we can come up with? How realistic is it to think of networked objects sneaking into refugee camps to report human rights abuses? How could networked objects make us understand that mutual aid gets us further than any "killer app"? How we can we reach beyond the usual corporate drill of optimizing things for higher efficiency? How can The Internet of Things make life more spontaneous, disordered (!), unpredictable and emotionally rich? How can we learn to collaborate and dump social Darwinism for Free Cooperation?
These questions don't have the bitter California Ideology aftertaste that I get from Sterling. They don't sound like the semiotically trained techno-insurgence (with a good sense for commerce) and these questions are not sexy or punkish at all. These questions don't pump semiotic adrenaline into your veins.
I'm certainly not asking for any one-fits-all answer to these humanitarian problems: technology will not be our savior; I don't expect it to be. However, I deeply wish that technological insight could be coupled with social vision that goes beyond the recycling of shoes.
For the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium I hope that we can start to squat the techno-social imaginary of tomorrow's tomorrow in this field before American "values" like convenience, efficiency/optimization, surveillance in the name of liberty and competition dominate these discourses completely.
Trebor Scholz
Instead, Sterling lights up over cheap everyday objects that are traceable in space and time, objects with unique identity (SPIME). His vision is all about searchability. These pime objects begin and end as virtual data. They are virtual objects first and physical things second. His hope is that in the age of the The Internet of Things, three decades from now, we will be able to relate deeper to objects. This is not a call for a renaissance of objects/things. It does not signal that "Things" are the new "Internet." It also does not indicate that the net failed.
*
Flagr, bookmark the real world and share cool places from online or right from your mobile phone!
<http://www.flagr.com/>
*
It simply means that we can engage with objects in more complex ways. From the moment of their invention to their doomsday of decay we could sort, trace, and search objects. It's 6 am and you don't know where your shoes are? Just google them. The Wall Street Journal talks of the Google Economy. Now add the ability to find out everything about the objects in our material world to this search power. When where they fabricated? Where did they move? Which objects did they encounter?
*Semapedia
With Semapedia you can connect Wikipedia knowledge with relevant places in physical space.
<http://semapedia.org>
*
Link the frame of the photograph on your wall to the Internet and ask it where it was built, where the tree came from and who designed it, how much the workers were paid to manufacture it. Or, do you need a new mattress because you got bed bugs (like so many people in Manhattan right now). If you could Google all new thermopedic mattresses in your vicinity you could call up their owner and ask if they are for sale. It's CHEney¹s dream of Craigslist on steroids.
*BookMooch is a community for exchanging used books. It lets you give away books you no longer need in exchange for books you really want.
<http://bookmooch.com/>
*
Sterling wants to outsource his brain. The best thing about the Internet of Things is that I no longer need to inventory my possessions in my head, he says. They are automated through an 'auto-magical inventory voodoo' of machines, which work down far beneath my notice. I don't need to remember things about things any longer, what something costs or where it is located. Objects become 'auto-googleable.' Things just sit there and 'ordinate' (French for computer). The Internet of Things sorts, ranks, and shuffles these things and we get at ease with them, we just ask them what we need to know about them.
*
SynapseLife is an online life manager.
<http://synapselife.com/>
*
All this object mining and love for the object hyperlink (or: "thing link") is of course a dream scenario for any authoritarian regime that wants to control its citizen and their objects. (Remember the Stasi smell archives?)
Sterling has no problem admitting to that: The Internet of Things would be great to run a concentration camp, he says in an interview with RocketBoom: You can't have the good without the bad. Perhaps the advantages of networked objects would far outweigh the horrible horribleness of the surveillance that would doom on us.
*Spy Chips: Russian charges against UK secret service
*
When I first listened to the venerable cyberpunk Sterling I was totally sold. He is a fantastically charismatic, superbly witty and quirky speaker without ivy snobbiness but with a justified skepticism of academia and an air of anti-status-quo oppositionality. Poster child of the early Wired magazine, he is now blogging on their turf. You just want to believe him (or write him a check) after listening for a while. His technological projections are informed by the current-day realities in the inventor's lab, his metaphors are sharp, his language is a joy. His emphasis on language reaches beyond creating a new secret code for the techno-priesthood. He wants to find trackable word containers for new concepts that can be communicated to newbies in the field.
But there must be a way to add to his visions of the future. Sterling opens up some of Al Gore's concerns (i.e. ability for reuse, eco-aware tracking of fabrication history of a shoe).
Let's add 360 degree awareness to Sterling's techno-snapshot of the future. What does The Internet of Things do about the AIDS crisis, unemployment, wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, __, minimum wages, and 47 million U.S. citizens without health insurance? Just look at the stark economic differences in Mexico or Brazil. The poor and ridiculously oppressed in these countries will kick out the fat bastards who keep them in such conditions! What do philosophers of The Internet of Things have to say about -- that --?
In addition, The Internet of Things is merely one more piece in the puzzle of Howard Rheingold's sketch of the landscape of Technologies for Cooperation; the concept of The Internet of Things does no more (and no less) than adding another component to this picture.What does really matter about the future? Is the ecology of a thing, like a shoe, all we can come up with? How realistic is it to think of networked objects sneaking into refugee camps to report human rights abuses? How could networked objects make us understand that mutual aid gets us further than any "killer app"? How we can we reach beyond the usual corporate drill of optimizing things for higher efficiency? How can The Internet of Things make life more spontaneous, disordered (!), unpredictable and emotionally rich? How can we learn to collaborate and dump social Darwinism for Free Cooperation?
These questions don't have the bitter California Ideology aftertaste that I get from Sterling. They don't sound like the semiotically trained techno-insurgence (with a good sense for commerce) and these questions are not sexy or punkish at all. These questions don't pump semiotic adrenaline into your veins.
I'm certainly not asking for any one-fits-all answer to these humanitarian problems: technology will not be our savior; I don't expect it to be. However, I deeply wish that technological insight could be coupled with social vision that goes beyond the recycling of shoes.
For the Architecture and Situated Technologies symposium I hope that we can start to squat the techno-social imaginary of tomorrow's tomorrow in this field before American "values" like convenience, efficiency/optimization, surveillance in the name of liberty and competition dominate these discourses completely.
Trebor Scholz
[Trebor]
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