The Epic Struggle of the Internet-of-Things

On a recent trip, I managed to finish reading both the books I loaded

to my Kindle for said trip (Neal Stephenson's Zodiac and Margaret

Atwood's Oryx and Crake) just a little before I got home, so on the

final bus ride I reread something I had lying around on there, which

was Bruce Sterling's very short book or very long essay, depending on

how you look at it, "The Epic Struggle of the Internet-of-Things".

This is probably readable in about an hour and worth checking out if

you have an interest in the subject.

It's quite interesting in that the first thing he does is dismiss out

of hand any importance or relevance of the actual things that make

up the IoT. The book has literally zero discussion of the kinds of

practical thing-oriented discussion that you find in, say, the

Gizmodo article "The House that Spied on Me"[1] (worth reading).

The book is all about what the IoT is actually about, which is

various corporate interests tripping over themselves to achieve the

same kind of tremendous power and wealth which companies like Google

and Facebook have attained online, but this time in the real world,

by positioning themselves as unavoidable middle-men and providers of

basic infrastructure, and locking people in and hoovering up data.

The actual things are just a means to this end, and by themselves

are frankly uninteresting. In fact, one of my favourite parts of

the whole book is where Sterling says of the things themselves:

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.

Before I get to the point, some other snippets I really enjoyed are:

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 it's feudal livestock

(probably not news to any of my readers, but a delightful instance

of calling a spade a spade, with a little flourish)

People never voted to become electrical or automated. Those

processes came from a rough consensus among the political and

managerial classes of the developed nations: "we must electrify,

we must automate". Those who disagreed were reduced to the state

of the Amish; they were just routed-around.

(I'd never previously thought about the process of electrification,

which I have always just taken for granted. But I suppose some folk

must not have wanted it, and probably could have mounted good

arguments for why they didn't need it, but they inevitably lost and

look now, to history, like extremist crackpots.)

Two things in the book struck me as worth spinning phlog posts off,

so I'm writing this entry now to kind of set the stage for those

posts, which I'll endeavour to write over the weekend.

Firstly, Sterling identifies five big internet companies as the

primary players in the online middle-man/infrastructure monopoly

business, as the role models that IoT companies will try to

emulate in the physical world: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and

Facebook. As a corollary, if you are interested in ethical and

sociopolitical issues around the internet, these are the companies

you really have to understand and think carefully about your

relationship with. And it struck me that of the five, Amazon are

the one that I have made the least active effort to distance and

disengage myself from (recall that I read this on a Kindle). I was

rereading Epic Struggle at roughly the same time that Tomasino

wrote a few entries about his frustrations with Amazon, the little

ways he attempts to shake his fist at their windmills, and his

abandonment of AWS[2,3,4]. So this gave me a lot of food for

thought and I need to think more and harder about my stance in

relation to Amazon.

Secondly, Sterling identifies the smartphone as the crucial

instrument by which the IoT will be thrust upon us, He says:

The smartphone is the basic pass-ticket, the voucher, the proof

of existence...Once the reader has one of those in his pocket or

her purse, she is assimilated...All of the great and good of the

planet: bankers, senators, regulators, venture capitalists,

engineers, designers, coders, the military, the church, the

academy - every last one of them has a wireless broadband

lozenge that's chock-full of responsive sensors and sophisticated

electronics. There is no power-group of consequence in the world

today that successfully renounces smartphones. No one who

matters refuses what they offer.

This got me thinking about the fact that I own and use (albeit far

less than most owners) a smartphone, and wondering how comfortable

I am with that fact. So I've been thinking about changing that

and wanted to share my thoughts and solicit feedback.

Stay tuned, fellow insufferable digital malcontents!

[1] https://gizmodo.com/the-house-that-spied-on-me-1822429852

[2] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180323-audiobooks

[3] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180329-leaving-aws

[4] gopher://gopher.black:70/1/phlog/20180329-more-migrations