The Epic Struggle of the Internet-of-Things
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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
