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    The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
    The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
    The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
    Ebook44 pages40 minutes

    The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

    By Bruce Sterling

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    About this ebook

    If the hype is to be believed then the next big thing is the Internet of Things. But is it what you think it is? Because the Internet of Things is not about things on the internet. A world in which all our household gadgets can communicate with each other may sound vaguely useful, but it's not really for us consumers. The Internet of Things serves the interests of the technology giants, in their epic wrangles with each other. And it is they who will turn the jargon of "smart cities" and "smart homes" into a self-fulfilling prophesy. In this piercing and provocative essay, Bruce Sterling tells the story of an idea that just won't go away because there's too much money to be made and a whole world to control.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherStrelka Press
    Release dateSep 1, 2014
    ISBN9785906264305
    The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

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    • 3/5
      People are not Google’s 'Customers' or Even Google’s 'Users, but Its Feudal Livestock: “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” by Bruce Sterling “An IoT is not a consumer society. It’s a materialized network society. It’s like 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 with Big Data silos.”

      In “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” by Bruce Sterling.

      Imagine the following creepy scenario.

      Picture yourself doing the number 2 on your recently bought high tech throne. Unfortunately your next door neighbour is a black-hat hacker. Do you want him to hack into your home system and flush your toilet while you're on it? With our current batch of politicians I can guarantee that's what will happen. I can't see them stepping up to the plate. We all also know that when it comes to safety, leaving self-regulation to the end-user doesn’t seem to work. We all know what happened with credit cards; we all know what's still happening with customer data; it's clear as water it's not going to work for the IoT. What's wrong with this picture? Everyone who works in IT knows that if one wants to add security to a product, it's going to cost big money. Making a gadget a safer product adds to the cost of it, and that just doesn’t work in this day and age. For IoT to become widespread we need cheap, but also safer products, and I don’t see that happening in my life time.

      If you're into IoT and IT stuff in general, read on.

    Book preview

    The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things - Bruce Sterling

    1.

    The first thing to understand about the Internet of Things is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that powerful stakeholders have settled on for their own purposes.

    They like the slogan Internet of Things because it sounds peaceable and progressive. It disguises the epic struggle over power, money and influence that is about to ensue. There is genuine internet technology involved in the Internet of Things. However, the legacy internet of yesterday is a shrinking part of what is at stake now.

    Digital commerce and governance is moving, as fast and hard as it possibly can, into a full-spectrum dominance over whatever used to be analogue. In practice, the Internet of Things means an epic transformation: all-purpose electronic automation through digital surveillance by wireless broadband. In this essay I’ll describe how this is likely to work, and what the major players think they are doing to get there.

    To begin, though, I must first free the reader from any folk ideas about the Internet of Things.

    So, let’s imagine that the reader has a smartphone in one hand, as most people in the Twenty-Teens most definitely tend to. In the other hand, the reader has some thing. Let’s say it’s the handle of his old-fashioned domestic vacuum cleaner, which is a relic of yesterday’s standard consumer economy.

    As he cheerfully vacuums his home carpet while also checking his Facebook prompts, because the chore of vacuuming is really boring, the reader naturally thinks: Why are these two objects in my two hands living in such separate worlds? In my left hand I have my wonderfully advanced phone with Facebook – that’s the internet. But in my right hand I have this noisy, old-fashioned, ineffective, analogue thing! For my own convenience as a customer and consumer, why can’t the internet and this thing" be combined?

    This concept sounds pretty visionary, and it’s certainly enough to impress most people born during the Baby Boom, so this paradigm has been doing well in the popular press. If the reader thinks it over, he can easily refine the basic idea. This vacuum should be equipped with wireless connectivity and sensors! Also, as its owner, I should have a mobile app or dashboard that can tell me many useful and healthy things about my vacuum – such as how much energy it is using, or how many toxins it found in my carpet. Also, the vacuum should run around in robot fashion, all by itself!

    That’s the standard Internet of Things scenario. It’s framed in the traditional language of consumer electronics. People often mock it, because they don’t like so

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