The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things
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Any establishment will smile on its own and kick others aside; it was ever thus. The Internet of Things will kick in new ways, but it also offers some new ways of becoming established. The Internet of Things is not a monolithic, one-party surveillance empire. Instead, it amends the old-fashioned internet slogan of “Information wants to be free” to a new, more politically pointed, “Information about you wants to be free to us”. The IoT platform wants to become an establishment. It’s not a sinister platform for cyber war or a frothy divertissement for arcane gadgets. It wants to be social reality, it wants to be the way things are done in daily life.
It’s hard to outguess its wrangling, unstable behaviour. However, it is easy to guess how it ends.
Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand. 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.
It does offer one serious improvement: because it is so mindful about “things”, it offers much better chances for humanity to mop up its own rubbish. That’s the one thing about it that historians might regard as progress.
But everything about the Internet of Things that actually works, that functions in real life, is already obsolete. It will leave few visible monuments. If you hold your breath and close your eyes, you can almost see the last of it from here.
About the Author
Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, critic and a contributing editor of Wired magazine. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns and introductions to books by authors ranging from Ernst Jünger to Jules Verne. His non-fiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003) and Shaping Things (2005).
About Strelka
Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design is an international education project founded in 2010. At its Moscow campus, Strelka hosts a postgraduate research programme on urbanism and city development. A philanthropic project, students study for free and develop the skills required for a strategic understanding of the contemporary city and its future.
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A Note About Our Typography
The typeface on the front cover is called Lazurski, and it was designed at the Soviet type design bureau, Polygraphmash, by Vladimir Yefimov in 1984. It’s a homage to a 1960s font designed by Vadim Lazurski that was inspired by Italian typefaces of the early 16th century.
Published by Strelka Press
© 2014 Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design
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ISBN 978-5-906264-30-5