The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    However, suppose that you are “internet”, but you don’t happen to be American. If that’s the case, then the strategic alliance of GE, AT&T, IBM, Cisco and Intel looks an awful lot like a military-industrial “Internet of American Things”. Their “Industrial Internet” might, perhaps, be perceived as a scary, NSA-friendly, neo-Cold War apparatus from the world’s last remaining military superpower. An electronic cyberwar conspiracy, aimed directly at the future prosperity of Huawei – or even harmless, unsuspecting Samsung!
    Who would have guessed that an Internet of Things might look so nationalistic? But “things” aren’t made of data. Things exist within the real borders of real countries. I can invade your website and, well, who cares? But if I invade your house and garden…
    Introducing national interests makes it a three-dimensional chess game.
    So, sure, the Internet of Things may sound like mere hype – arcane, technical, mostly speculative. But if you’re a European regulator, protecting the remnants of Philips, Ericsson or poor, crushed, bleeding Nokia, can you scoff at that hype? Can you dismiss it? Much better to wake up, grab what levers are left to Brussels, fire up the “centres of excellence” and encourage “smart city” initiatives that appeal to the treasured European quality of life. Amsterdam loves that idea. So do Copenhagen, Helsinki, Barcelona, Stockholm and Vienna.
    If you are in the “Japanese Galapagos”, you were once brilliantly electronic. However, being Japanese, you were never globally social and networkable. That led to a decline in your prospects, but an Internet of Things might be a new poker deal. It’s probably in your national interests to at least pretend it’s different. At this point, there is little to lose – and a buzzing, clicking, beeping world to gain.

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    This last part of my essay is about the players in the Internet of Things who don’t care much for power or wealth. They like social influence, they like fame, because they are the IoT culturati.
    Since these cultural actors don’t much care for material goods and show little interest in conventional political power, this third contingent might be seen as rebels of a sort – possibly even an Internet-of-Things “counterculture”. But that’s not so. If they “counter” any culture, it’s the cultural values left over from before the Internet of Things. Within the Internet of Things they’re a cultural avant-garde.
    Although these figures often talk politically, they don’t genuinely argue or debate. As aboriginal denizens of a network society, what they really like is wrangling. They are the pure-play wranglers – when given standard forms of power or money, they devote it to more wrangling; wrangling for the sake of wrangling; wrangling as their way of life.
    Some of them enjoy the fame and esteem that successful wrangling can bring, but others are quieter. The quietest possible form of wrangling is composing software code. This means wrangling not directly with other human beings but with the infrastructure of code. This activity supplies most of the satisfactions of triumphant cleverness, without the pangs and hazards inherent in human relations.
    If this semi-electronic sociality was a minority taste, there wouldn’t be a billion people on Facebook. However, there are. The cultural ambition of the IoT is to make wrangling the dominant form of world culture. They are cultural imperialists in this way: all previous forms of human culture must be reframed in terms of the wrangler hack. Forms of culture that can’t go there do not matter.
    Let’s imagine that – through some economic miracle of zero-margin production, let’s say – people had guaranteed annual incomes, nutritious food and social housing. It’s easy to see that wrangling on networks would become our civilisation’s dominant human activity. People would websurf, or rather electronically socialise,