The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling Read Free Book Online Page A

Facebook. He gets fantastic services free of charge, and he responds mostly with dropdown menus and checkboxes, while generating data whose uses and values are invisible to him.
    The reader didn’t build the phone or the vacuum cleaner. He can’t repair or modify them. He doesn’t understand their technical workings, and when the two of them interact (by various adroit forms of wireless communication), he’s not in charge of that, or of where the data goes. The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It’s a new platform for radically broadening digital activity. At the moment, it’s actually many balkanised intranets for digital activity, but it’s called “internet” by the power players, because they aspire to that catholic universality.
    The reader is not a “customer” of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook’s genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the “Big Five” of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.
    None of them are conventional corporations as corporations used to be known. The Big Five all have important central features that previous companies never possessed: an operating system, some dedicated way to sell cultural material (music, movies, books, software), tools for productivity, an advertising business, some means of accessing the internet that they themselves more or less control (tablets, smartphones, phablets), a search engine capability, a social network, a “payment solution” or some similar private bank, a “cloud” capability and, very soon, some dedicated, elite high-speed access that used to be the democratic internet.
    The Big Five are the genuine heroes of the Internet of Things. The epic drama of the Internet of Things is really their story. It’s not a popular uprising – except in the sense that the Big Five are really, really “popular” – because billions of people are willingly involved in their systems. The Internet of Things is basically a recognition by other power-players that the methods of the Big Five have won, and that they should be emulated.
    The Big Five are smart, profitable, capable and colossal. They are as entirely free of political constraint as the railroads or Standard Oil were in their own heyday. They sense that they can dominate because the enterprises that already dominate are much worse than they are.
    Lesser enterprises, and governments as well, have grown bitter and tired of being bossed around by oil companies and bankers in a jobless, terror-riddled World Depression. They see the Internet of Things as a way to break the stasis, attract new investment, and flood the world with yet another tidal wave of cheap, connected silicon. They’re willing to go for this prospect because they don’t see anything else happening. Certainly nothing else with hundreds of billions in potential new wealth, that is.
    The standard IoT pitch – about the reader’s smart, chatty refrigerator – is a fairy tale. It’s like the promise of a talking chicken in every pot. Politically speaking, the relationship of the reader to the Internet of Things is not democratic. It’s not even capitalistic. It’s a new thing. It’s digital-feudalism. People in the Internet of Things are like the woolly livestock of a feudal demesne, grazing under the watchful eye of barons in their hilltop Cloud Castles. The peasants never vote for the lords of the Cloud Castles. But they do find them attractive and glamorous. They respect them. They feel a genuine fealty to them. They can’t get along in life without them.
    This is not what people expected from “the internet” back when it was a raw, anarchic, electronic frontier. But that was then, this is now. The internet has seen a full generation’s worth of political, economic and social development. The feudal lords of popular mass computation, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon