So I'm sitting there with a rare opportunity to watch some television, and I find something in the guide I want to watch (seriously, why don't TV remotes have QWERTY keyboards, or even predictive text like a Nokia in the 90s?), and I switch over, but apparently advertisements take up half the listed running time of a TV show, so I'm stuck with some dumb ad for some dumb exercise bike. Only this is a super 21st Century exercise bike, and its control screen is wirelessly hooked into Google Maps. It is in fact an internet-connected exercise bike, which maybe no one saw coming when they laughed at the idea of internet-connected fridges. You use Google Maps to select a real-world cycle route, and the bike emulates the slope of the road as you progress.
Or, put another way, it's a device that processes and physically responds to remote digital data without significant human action. It's the blunt end of the Internet Of Things. One step down from, say, house lights that know when you're coming home, or a toaster that tweets. (I recently saw a project, and I can't remember where, in which a toaster is wired to tweet if it's not being used enough, and starts to beg for a new owner who will make better use of it.)
The Internet of Things, often written IoT, is something that people are looking at this year. Like, say, Google Glass, it's one of those touchstones for The Next New Normal. Ignoring the fact that Google Glass glasses will this year only go to developers prepared to pay $1500 a pop and that they currently don't do much of anything. It seems that they're all in some kind of collected space: that IoT and Google Glass and 3D printing and a bunch of other things will all somehow connect together and bring on, I dunno, Web 3.0.
I remember, in the 00s, watching some hideous Bay Area vox-pop internet video in which each mini-interview concluded with the interviewer asking "Whaddaya think of Web 2.0?" A few years before that, I was invited to a panel at a digital conference with someone from Aardman Animation to talk about storytelling, only to have someone stand up and ask what the B2B applications were. B2B stood for Business To Business, and represented the idea that businesses could sell other businesses their worthless crap and somehow not need actual customers at all. It was the full sequence of the Human Centipede as a business model, basically.Some pundits are saying that's all coming back this year, because one huge bubble-burst wasn't enough. The same sort of utter cultural tonedeafness that led one Marc Benioff, back in '11, to declare that "entrepreneurs" should listen to Occupy Wall Street and its many business lessons in order to learn how to "Occupy The Enterprise". This is the sort of thing that's emboldened Marxists to start talking in public again about "late capitalism" in the last ten years. When Marxists, who are marginally more annoying even than a toaster that tweets for some fucking hippie to rescue it, begin to sound like they might have a point, you know you're living in the shit years.
The ground this group of Next Internet Stuff stands on is shaky enough that people are trying to disrupt them before they start. Military theorist and resilience pundit John Robb is pitching the idea of Dronenet: using drones to deliver goods so quickly that using and buying a 3D printer becomes a hassle and a worthless extravagance. He calls it an Internet Of Drones, which seems to me to be essentially indivisible from an Internet Of Things.
An Internet Of Things is in fact a wonderful idea. A world where devices report, learn, remember and aid. But it's also a world spawning a desperate "entrepreneurial" class born of stern austerity and sociopolitical upheaval. In the Human Centipede Business Model, why not try to crush 3D printing while using a wondrous possibility to re-invent Amazon next-day shipping? Why not think very hard to find ways to keep things as half-useful and basically shitty as your standard TV remote control?
Why not pedal as fast as you can to go nowhere?
Welcome to 2013.
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