ISSUES
: The Internet of Things
Chapter 2: Our digital future
29
purchase and have greater control over their own lives
than ever before.
We are at the peak of what the Gartner research
firm calls a “hype cycle”, when expectations of new
technologies rise giddily. This is followed by sober
realism and everyday use.
The Design Museum has rapturously announced that
we are entering “A New Industrial Revolution”. Given
the costs as well as the benefits connected to the first
one – illness, death, pollution, slavery and war are all
there on the downside – one might think the advent of
this miraculous new age would provide opportunities
to rethink the absurd lightness of being routinely
attributed to the Internet.
For the past two decades of cybertarianism have
been an era of ignorance. We have neglected the
dirty, material origins and processes that characterise
communications technologies like tablets, phones
and laptops. We have forgotten the real story of Cold
War militarism, undersea cables, conflict minerals,
slave labour, toxic exposure and illegal recycling.
We got such things (the environment, workers and
legality) badly wrong the first time, and risk repeating
the mistake due to the obfuscatory claims for a post-
smokestack Internet age.
Then there are the problems with architecture,
security, robustness, interoperability, regulation and
privacy across the Internet of things – and doubt
even encircles the holy fetish of modernity: economic
growth.
In 1987, the year he won the pseudo-Nobel prize for
economics, Robert Solow identified what has become
known as the ‘Solow Paradox’. He came to this insight
while reviewing the tide of futurism that accompanied
the Cold War and is now reborn via the Internet.
Solow doubted the wonders of a service economy,
which he thought might produce “a nation of
hamburger stands and insurance companies”.
The memorable phrase he used was: “You can
see the computer age everywhere but in the
productivity statistics.”
Last year, the National Bureau of Economic
Research published findings that buttress
Solow’s Paradox, a decade after it was
supposedly dispatched to the dustbin
of history courtesy of the Internet. This
research suggests that unemployment
hastens
productivity
growth,
not
information technology. And of course,
the Internet of Things will see labour displaced onto
customers, who will become increasingly responsible
for work previously undertaken by full-service utilities
providers, for example, through properly-employed
experts.
And what about the instant purchase and upgrade
fetishes that will add massive over-consumption to
mass capitalism’s inexorable crises of overproduction?
The Internet of Things will create a mountain of junk.
Its electronic detritus will be untold.
Suddenly your light switch, toothbrush, trousers,
tights, kettle, bedroom toys – and chopsticks – will
be rendered useless thanks to software upgrades,
otherwise known as built-in obsolescence.
And that fish-oil prophylactic – do you need it? Why
not cease industrial fishing?
28 January 2015
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“Your light switch, toothbrush,
trousers, tights, kettle, bedroom
toys – and chopsticks – will be
rendered useless thanks to software
upgrades, otherwise known as built-
in obsolescence”
“We are at the peak of what the
Gartner research firm calls a ‘hype
cycle’, when expectations of new
technologies rise giddily. This is
followed by sober realism and
everyday use”
