This article was taken from the February 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.
Allegedly, the internet of things means "the internet" plus "things", but it's been stretched to cover home automation, wearables, health gadgets, urban transport, banking, water, sewerage, grocery logistics, traffic lights, electric power, manufacturing, military operations, big-data analytics and even smart planet environmental monitoring.
So what exactly is not "internet of things" these days? Nothing.
This huge conglomeration of modern capabilities had to be called something. "Internet of things" is a kindly, upbeat term. It could have had a much more sinister name. "The cybernetic consortia for control of property", anyone?
It's that allure of raw power that unites this chaotic clutter of topics. The internet of things is not a revolution in the way the internet once was. It's a power grab. It's a clampdown, a seizure of the formerly unseizable. It's not for rebels. Everything about the internet of things would meet the firm approval of the offshored billionaire landlord of an empty London skyscraper.
Every institutional interest that our fictional landlord might have is strongly favoured by the internet of things. Everything that it does tends to help him. There is nothing to upset him. The internet of things is the contemporary system that put that landlord in remote control of London already -- only much, much more so.
Today's digital elite wants wireless command and control over every tap, switch, lever, cogwheel, traffic light and flush-button on the planet. They're not going to get that, but it's fascinating to see an epic struggle over electronics in which consumers are almost obsolete.
The internet of things has nothing to do with old-fashioned personal computing. It's mass social electronics. It's billion-dollar planetary enterprises -- corporations, smart cities, consortia -- avidly grabbing control of the staples of daily life: water, food, heat, light, shelter, even the parking spaces.
I've been watching the internet of things since before the term was invented. I don't expect any player to "win" this epic struggle. It's a phase. It will last about 15 years, much like the information superhighway did. By the 2040s, we'll be in a post-industrial landscape so utterly transformed that people will forget today's battles.
The strategy's already clear: the internet of things is about billionaire-oligarch geek power. The tactics are clear, too: grab cybernetic control of all old-fashioned, leaky machinery, devices and services; disrupt and disintermediate the previous value chain; eliminate the labour unions and fire the industrial workforce.
Eliminate the middle class, route around national regulators and move all profits to the top of the heap. That's already been happening at a pretty brisk clip, as Britons know better than anybody. Democracy won't stop it.
But something unclear probably will stop it, and that obscurity is what interests me most. The grand internet-of-things scheme will fail for the same ornery human reasons that soured manned spaceflight, nuclear power, Marxism-Leninism and the New World Order. The comic spectacle there will cheer me for many a day.
When you study the multiple players involved, it's clear that, although they see the technical sweetness of this oligarchs' utopia, their heart's not in it. They don't have the Leninist fire in the belly needed to wipe the slate clean, seize every innocent dumb thing, tattoo a barcode on it and chain it inside a physicalised internet.
They all imagine that the internet of things is a bigger version of what they're already doing now. They're all wrong. They all know that its main stumbling blocks to success are protocols, standards, APIs and spectrum allocations. For a genuine, catholic, totalitarian internet of things, all those tech factors would have to mesh perfectly. That won't happen. The stakeholders are at the table with napkins tied around their necks, but it's like watching guests at a dinner party eating off landmines.
The smouldering hulk of Nokia is already at that table, as spectral as Banquo's ghost, and anybody could be next: HP, IBM, Yahoo!, even Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon or Facebook. For all their vast wealth and size, they are inverted pyramids teetering on small cliques of tech pinheads.
Nations who smile on the internet of things don't know that it means to grab their own national things. Consumers who buy internetted things don't know they're instantly someone else's things. The healthy don't know that their self-monitoring hypochondrias will make them sick. The cosy don't know that tomorrow's kitchen will shriek like a car alarm... We just don't know yet. And that's what's good about it.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
