The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things

The real problem with this scenario is that the reader thinks he’s the hero of the story.

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.

It follows that most “things” are too humble and common to use the elaborate, aristocratic protocol of the Internet of Things. Lesser things have come to make do with alien protocols that use less electricity, such as MQTT, XMPP and DDS. These unruly “things” are like Balkan peasants muttering Albanian and Croat when their lords and masters want them to speak classical Latin

The Internet of Things is not a monolithic, one-party surveillance empire. Instead, it amends the old-fashioned internet slogan of “Information wants to be free” to a new, more politically pointed, “Information about you wants to be free to us”

Voting isn’t enough; suing isn’t enough; buying isn’t enough; even using isn’t enough. Instead, there’s this other, emergent form of networked struggle

I don’t recite these colourful and spiteful quarrels merely to scold the participants. They’re not small struggles, they’re epic struggles, although they differ radically from struggles of a normal political or economic kind, with cash, or votes, or lawsuits

Microsoft calls its efforts at the Internet of Things “The Internet of Your Things”. That slogan was deliberately chosen to insinuate that Google’s Internet of Things is, in fact, a sinister mass of Google’s things

“Knifing the baby” means deliberately appropriating the work of start-ups before they can become profitable businesses. “Stealing the oxygen” means seeing to it that markets don’t even exist – that no cash exchanges hands, while that formerly profitable activity is carried out on a computer you control

The Internet of Things doesn’t want to electrify or automate because that work, for better or worse, is mostly done now. Basically, it wants to “electronically automate through digital surveillance by wireless broadband

People never voted to become electrical or automated. Those processes came from a rough consensus among the political and managerial classes of the developed nations: “we must electrify, we must automate