Who says that sf writers can't predict the future? Science fiction icon Bruce Sterling dropped his rich, twisted eloquence on both the star-struck and the skeptical at O'Reilly Etech:
Bar codes took the past 30 years to permeate society. Sterling believes that 30 years from today, we will wake up to an Internet of things, and explores this in a new book called Shaping Things. Today, we still debate the meaning of an 'Internet of things.'
Using buzzwords like 'Web 2.0' has some advantages. You can throw out words like 'Flickr,' and
people grasp a loose bag of concepts. People seek grab bags so that concepts can be added in. At the same time, Sterling recommends against freezing
language too early. It's good to keep ideas vague rather than introduce
prejudices via closed semantics.
Sterling posits that it's a bad habit to refer to computers as thinking machines.
This metaphor harms the development of computers. Google is a
search engine, a linking, ranking, and sorting machine - which is not glamorous
or philosophically crucial. But do we really want an AI that
can talk to us like Alan Turing's disembodied head? Or would we rather
have the fast, efficient response of Google, which was created by a
couple of grad students? What works? What matters?
As Sterling says, it's words that have misled us. Language is of consequence. When Sterling tries to describe an Internet of things, he is limited by the realities of mass computing, which aren't addressed by traditional computer science. Laptops, media players, and camera phones serve people as they physically move around the world. Content is now generated by the consumer. This is all part of a new, socio-techno phenomenon.
What's a "spime?" These are classes of objects trackable in space and time: Interactive chips that identify you, what you like, and what you do. Geolocation systems. Rapid object prototyping and digital manufacture. Spimes include not only an actual item, but also the cloud of data around it. The word spime is growing as a theory object, a concept that is both gathering attention and creating trackable trails of attention.
Why do we need new semantics for these concepts? They are material substantiations of an immaterial system; they begin as data or virtual objects, and become actual objects later. Why do we want to do this? So that we can interact with these objects across their entire existence, and so that items can be both more simple and more immediate.
We no longer inventory our possessions inside our heads. Instead, it's done beneath our radar by a host of machines. Now, Sterling has both an Internet of things and a search engine of things. He doesn't look for his shoes in the morning, he Googles them.
Real generational changes are affecting the Web. Sterling believes that Web 2.0 is just trying to capture social and cultural changes, and that the theory object is just a hack for English majors like me. Thing-links are unique identifiers for physical objects (and that brings us back to bar codes again.) In technology, the opposite of hype is not the truth - the opposite is argot. Argot is a cult language with no traction outside of the geek clique; it would take more people than belong to the geek clique to sustain argot as a vernacular.
Old objects are a primordial soup of passive thingness. Spimes will be like blogs that emit objects; they will begin and end as data. And soon, babies must be named so that they can be tagged, ranked, searched, and sorted.
Tags: christine herron christine.net space jockeys technology etech o'reilly spime bruce sterling
