There was a moment during TechCrunch disrupt when I felt the "thunk" of the unevenly-distributed future arriving.
A woman was demonstrating one of the start-up contestants -- GetAround, a service that lets you rent other people's cars for periods of time, say, $5 or $10 an hour.
She walked over to a fancy electric car on display, and putting her cell phone by it, popped open the door.
This wasn't a remote control that was hers, opening a door to a car that was hers.
This was different; this was her opening a stranger's car, with some bit of information beamed into a device in the stranger's car.
I had that same sort of squeamish feeling I had in the "family photo" of everyone at SLCC1 that Philip wanted everyone to be in -- and I ran running from the room. It's funny how you get funny feelings like that...
Thunk.
I really didn't like GetAround, and argued against it on TechCrunch. Why? It's called, geek-style, "peer-to-peer car sharing." Bleah. So the concept is that your car now is broken up into a kind of time share. If someone needs it just for two hours to go downtown, they rent from you. They find you online, pay you online, work out the details online, and pick up your car. The little gizmo inside has the keys locked into it and you open it with your smart phone. Walla.
So, it breaks apart what was once your property, collectivizes that property, and them that collectivization is monetarized by someone who is not you, but the company. (This is why it's like communism). So they take a percentage for keeping this collectivizing and Politburo function going as an online service, and you get paid for that piece of your car's time.
Yeah, I'm fully aware that no one else will describe it that way, no one else will see it that way, and it merely garners laughter about seeing reds under the bed and so on -- but I don't care. Think about it that way, and be more fearful -- because fearing bad things isn't a bad thing, and isn't "FUD" that must be dispelled, but part of the pushing back against the exploitative future that transforms things that are bad into something perhaps more tolerable.
Again, walk it through.
You can browse and find the car you like. Of course, immediately the first thing you see about this system is "governance problems". Supposedly they've fixed the insurance thing (I had to wonder who on earth would agree to insure this strange negligence-prone system, and I have to wonder how it will last). They've fixed other things like breakdown response, I guess. So then you have things like this: the lady who says she will only rent to people age 30 above, and only people who agree never to take her car out in the rain, and if you book it and it rains, your order is cancelled. That sort of stuff that happens when people get their stuff collectivized, but didn't really want it collectivized. The push of the monetarizing of that collectivizing is supposed to help them overcome their reticence.
Among the things I really didn't like about this is the nasty, malicious camraderie that immediately formed in the room when this thing was being demo'd. Oh, they'll stick it to the Herz rent-a-car people. Oh, this will really disrupt the rental car business.
Well, um, why? Why do you "need" to stick it to the rental car industry? It's not like they are failing or unnecessary. It's not like they'd still offer a better deal, because unlike that fussy lady with the rain-phobia and the under-30 heebejeebees, they will provide you a car "just any time" that is a late model and not subject to strange clawbacks that "social network" and "peer-to-peer" can lead to.
It's like the Megabus premise -- "we'll give you a much cheaper bus ride but no bus station, just come to the corner and get right on, and we'll take you to a parking lot in another city for less". Except...when they don't, because they don't have another bus and it's overcrowded. Greyhound feels obliged to lay on another bus if more people show up than fit on one bus. Megabus doesn't.
I don't know why it's "required" that you "disrupt" somebody else's business to succeed, but then, the conference is called TechCrunch Disrupt, see...
But, all of this is just a gateway drug to the Internet of Things. That will be pretty awful stuff, with that same kind of "disruptive" and aggressive collectivization, with you getting something, but the collectivizers not only getting money but, well, a slice of your time and your property that they give away to others. How much will get sliced away, until nothing of yours is really left?
Sounds convenient -- hippie types and geek types without cars or who have a yen to drive a fancier car seem attracted to it. Others don't like the feeling that something isn't exclusively theirs and that they are on some kind of timer without flexibility, and they might not be attracted to it.
The GetAround car is only one of billions of things coming on the Internet of Things, however -- or they're already here.
Remember when Anthony Weiner first lied about the tweet of his crotch shot, that it was something that had somehow been "hacked" or not sent by him? (In a way it's true; it was something sent by his lizard brain.) And he joked about how "soon his toaster would be tweeting." Well, yeah, it's like that!
We saw all this prototyped in Second Life some five years ago. Babbage Linden (Jim Purbrick) was making the Internet of Things inside the world of SL. So what that meant is that every object on a parcel was tagged, every object was interactive, and everything talked. So let's say you put out a flower, and someone comes and touches it, it does something, it records the touch, you write something, it saves a message, it puts it all in a HUD, it records everyone coming and going and interacting, endless things. You could go around clicking on stuff and filling up the dbase.
I'm not sure if it was directly because of this work of Babbage's (he's gone now) or some other Linden, but for a time, the search contained every single thing on a parcel and, its XYZ grid location. So you could look up a store, and home in on the object directly without pawing through loads of stuff rezzing, or materializing into view.
Prior to this Linden experiment (since retired, maybe it was too noisy, too dbase heavy), the Electric Sheep, now pretty much defunct, had an avatar bot called Grid Shepherd (yuk yuk), that Chris devised and ran, and it roamed the grid scraping data -- objects on parcels. It popped their name and location into search, because they were trying to make a better search than the Lindens had.
But then when it was shown on the web, people howled. Their belongings that they had thought only visible to themselves and their friends on their parcels were now in search and being fetched up. Stuff they'd accidently left out for sale like a TV to be undeeded or something to pass for a friend could now be stolen. The fisting bench in their sex dungeon was now showing up in red. Or simply anything that they just didn't want others to be zooming in on -- attractive nuisances. The geeks snorted and chided everyone with the old FUD crap (as they will do when they see the headline of this article) and said that the stuff was open to the naked eye or bot anyway, that nothing was private on the Internet -- you know the drill, we've heard it before.
And -- like Facebook had to later in its day, Electric Sheep had to dial their search back. They insisted that it be "opt-out" with people opting out their parcels or the object. That was unfair; it should have been opt-in. But they made the geeks' typical lament -- "We won't have data for our data base" -- not many people would opt-in, see. I started an avid campaign to ban the bot Grid Shepherd from all rentals; I had protest kiosks all over the place. In the end, they pulled it. The Lindens went on to do the exact same experiment later with the exact same problem with people feeling like they were over-exposed. I mean, seriously, what if "The Internet" had a report about your bedroom lamp, bed, side table, book, medications, alarm clock beaming to it 24/7?
That's what we have in Second Life. People didn't like living with that. But...in that integrated and closed world, it was hard to make it otherwise. Even if something like Grid Shepherd isn't getting this data now, the Lindens are, and some third-party scripters who scrape data in various projects. The thing most people hated the most was scraping of avatar data that would either show alts, or proximity to other avatars they didn't want to be known about, or of course, the IP address.
And snotty geeky protestations that these things were all known; that these things didn't lead to your actual home address; that you had to give up privacy on the Internet -- well, they didn't wash.
Now, there's a lot more I could say about the Internet of Things and will, but for now, I'll just paste in this interchange from ReadWriteWeb-- it's priceless!
They've been plotting this in Second Life for ages (Babbage Linden spent years prototyping it using the virtual world of SL and its scripted objects). Here's the worst thing about all this: the collectivization of property. No longer will property I make or buy be mine, whether intellectual or real. It will part-belong to coders on the Internet who can shut it off if they like, scrape its data, do what they want to with it. There will no longer be "toaster" or "car"; there will be "toaster plus integrative code" and "car plus attachment to Internet of things".
So it's really a very vivid manifestation of the technocommunism I've always talked about. Coders will suddenly essentially "own" everything you have that is interoperable and interactive and you will cede more of your life over to them for the sake of "convenience" or "learning" or "life-saving." Meanwhile, you will not have had a say in the governance of this system.
One of the ways that scientist-ideologues propagandizing this put it over on people is by accentuating the "health benefits" or "life-saving benefits". Why, it will stop air pollution! It will diagnose illness! It will run insulin pumps! Or whatever. And by pumping up these possibly real boons to the concept of IOT, they overlook the horrendous consequences of system lock-ups and network totalitarianism that will occur with things like "your alarm goes off and your coffee pot goes on" -- once it becomes more like this (as an ACLU ad warned): "You can't order that pizza sir because you have reached your recommended caloric intake today but we can recommend a yoghurt shake."
Worst of all, there's the "down" factor that geeks never factor in as not an aberration to systems, but integral to systems. This stuff will always be "down" the way computers are always "down" and frustrating you in stores and banks and such. Only now it will be your car, and not just your coffee pot.
Why are you so afraid of us "coders"? Programmers are just people like you. News flash : most of us don't want to 'own' you or take control of your stuff... we are just trying to live and enjoy our life - and we probably contribute more towards the greater good than many other professions.
It astounds me that you aren't thinking of these sorts of thing in a system that large, and acting as if "rogue programmers" is some kind of exceptional and rare aberration in the system, when in fact, it is part and parcel of the system. Every single day, thousands of times over, systems are hacked, and sometimes monstrously damaged -- $171 million for Sony. That's not an exception; that *is* the nature of the system at this point, and it accelerates and compounds.
And you want...*that*...to be running my toaster...my pace-maker when I'm old...my bicycle...my work station...my store? I mean, you're not thinking this through.
That you would think there is no problem of rogue programmers in the
Internet of things in the day and age when everything from the Pentagon to a dead teen's phone is hacked is truly astonishing. Do you ever think, well, philosophically instead of technically about these
systems?!
And...to even think in terms of this problem as merely about "rogues". The problem is that even good guys will own too much of your property and your life, your objects and your time, and they will inevitably acquire too much power with it -- just like the maker of computer chips have too much power over many objects in our lives already.
The making of the Internet of Things inevitably involves collectivizing private property -- and we've already seen what a devastation that has been in digital form regarding the music, book, and media industry -- and even government (wikification of files in the US government preceded WikiLeaks' exploitation of that wikification.) So now you want to let that loose on real stuff? On things in the world? On things in my house?! Each toaster, diabetic pump, battle plushie toy will become less of mine, and more of the Internet's -- and the coders and the companies.
We've already lived through the prototype of the Internet of Things made in Second Life. There were huge privacy, governance, scaling, etc. issues all over the place. In fact, each time Linden Lab would try to make a full-scale Internet of things within their world, or a third-party would, they'd end up retiring it because of the complexities.
See, people like you scorn and sneer at Second Life because you don't realize that it's a little petri dish for social media platforms and devices that is forecasting the future and conditioning people to deal with it...
As for aditya, hell, I couldn't script this scenario better myself. I express legitimate concerns, and what does this coder telling me the usual silly mantra about how I'm filled with FUD do?!
He tells us that -- ominously -- the worst sort of hubris, without any sense of irony or accountability..."we probably contribute more towards the greater good than many other professions."
see the problem?
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