Sure, it sounds cool -- Google Earth is rendering the world in 3D and making Google Earth maps more interesting! Just like Second Life! Virtualizing the world! Snowcrash!
Of course, for those of us who have seen Second Life, the 3-D interactive virtual online world, for 7 or 8 years, it's not *that* cool because you can't navigate it with an avatar, interact with others, or build things yourself. But that will come -- remember Google's Lively? That was their false start -- but experimental prototype -- for how you do social and online interactivity in a virtual world.
Now, if they had all kinds of cool apps built on top of Google's 3d maps, what's not to like? Wouldn't that be grand?
Oh, no. Not at all. Because this is now the Internet of Things and the Collectivization of Everything as I have been trying to explain, and warn people about, for years.
Let me try to walk you through the implications of the Collectivization of Everything, like some vast, super technocommunism.
Let's say you are a real-estate developer. You invest capital in the building of a real-life bricks-and-mortar building. You fill it then with people who rent apartments. You make a profit, you pay back your investment, it's your income-earning property. It's all good.
And let's say you're a tenant -- you rent or you even buy a co-op in this building and it becomes your leased property or your owned co-op.
Now, let's fast forward to the world of the future, that is coming faster than you realize. In this future, Google has taken your landlord's property, and your property, and virtualized it. That means you now use that represented image of your building to do various things -- perhaps control the heating and air conditioning and find all kinds of energy savings (that's how this collectivization is often sold -- as something "green"). You might control security with the virtualized building -- the apps talk to it. You might even control the view -- painting a sunset on your window to view as you'd like to see it. The virtualized building might do lots of other things -- it might pop up your toast in the morning by telling your toaster when to pop up. It could tell you when the laundromat is empty and how many dryers are left (there are already laundry rooms online that do this). The building might accept your dry cleaning delivery and message you when it is ready. And so on. You get the idea.
So once that virtual building is now humming with hundreds of people running hundreds of apps off it, where is the value of that building? Sure, the bricks-and-mortar building that physically shields you from the rain has some value, and the windows that physically look out on a real-life view that might have value.
But what if we are in the future, and the building renders your furniture; it's a holodeck, a kind of platform that can display any scene or items you wish -- perhaps you want an Asian home with low tables and tatami mats and rice bowls and chop sticks -- they rez up (i.e. resolve, or render into view); maybe you prefer Southwest and a Navaho rug appears on the wall and a rawhide couch. The SmartBuilding does this with your smart phone.
Maybe you're poor and only on the $40/mo SmartBuilding plan, that will only give you a prettier view to look at than the alleyway, and signal a robot to pick up the garbage -- but even the low-end plan still has maps on the wall to tell you where traffic is stuck on the way to work, and temperature adjustment and a visitor list. Imagine if your home worked like a Second Life home with a visitor list! If your teenagers had a party, you'd type "say list" and you'd get the list of 30 kids who jammed into your apartment while you were gone!
Second Life prepares us for this world in which we own nothing because really, the asset server owns everything and the platform providers own everything. You have a kind of secondary intellectual property right to what you create using the tools and platform and affordances, but at any time "for no reason or any reason" you can be ejected and lose your property. That's what happens in virtuality.
And that's what could happen in virtualized real life.
The value of the building shifts from the land (land is always the first thing to be devalued and collectivized in any form of communism), and shifts to the interactions of the hundreds of app interacting on the building. Who *really* owns the building then? The old-school landlord who merely has an old deed to the physical plant?
Or the new apps-lord who controls your entire experience in that building, from whom you may have purchased your SmartBuilding apps in the App Store, and who now knows everything about you -- what you ate for breakfast and how many kids came over while you were gone.
To create this experience, that building must be virtualized -- and so must you, but that's a separate story. My main point now is to point out how virtualizing and creating interactive apps then essentially collectivizes all property. If your pace-maker depends on a pace-maker manufacturer and a surgeon, who owns your heart? It's your heart, but it won't work without the pace-maker, the manufacturer and the surgeon.
If your home now is layers and layers of applications above the actual drywall and "something else" -- something that coders and the company Google and its partners control
It would be far, far better if the virtualization of the world were not in the hands of one powerful company, creating the interface of the future upon which we will all depend, and all our apps.
It would better if lots of different companies owned this virtualization, and governments regulated them. Oh, but that would, um, "kill innovation", right? Mustn't have that!
Google wants badly to own the whole virtualization space because who owns the virtualization owns the world -- the virtualized image that all apps will interact with, just like so many things interact now with Google maps.
When you are only a dot on a mobile phone screen on a flat map, it's hard to care vary much that only one company made the map and your experiences with that map.
But trust me, it will be very, very different when you are dealing with a 3-d navigable virtual world that begins to control things like heat and light and furniture placement and security -- the space you inhabit. VERY different.
When Google rolls out more of its 3-d virtualized world, everyone will keep oohing and ahhing. They won't notice that now City Hall is a virtualized building. Now Beth Israel Hospital is a virtualized building. Now Public School No. 40 is a virtualized building. Now Central Park is a virtualized park, and Fifth Avenue is a virtualized street and the Empire State Building is a virtualized tourist attraction and office building. And this entire virtualization has wires that lead to only one place, or maybe two or three (Apple, Layar, whatever).
But it is no longer yours our ours as a civic body, as "the public". Google controlling light or heat or security is not a utility like Con Ed; it's the Borg.
There are many fearsome aspects to this collectivized future which will inevitably become a dystopia, and that's not about "fear, uncertainty and doubt" regarding technology, it's about "fear, uncertainty and doubt" about *technologists* who tend to be greedy, selfish, heedless to user concerns, arrogant, and sometimes loony about their worldviews imposed on the rest of us.
But it's not just the control by this new platform provider of virtuality that is the problem; it's the devaluation of real property. It's the virtualization of real estate which inevitably forces it to tend to $0 cost because you can always print one more. To be sure, it must be tethered to servers -- or in the case of real-life buildings' virtualization, tethered to this real buildings, which aren't so easy to "copy". But the cost will go down. That, of course, is the idea -- technologists hate arbitrage except when they can benefit from it.
Google is in a dead-heat race with Apple and possibly others to collectivize the world in this fashion, and small wonder because, as I said, who controls the virtualization, controls the world.
What can be done? Well, it won't be possible to trap or make a citizen's arrest of every backpacking Googler out collectivizing your property right now, although it would be good if some civic activism were exercized peacefully on this matter, given its profound ramifications.
If you're a state and you think that you will be able to arrest this Escape to the Virtual World when it goes arry and causes world-wide economic convulsions -- by taking over the electrical grid, arresting Google executives and physically pulling the plug until they do it over and stop devaluing property, guess again. Your heart, your pace-maker, the pace-maker manufacturer, and the physicians -- they are all at Google now.
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