The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things (2 page)

The Internet of Things has a slight utopian tinge, but mostly it has a certain melancholy, even grim air. It’s not some psychedelic exploration of the cyberspace of the digital. It’s material labour, it’s hardware, it’s a hard slog. The Internet of Things has already been tried once, and it failed.

The original, failed “Internet of Things” was based around the invention of the Radio Frequency ID chip. Its grand champions were Wal-Mart and the Pentagon. The great American retailer of Chinese-made goods and the US military-industrial complex united to impose electronic barcodes on the host of “things” they bought or commissioned.

This premature, imperial effort was stunted for a number of painful, complex reasons. The main failure was political. The RFID Internet of Things failed through the overweening arrogance of Wal-Mart and the Pentagon in thinking they could get away with it, simply impose a technology by fiat. They thought that they could paste little interactive radios onto everything that mattered, and that no other power-player would catch onto their hack of the infrastructure.

The suspicious Chinese immediately said no, which blew away much of Wal-Mart’s interest. The Pentagon’s electronic presence in world manufacturing and shipping was about as popular as the NSA’s is right now. The Pentagon is the ultimate sucker consumer: they’ll blindly pay any sum for anything, and its military contractors like the process kept that way.

As for the general populace, there seemed to be nothing for them in the elite and secretive world of electronic barcodes. Whenever mere civilians expressed some interest in RFID and “auto-identification”, they were insulted, dismissed or fed a pack of childish lies by hired PR firms. The first Internet of Things revolution was hugely ambitious, arrogant, intrusive, fundamentally dishonest, and a failure; so much so that the new IoT movement carries on as if there had never been one at all.

Despite selling memory by the bucket-full, the computer business has a very short memory, and the new IoT is back a mere decade later – this time with bigger coalitions, more political support, and radically upgraded hardware and software. But it’s still an epic struggle, and it could still fail again.

It’s clear that today’s Internet of Things isn’t just a techno-revolution; it’s a reaction. It’s not by and for the oppressed, the disruptive, the hungry, the have-nots, the start-ups, the shut-outs. The Internet of Things is very much in the interests of certain groups who can already count themselves among the haves. Many of its architects are clearly inspired by fear – they’re powerful, but afraid to lose the things they already command and control. By intensifying their command and control systems, they hope to maintain their hold. 

The Chinese are happy to call their own strange activities the Internet of Things too. If it ever exists, the Chinese IoT will likely be much better known as the “Firewalled Internet of Heavily Censored Things with Chinese Characteristics”. The Chinese know that this blanket of techno-affirmation, the Internet of Things, requires no Western shibboleths of civil rights or individual autonomy. It’ll work for them just as well as it works for anybody, and maybe better.

It gets worse. Due to its louche, unruly internet heritage, the Internet of Things is already infested with spies and thieves. They’re not minor threats either, but colossally powerful, nationally financed spies, along with persistent, vicious, clever, socially networked, high-tech thieves.

The internet, although beloved by all including Al Qaeda, went straight from barbarism to decadence without ever encountering a civilisation. It was never utopian, although it was free. Its lawyers are patent trolls. Its political parties are flash mobs in the streets. Its wealthy are nouveau-rich cranks. Its poor are a tidal wave of Third World young people. The Twenty-Teens are quite an interesting cultural period.

The Internet of Things makes no attempt to redress, or even address, the many real problems that the internet brought to the world. On the contrary, it’s an international effort to bring everything that wasn’t internet within the purview of the techno-elite that currently dominates the internet.

What will that really be like? Who benefits? Where do the rewards go? Who loses? If the reader looks objectively at places in the world that are already dominated by the techno-elite of the internet, the reader may well feel concern. California, for instance, never lacks for charm. However, California is suffering a desperate climate-change drought. Its state politics in Sacramento are dysfunctional, its urban affairs almost unmanageable. The divisions between its mega-ultra-wealthy and its poor are some of the worst in the world.

Californians are superb at hardware and software, but if the reader asks if this skill of theirs translates well into the everyday management of political power, well, it doesn’t. Modern California is not a peaceful, just or well-organised place. California never has been like that, and those who aspire to understand and promote the Internet of Things should understand that California is a golden realm that is beset with earthquake, riot, tsunamis, cult religions, volcanoes… Well, it’s California, basically.

Both Google and Apple are ingenious, powerful, Californian enterprises. They’re also Napoleonic empires run by very small elites of cranky eccentrics. They may “think different”, they may “not be evil”, but the reader didn’t elect them. The activities in their ever-growing clouds and big-data silos are opaque to the reader, and they like it that way. Even though they have elaborate and well-designed relationship-management software, even though they are huge, profoundly popular social-media machines, they are not the reader’s bosom friends. Google and Apple don’t even much like each another these days.

Ask Nokia what it’s like to fall afoul of Google and Apple. Before the smartphone arrived, Nokia was the global queen of cell phones. Apple hit them high, Google hit them low, and Nokia lost a planetary empire in a matter of months. Nokia’s ruins were deftly vacuumed up by Microsoft at fire-sale prices.

Microsoft is, as everyone knows, even worse than Google and Apple. From Seattle rather than Silicon Valley, Microsoft seems to actively enjoy the resentment of its user-base and the enmity of national governments. If the reader is enamoured with the IoT, the reader should think hard about the implications of a Microsoft kitchen. Or a Microsoft car. Or, as London currently has, a Microsoft Internet of Things subway system.

Amazon is underestimated, because its fantastic logistics enterprise actually does resemble an authentic “internet” that packages and ships a host of “things”. But imagine Amazon subways. The Internet of Things is not a world where Amazon literally buys, owns and manages your subways. Instead, it’s a world where Amazon’s skills at logistics have crushed the subway unions and are managing the riders as if they were packets in one of Amazon’s gigantic robotic distribution plants.

That’s a good idea of what an Internet of Things looks like and feels like. It’s not a novelty fridge that talks, it’s a state of daily affairs that is truly strange and different. It needs to be justly compared to our actual, existent state of affairs. One can’t complain about the vistas of the Internet of Things without comparing it to what we have today, in broad daylight.

Google smart cars, for instance, are very Internet of Things – self-driving broadband robots using meticulously mapped highway databases generated and maintained with Big Data. Modern highways, without self-driving cars, are slaughterhouses. They kill more people than major wars.

“Smart City” parking means a bonanza in traffic fines for cities. That is why city managers really like the idea. It also means that legal parking becomes more efficient and children breathe less smog. It’s not the newness of the Internet of Things that is bad. Its good and bad aspects are ethical, legal, social, political. They’re human.

None of the many things that the Internet of Things seeks to transform have ever been particularly good for us. The power grids have already wrecked the climate, and are fast making it even worse. The leaky water pipes damage rivers, lakes and streams. The highways kill us. The attention of the overworked police is distributed through cities in haphazard, unfair, even ludicrous ways.

The Internet of Things doesn’t politically reform the failings of the past – in fact, it doesn’t even care about the failings, it simply wants those new forms of digitised command and control. The IoT isn’t a social reform movement, or a source of progress, any more than Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft are reformers seeking progress. It’s better in some ways, worse in others; mostly, it’s just different. The clues to that future culture are already here.

These are hard times. It would be a wondrous thing if some supreme genius could bend the enormous power of the Internet of Things toward, say, the creation of a just and sustainable economy. Or toward liberty, equality, fraternity, whatever social purpose the reader finds laudable.

However, a movement that wanted to do that would somehow have to seize control over the means of internetting things.

That movement would need what the Big Five already have: a political operating system, some dedicated political way to sell cultural material (music, movies, books, software), political tools for productivity, a politicised advertising business, some means of accessing the internet that is under political control (tablets, smartphones, phablets), a political search engine, a social network that was actually a political party, a political “payment solution”, a political “cloud” capability and, most of all, political control over wireless spectrum, cables and data-transfer protocols.

Rather than being a “government”, that state would have to become a “platform”. I could be wrong, but this prospect doesn’t seem likely to me, even in an authoritarian state. Nations are patriotic, they’re about land, language and a people’s aspirations, while railroads and electrical networks and fibre-optic cables aren’t patriotic, they’re infrastructure. The internet’s a generation old, but we have no internet nations, or provinces, or even a fully digital city council of a modest village. States have functions that aren’t supplied by infrastructure, even of the digital kind.

So the Internet of Things is not a coup d’état, it’s not Orwellian totalitarianism at work. However, it’s definitely about power, and also wealth and fame. Making your refrigerator talk to your toaster is a senseless trick that any competent hacker can achieve today for twenty bucks. It is trivial, but the Internet of Things is epic. It will entail a struggle – not
for
the Internet of Things, or against it – but inside it, as it both grows and fails.

2.

In this part of my essay, I want to name and number some of the players, and describe what they want and how they work. If the Internet of Things spreads widely, the way these people behave today is the key to the way most everybody else will be compelled to behave. They’ll be society’s leading actors, the exemplars of progress.

So let’s start with the champions of the Internet of Things, the Big Five: Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook. One might think that since they’re all American corporations, and all on the West Coast, they would see their common institutional interests and unite as some kind of trust. This was certainly true of large American corporations in the past: oil companies, steel companies, railroads, the telephone industry, aerospace companies and so on. 

All these traditional American industries realised that competition was tiresome. They were constantly scheming to unite in continental-scale monopoly conglomerates that could simply buy Congress, and then live off the fat of the land.

Amazon, Facebook, Google, Apple and Microsoft almost try that, in some ways. Google, Facebook and Microsoft are especially good at burning off the competitive landscape by acquiring smaller companies that might pose a threat. Microsoft, and increasingly Google, are often decried as monopolies.

But they don’t unite as a vast, conglomerate trust: the terrifying GAFAM Inc. They can’t become a monopoly because they don’t directly compete. The reader rarely sees any direct price war between Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft. They don’t bother to “compete” because their real strategy is to “disrupt”.

Each of the Big Five has a theological conviction that the other Four have it all wrong. For each of the Big Five, the other four are not the competition, but something like heretics. Rather than “competing” – becoming more efficient at doing something specific – “disruption” involves a public proof that the rival shouldn’t even exist. The rival’s services are meaningless; they should, properly, be mere commodities, or even given away for free.

Microsoft, one of the oldest and long the richest, was the pioneer of this practice. Having seized control of the desktops of both business and governance, Microsoft carried out the “embrace and extend” practice of copying software innovations by other companies, folding them into their almighty operating system, and giving them away as mere features of Windows OS. Microsoft once even dared to appropriate the entire internet as a minor area of the Windows screen that they called the Internet Zone.

Microsoft was notorious for its colourful practice of “knifing the baby” and “stealing the oxygen”. It’s important to realise that this isn’t capitalist competition as described in economics textbooks. Life in the Internet of Things isn’t about buying a smart toaster and keeping it. No: it’s a silent, semi-covert, digitally interactive struggle of baby-knifing and oxygen-stealing.

“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.

It commonly takes money to knife the baby and steal the oxygen. And Microsoft had vast hoards of loose cash from the supremely valuable, and very complicated, Microsoft Windows operating system. By tactically giving away free dead babies, they were strategically protecting their core asset, Windows. Windows was commonly stolen by pirates but Windows had no real peer competitor.

Once, Apple had been in near-direct competition with Microsoft for command of the desktop. Apple was beaten to an apple-pulp. Apple wisely decided to “disrupt” instead of wasting time and energy directly competing with the Blue Monster of Redmond.

Apple therefore created new, networked alliances that allowed it to sell music, creating a monetisable, digital entertainment retail system instead of some mere desktop operating system. Apple even removed the unfortunate legacy term “computer” from its name and created a comprehensive data-system of music players and smartphones.

Microsoft attempted to directly compete in these arenas, and it still does, but failed through lack of the necessary negotiation and design skills. The music industry despised Microsoft’s Zune media players. The phone service providers loathe Microsoft Windows phones because they know that Skype, which is included in Microsoft’s phones, is a brazen attempt to “steal their oxygen” by removing their toll revenues.

The phone service providers therefore engaged in a quiet conspiracy to crush Windows on phones, while beaming in joy at the sudden advent of Google Android. The reader may note that he loves Skype and is willing to pay for it, but that’s not the consumer’s decision. The reader may wonder why Microsoft doesn’t sue all the world’s phone service providers and force them to install Skype. That’s because the legal approach doesn’t work either.

Google sells network surveillance and collective intelligence. This is Google’s actual, profitable, monetisable product. “Search” is merely Google’s front end, a brilliant facade to encourage free interaction by the public. People are not Google’s “customers” or even Google’s “users”, but its feudal livestock.

Industry observers marvelled at Google’s astral lack of business sense when Google gave away a functional, open-source smartphone operating system. Not only did Google make no money from this action – in order to defend the Android OS, Google bought and promptly destroyed a perfectly functional American electronic hardware manufacturing company, Motorola. Motorola was burned at the stake as the price of maintaining Android. However, this Byzantine manoeuvre was worth it, because Nokia went down in flames, Microsoft was defeated, Apple was belittled and Android is now the planet’s dominant smartphone system.

That is the cultural logic of the Internet of Things. The manoeuvre I described in the paragraph above may seem weird and treacherous, more like writing software code than balancing a chequebook. But that’s how it is, and Google is not some obscure or recherché enterprise, Google is present most everywhere.

Google doesn’t fully control Android, but they’ve stolen the oxygen for everybody else. They don’t sell Android, either, but they do sell people’s intimate use of it. People who might once have bought a newspaper to beguile themselves now look at their Android. Magazine readers look at their Androids, too. Amazingly, even manufacturers of chewing gum have taken a hit, because nervously chewing while staring out the window has become nervously tapping while staring into a handheld screen. “In the Internet of Things world, people chew less gum.” It’s a futuristic quirk of social change, but there will be hosts of those.

One might note that Google never showed any overt hostility towards newspapers or magazines. Instead, Google removed the attention of the readers, and the money of the advertisers followed.

The Android “ecosystem” is not intended just for smartphones. It’s also ideal for many wireless Internet of Things functions. Google likes wearables and radio-controlled robots. These are aspects of their enterprise where one can leave the desk and run around in the real world of “things”.

Google recently caused frantic interest through its three billion dollar purchase of a thermostat. But of course Google doesn’t want the thermostat as a mere consumer-electronics device – it wants to amass and analyse the records of millions of interactions with millions of thermostats. That becomes a stack of Big Data that Google can bundle and sell to interested parties. Google spent the money, not because the Nest thermostat is worth it, but to demonstrate its determined willingness to frighten off possible rivals from the home-automation space. Google did that to prove its own intent to dominate there.

Facebook is a social network of a billion people, and counting. Google would not mind that feat, except for the fact that Facebook, by design, does not reveal its web content to Google. Since Google indexes web content, data-mines that, and sells it, Google rightly took this bland refusal by Facebook as a hostile act. Google created Google+ as its effort to steal Facebook’s oxygen, but it turns out that social networks aren’t commodities. Their “architectures of participation” make them something more like political parties. People join them for reasons of temperament, not for the elegance of their software-based rules of order.

Google will nevertheless continue to run Google+, even at a grinding financial loss if necessary, merely to slow the growth of the blinding lump that is Facebook. Microsoft, for its part, will cheerfully run the search engine Bing at a loss, for the sake of hampering Google’s freedom of action.

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. Almost every Internet of Things player has a rhetorical IoT spin of this kind: Cisco is the “Internet of Everything”, GE is the “Industrial Internet”, and so on. Every one of these careful branding distinctions is a fault-line in the IoT enterprise.

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. I believe this is the native activity of the Internet of Things, and I like to call it “wrangling”. Wrangling is what the Internet of Things is like as a lived, mid 21st-century experience. 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.

The Big Five wrangle with one another, and anybody who participates in their worldview also has to wrangle more or less. Wrangling can be petty, but it can also be gallant, grand and even legendary. Consider the famous farewell paper letter from Bill Gates that Steve Jobs kept by his deathbed. Why a personal paper letter, between the two great digital entrepreneurs? Wouldn’t an email do, or maybe a YouTube video?

But of course it was deliberately a paper letter, and when its existence was revealed, the paper letter was immediately understood by the public as an epic gesture, a larger-than-life act of courtly gallantry between the secular saint of “Think different” and the world’s most generous philanthropist. That was an imperial moment of grandeur, carried out far above the wrangling, sweaty internet masses of a million Apple fanboys flaming Microsoft, and vice versa.

Wrangling is not about cash, nor does it win public office. It’s not market bargaining or political debate. At its heart, and it has one, wrangling is the palace intrigue of a network society’s technocratic elite. True, imperious wrangling needs the otherworldly, devil-may-care air of the hacker aristocrat; it aspires to the insanely great. It’s like a 30-year-old Zuckerberg bestowing vast sums on a symbolic virtual-reality gizmo, merely to show that the young prince is not to be trifled with in his march to futurity. It’s about the maestros of Google bidding for the corpse of Nortel Networks by superbly offering a billion dollars times the number Pi, 3.14159.

These wrangles among the Big Five have the obscure but intense air of honour struggles among great aristocratic dynasties. They’re feuds, intrigues, all about prestige and reputation. They’re not about the miserable opinions of the public, of course – who cares about those? They’re mostly about their standing in each other’s eyes.

The classic wrangle is to give away, to bestow, in a lordly fashion, what the other guy most prizes in life. This doesn’t compete with him on the regulated playing field of capitalism. No, it disrespects him. It states that what he values most is contemptible to you. Whatever he sells is something that you can supply with ease, for nothing, while properly busy elsewhere.

That act is a “disruption”. All the Big Five ache to disrupt one another, to disrupt intensely, until their rivals vanish from the map without a trace. However, by nature all aristocrats also share a class interest; they may joust incessantly but they don’t bluntly murder each other in total war and sow the fields with salt. They have diplomatic protocols.

The Internet of Things is festooned with protocols. It is cracked and riddled with them from top to bottom. Protocol number one, of course, is the imperial namesake: the beloved Internet Protocol, TCP/IP. The internet, through a disruption, gave away for nothing what the great analogue phone companies used to sell: planetary access. The protocol of the Internet of Things is the aristocratic code of the IoT hacker-lords.

However, well before the imperial triumph of the internet, there were a lot of lesser networks, using other protocols. The Internet of Things would love to be the planet’s one-and-only form of protocol, but it’s probably not possible for reasons of physics. It’s become pretty easy for a computer to talk to a computer with Internet Protocol. And smartphones can talk to smartphones, too (although telephone companies are a proud and ancient people who hate and fear the internet and seethe with vengeful rebellion). Even your fridge can more-or-less use the Internet Protocol, because it has an electrical wire plugged straight into the wall.

However, things with the Internet Protocol always starve for electrical power. The Internet Protocol needs electrons, voltage. Most “things” don’t have any wall plugs, and batteries are expensive impositions with short lives.

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.