The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things by Bruce Sterling

Author:Bruce Sterling [Sterling, Bruce]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9785906264305
Publisher: Strelka Press
Published: 2014-08-31T20:00:00+00:00

3.

This last part of my essay is about the players in the Internet of Things who don’t care much for power or wealth. They like social influence, they like fame, because they are the IoT culturati.

Since these cultural actors don’t much care for material goods and show little interest in conventional political power, this third contingent might be seen as rebels of a sort – possibly even an Internet-of-Things “counterculture”. But that’s not so. If they “counter” any culture, it’s the cultural values left over from before the Internet of Things. Within the Internet of Things they’re a cultural avant-garde.

Although these figures often talk politically, they don’t genuinely argue or debate. As aboriginal denizens of a network society, what they really like is wrangling. They are the pure-play wranglers – when given standard forms of power or money, they devote it to more wrangling; wrangling for the sake of wrangling; wrangling as their way of life.

Some of them enjoy the fame and esteem that successful wrangling can bring, but others are quieter. The quietest possible form of wrangling is composing software code. This means wrangling not directly with other human beings but with the infrastructure of code. This activity supplies most of the satisfactions of triumphant cleverness, without the pangs and hazards inherent in human relations.

If this semi-electronic sociality was a minority taste, there wouldn’t be a billion people on Facebook. However, there are. The cultural ambition of the IoT is to make wrangling the dominant form of world culture. They are cultural imperialists in this way: all previous forms of human culture must be reframed in terms of the wrangler hack. Forms of culture that can’t go there do not matter.

Let’s imagine that – through some economic miracle of zero-margin production, let’s say – people had guaranteed annual incomes, nutritious food and social housing. It’s easy to see that wrangling on networks would become our civilisation’s dominant human activity. People would websurf, or rather electronically socialise, all day, every day.

This wouldn’t mean “lazy idleness” of any kind, as peasants used to fear when they couldn’t get the crops in. It would mean intense palace intrigue, an endless jostling for public esteem and self-actualisation. That’s what the people in this third category are interested in doing. They like fame and glory, they like being seen and heard, they like making a difference. They would like to see a society arranged so that this is all they ever have to do.

I enjoy the company of people of this kind, being by temperament one of them myself, but they are problematic. The late Steve Jobs was the Napoleon of this tribe. Steve Jobs was intensely anti-materialistic – Jobs could scarcely abide to have a possession around him. Jobs didn’t care for wealth either, until he realised that he could upset the status quo by seizing a well-nigh infinite amount of cash.

Never once did Jobs have the prudent habits of a proper steward of great fortune. Jobs was a mogul, a titan, cruel to his intimates, exploitative to those he employed.

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