straight to the source—some of
these entities have their own Twitter
accounts. By 2015, according to Cisco, some
25 billion devices will be connected to the
Internet. Look around and you’ll see them:
computers, smartphones, cameras, routers,
televisions, MP3 players. Soon, even the
most mundane objects—watches, say, or
wallets—will have an Internet connection.
Alreadywehave the “quantified self” trend,
in which people keep tabs on their fitness
data viawearable sensors. And let’s not for-
get the Japanese, pioneers of smart toilets,
which know when they’ve been used and
can share that valuable data with people
who are seriously into ... tracking.
Songdo International Business District,
a $40 billion redevelopment project on
the Incheon waterfront in South Korea,
is a model for where all of this is headed.
When it’s completed in 2015, everything in
the newdistrictwill bewired together and
connected to the Internet, yielding total
technological integration. Street lampswill
react to the number of people walking by.
The city’shouses and the stuffwithin them
will be hooked up to the information grid.
Kids will wear tracking bracelets.
Songdo, as ambitious as it may sound,
isn’t so different from the world you and
I occupy at present. It’s become com-
monplace to have objects communicate
with other objects—CCTV cameras and
traffic signals, GPS devices and a Facebook
server—but we’re also getting used to
having objects communicate with us. The
digital theorist Tom Coates, for example,
has hooked his house up to Twi er, which
tweets at @houseofcoates. “It’s quite dark
in the Si ing Room,” the house recently
posted. “I’m going to turn the light on.” At
around the same time, London’s Tower
Bridge (@twrbrdg_itself) tweeted: “I am
closing after the SB Gladys has passed
BRIGHT IDEAS
||
TECH
NOVEMBER CROSSWORD ANSWERS
downstream.” There’s something eerie
about such messages. It’s easy to imagine
Coates’ house twittering away for years
a er an apocalyptic event.
The game-changing thing about all of
this is that our interconnectedmicrowaves
and wristbands aren’t only communicat-
ing; they’re busily generating data, and all
of that data is being stored on our hard
drives, or by the services we use or by the
National SecurityAgency. Youare nowone
of the zillion points of data that make up
the Internet. Old news, youmight say. But
this is different—because you are publish-
ing not by blogging or tweeting or poking,
but by doing stuff in real life. Taking
food out of your Internet-enabled fridge
and putting it in your Internet-enabled
blender, adjusting your Internet-enabled
thermostat, sitting on your Internet-
enabled commode. We have met the
coffeepot, and it is us.
As you generate more and more data,
meanwhile, there will be more and more
services on hand to feed your most inti-
mate information into the cloud, indexing
you and your things in the same way that
Google indexes
The New York Times
, then
giving all that data back to you in the form
of helpful advice (“Time to feed the baby!”),
or even a helping hand (calling 911 in the
event of a diabetic coma), before sorting
and storing the details of your existence
for the convenience of anybody else who
wants to access them.
You could say, in fact, that we are not
so much being connected to the Internet
as being absorbed by it. Whether jogging,
eating, sleeping or walking around, your
average human is on the cusp of becoming
a movable database—a cluster of servers,
all pinging and chatting, producing and
logging information. If it carries on like
this, before longwewill all amount to li le
Internet companies.
Not everyone, of course, is enamored of
all this. According to the trend watchers,
more and more people are going “off the
grid,” not only in terms of their physical
location (moving to a log cabin in Alaska)
but in terms of limiting their exposure to
the ever-watchful eye of the Internet. You
can readabout thesepeopleonoff-grid.net.
In fact, you can track and contact themvia
the site’s interactive map.
PAUL FORD,
a New York City–based writer
and computer programmer, recently received
an instant message from his socks. Follow
him on Twitter at
@ftrain.
68
NOVEMBER 2013
•
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