The Internet of Stuff

We now have an internet of stuff, at the heart of which are the distribution and fulfillment centers that have been replacing farmland and former broadcast transmitter sites near highways and airports everywhere. (The one above straddles I-65 in Whitestown, Indiana, northwest of Indianapolis.)

In The Rise of the Stupid Network, which he wrote in 1997, David Isenberg explained that the Internet’s design was stupid and smart at the ends: you, me, and the websites and services of the world. This would prove to create what David Weinberger and I six years later called the World of Ends.

Of course, Internet routing isn’t stupid. It’s just smart about routing—and as little else as possible.

The same is now true for shipping. Some of its movements are easy to see when an Amazon truck arrives, when we find ourselves on a highway with more trucks than cars, or when we see containers being hauled on railroads or stacked onto cargo ships. But how goods flow through this whole system isn’t much clearer than how what I’m writing on this laptop appears on your screen.

Surfacing those mechanisms is important because your smarts are far less involved in The Internet of Stuff today than in the Internet of Bits. And getting involved will give you far more agency in the marketplace than you have ever had before.

Imagine being in charge of your privacy, your identity, the prices you’re charged, the services you’re offered, your terms of engagement—all of it—for the benefit of both you and the services you engage.

Of course, there will be a fight. Both business and government are infected with the belief that surveillance is the best way to know people and what they’re about. This has given us an online economy far too informed by surveillance, and it’s getting worse in the offline world. Your phone apps spy on you. Your car and TV spy on you. Yet you can do far more with the information that spyware collects (where you go, who you meet with, what you’ve watched and when) than the spies can—for their good as well as yours. You and the companies you engage with can enjoy trusting, useful intelligence that flows both ways. Among much else that I’ve been writing about here for the last twenty years.

So that’s what I want to explore. Stay tuned for more.