The IoT

Do we really need to have everything on the internet? I can really relate to this one by Oliver Kornetzke.

I am entirely in favor of returning to older ways of living, working, and generally going about the business of being human. And before somebody gets the wrong fucking idea, I’m not talking about resurrecting some bygone social order in which women, minorities, or anybody else were denied the rights and dignity they’ve spent generations fighting for. Social progress and technological progress are two entirely different things, and I see no reason we cannot preserve the former while being considerably more skeptical of the latter.

What I would dearly love to see is a retreat from this perverse fucking infestation of technology into every conceivable corner of human existence. Somewhere along the way, we apparently decided that everything in the goddamn world needed a computer inside it, an internet connection, a subscription, and a corresponding application on your phone. Your refrigerator needs Wi-Fi. Your thermostat needs an account. Your automobile needs software updates. Your television needs to collect information about you. Even the humble fucking light bulb has somehow become an instrument of the digital economy.

For fucking Christ’s sake, why?

We don’t need more Internet of Things. We don’t need more Software as a Service, more subscription-based entertainment, more proprietary software, more smart appliances, or another fucking application to perform some ordinary household function that humanity managed perfectly well for the preceding several thousand years.

Give me mechanical switches, physical buttons, analog instruments, paper maps, printed books, ordinary clocks, appliances that can be repaired with common tools, automobiles that don’t require a computer science degree to diagnose, and machines that continue functioning long after their manufacturers have gone bankrupt. Give me physical media I actually own, software that can be purchased outright, and equipment that does precisely what it was built to do without phoning home to some corporate server in California. There is something profoundly appealing about a machine that belongs to its owner rather than a company that reserves the right to disable it remotely.

I say all this as somebody who has spent his professional life working in technology.

I genuinely question whether this enormous proliferation of digital convenience has made us any happier. Certainly, it has made certain things easier, but what exactly have we done with all the time supposedly saved? We’ve filled it with more work, more consumption, more obligations, more distractions, and an endless procession of new conveniences designed to accommodate the increasingly frantic lives our previous conveniences were supposed to improve. It’s a marvelous fucking arrangement. We invent machines to liberate ourselves from drudgery and somehow wind up busier, more distracted, and more dependent upon the machines.

Meanwhile, we are constructing an increasingly fragile civilization whose most elementary functions depend upon enormously complicated networks of interconnected systems. A perfectly serviceable piece of equipment can become useless because a server goes down, a company discontinues support, somebody forgets to renew a certificate, or some miserable bastard halfway around the world discovers a vulnerability.

Consider the recent reported incidents in France of networked refrigeration systems being compromised and their temperatures manipulated to spoil food. Why in the absolute fuck does a grocery store refrigerator need to be accessible over the internet in the first place? Have we really reached the point where saving a corporation a few dollars in operating expenses justifies introducing another avenue through which somebody can potentially spoil thousands of dollars of food? I understand the legitimate benefits of remote monitoring and centralized control, but there ought to be some consideration of whether the additional complexity and vulnerability are worth the fucking trouble.

Beyond all this technical absurdity, I think something considerably more important is being lost. The physical world itself.

I’ve just returned from two weeks in Paris and London, during which I spent remarkably little time online. Instead, I wandered around cities, visited museums and bookshops, sat in parks, drank coffee in cafés, watched people going about their lives, and averaged something like 27,500 steps a day. A figure which, rather ironically, I learned from my fucking phone.

I was happy. Really fucking happy.

There was something wonderful about spending my days simply existing in the world rather than staring into a glowing rectangle and participating in the endless digital circus. I was surrounded by people, architecture, history, books, trees, animals, conversations, and all the peculiar little experiences that make being alive such an extraordinary business. I had no particular desire to know what some idiot was arguing about on the internet or what fresh catastrophe the news had manufactured for my immediate emotional consumption.

I work entirely online, and after just two weeks away from my computer, I feel like an entirely different person. Happier, calmer, considerably less stressed, and more interested in the ordinary pleasures of being alive.

I’m certainly not advocating abandoning science, medicine, computing, or the genuinely extraordinary things modern technology has made possible. I’m advocating a little fucking discrimination in how we employ it. A civilization ought to be capable of distinguishing between an invention that meaningfully improves human life and one that merely creates another opportunity to sell us something, monitor our behavior, or extract a monthly payment.

Progress ought to be measured by the quality of human existence, not by the number of things we can connect to the internet.

I suspect a great many of us would be happier with fewer screens, fewer subscriptions, fewer digital obligations, and a little more time spent outdoors, reading books, working with our hands, talking to our neighbors, and enjoying the physical world we actually inhabit.

Perhaps we ought to stop asking how much more of our lives we can digitize and start asking how much of our lives we can reclaim.

I’d rather live in a technologically sophisticated civilization that knows when to leave well enough alone than one that insists upon putting a fucking microchip in everything that isn’t nailed down.

Oliver Kornetzke