Is That a Computer in Your Pants?

Cyberculture chronicler Howard Rheingold on smart mobs, smart environments, and smart choices in an age of connectivity

Jesse Walker from the April 2003 issue

(Page 3 of 5)

You could, for example, using this technology, point to a book and find out what The New York Times says about it -- and also what your book club says about it. You can do that with bar codes today: I reported an experiment on my blog where a friend of mine took a bar code reader and attached it to a hand-held computer. Every object has a story; it's just that citizens and consumers don't have access to what that story is. Soon we're going to have lots of little chips in lots of things, and those chips are going to communicate, and we're going to read information from those chips, and in some cases the chips can read information that we can send to them.

In not too many years, there will be more objects communicating via the Internet than people. We have an environment that's beginning to have ambient awareness. "Intelligent rooms" could have sensors that pick up information you broadcast so that they would know who you are, and what your credit rating is, and what your record with this particular store is.

There's also wearable computing, so that it's not the environment that has the ambient awareness but your clothing that can communicate with objects and the environment. So here we have a very complicated situation: Our clothing, the objects we carry, the devices we encounter, and the places we encounter, in the future, will have information associated with them and in some cases the ability to compute.

reason: A lot of this is still in the research stage. We're still talking about that pure model of how things are supposed to work, before you fall into the messiness of how things work in the real world. When I read your book, I kept imagining myself turning on my computerized glasses, looking at an object, and seeing a 404 Error floating in midair.

Rheingold: One of the quotes in the book is that a side effect of this kind of future might be that nothing works and nobody knows why.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

reason: The book mentions Mark Pesce's idea of "technoanimism." And animism is one of the first things I think of when you describe this world where there are spirits in everything, and they're communicating with each other, and you have to go to an expert to mediate between you and them.

On the other hand, Pesce is worried that "widespread popular beliefs that computationally colonized objects are intelligent ...could lead to unpleasant unintended consequences." But a lot of people already react to recalcitrant objects as though they were intelligent. I yell at my car when it breaks down whether or not it has microchips in it.

Rheingold: I think this is qualitatively different. There's what used to be known as the "pathetic fallacy" of projecting human emotions onto objects. Here, the projection is facilitated by the object's calling you by name, knowing what the last thing you bought in the store was, knowing what your credit record is. When that happens, you quite naturally assume that it knows more than that. You don't know what it doesn't know about you, and therefore the room for that kind of projection is much more vast. It's not just an artifact of the human propensity to anthropomorphize things.

reason: You've pointed out that there are questions about who's going to write the information that's embedded in the environment -- whether it will come from the top down or emerge from peer-to-peer communication. Do you think people would stand for any smart environment that tries to direct them instead of the other way around? The recent history of the Internet is a series of business models failing because companies thought they could channel people rather than just being there as tools for them.

Rheingold: There are naive notions of how to use these things in commerce. They're going to fail and get a backlash.

reason: Which of these technologies strike you as useful tools you'd like to have, and with which do you think you'd want to hit the off button as soon as you get a chance?

Rheingold: We already know that spam is a huge downside of online life. If we're going to be spammed on our telephones wherever we go, I think we're going to reject these devices. And it may be, like spam and telemarketing today, an annoyance in life that, no matter how much we personally hate it, our choices aren't going to make it disappear. So that's the hellish side of this.

I do think that giving consumers and citizens information about objects that they might want to purchase or interact with, and places they may want to patronize, gives us power and choice. If I can say, "The service in this place has been really shitty," and thus influence who's going to use it in the future, that's going to give me more power. If I'm able to look at the label of an object and choose whether to purchase it based on my political beliefs, that gives me and other consumers more power. With much of what I'm writing about, there's an upside and a downside, and it's hard to tell which ones are going to prevail. I think it's not either/or but both/and.

reason: To what extent do you use mobile devices yourself?