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The first thing to understand about the “Internet of Things” is that it’s not about Things on the Internet. It’s a code term that powerful stakeholders have settled on for their own purposes.

They like the slogan “Internet of Things” because it sounds peaceable and progressive. It disguises the epic struggle over power, money and influence that is about to ensue. There is genuine internet technology involved in the “Internet of Things”. However, the legacy internet of yesterday is a shrinking part of what is at stake now.

Digital commerce and governance is moving, as fast and hard as it possibly can, into a full-spectrum dominance over whatever used to be analogue. In practice, the Internet of Things means an epic transformation: all-purpose electronic automation through digital surveillance by wireless broadband. In this essay I’ll describe how this is likely to work, and what the major players think they are doing to get there.

To begin, though, I must first free the reader from any folk ideas about the Internet of Things.

So, let’s imagine that the reader has a smartphone in one hand, as most people in the Twenty-Teens most definitely tend to. In the other hand, the reader has some “thing”. Let’s say it’s the handle of his old-fashioned domestic vacuum cleaner, which is a relic of yesterday’s standard consumer economy.

As he cheerfully vacuums his home carpet while also checking his Facebook prompts, because the chore of vacuuming is really boring, the reader naturally thinks: “Why are these two objects in my two hands living in such separate worlds? In my left hand I have my wonderfully advanced phone with Facebook – that’s the “internet”. But in my right hand I have this noisy, old-fashioned, ineffective, analogue “thing”! For my own convenience as a customer and consumer, why can’t the “internet” and this “thing” be combined?

This concept sounds pretty visionary, and it’s certainly enough to impress most people born during the Baby Boom, so this paradigm has been doing well in the popular press. If the reader thinks it over, he can easily refine the basic idea. “This vacuum should be equipped with wireless connectivity and sensors! Also, as its owner, I should have a mobile app or dashboard that can tell me many useful and healthy things about my vacuum – such as how much energy it is using, or how many toxins it found in my carpet. Also, the vacuum should run around in robot fashion, all by itself!”

That’s the standard Internet of Things scenario. It’s framed in the traditional language of consumer electronics. People often mock it, because they don’t like so much unnecessary technical complication in their daily lives. It seems baroque, maybe even fraudulent.

That’s not what’s going to happen.

The real problem with this scenario is that the reader thinks he’s the hero of the story. To the vacuum company, he was the “customer” or “consumer”. In the legacy internet days, he was the “user”. In the Internet of Things, he lacks those privileged positions, “user” and “customer”. An Internet of Things is not a consumer society. It’s a materialised network society. It’s like a Google or Facebook writ large on the landscape. 

Google and Facebook don’t have “users” or “customers”. Instead, they have participants under machine surveillance, whose activities are algorithmically combined within Big Data silos. They don’t need the reader to be the hero. He’s not some rational, autonomous, economic actor who decides to encourage the Internet of Things with his purchasing dollars. They’re much better off when those decisions are not his to make.

The reader may be allowed to choose the casing of his smartphone and the brand of his vacuum cleaner, but the digital relation between the two of them is not his decision. He still has a role of sorts, but it’s much like the role he has within Google and Facebook. He gets fantastic services free of charge, and he responds mostly with dropdown menus and checkboxes, while generating data whose uses and values are invisible to him.

The reader didn’t build the phone or the vacuum cleaner. He can’t repair or modify them. He doesn’t understand their technical workings, and when the two of them interact (by various adroit forms of wireless communication), he’s not in charge of that, or of where the data goes. The Internet of Things is not a capitalist marketplace. It’s a new platform for radically broadening digital activity. At the moment, it’s actually many balkanised intranets for digital activity, but it’s called “internet” by the power players, because they aspire to that catholic universality.

The reader is not a “customer” of Facebook because he never paid for Facebook. Facebook’s genuine customers are the marketers – those who pay Facebook for the hard labour of surveilling the billion people on Facebook. Facebook is one of the “Big Five” of Facebook, Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Apple.

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