If you wanted to pinpoint the most bugmannish idea ever – a concept so technofetishistic, decadent, and pointless as to be a self-contained definition of bugmanism, you’d have to go a long way to beat “the Internet of Things.”
The notion of hooking everything up to the internet lacks even the saving grace of saying, “Well, it looked good on paper.” Anyone who believed that adding internet connectivity to fridges and dishwashers was anything but proof we’d slid into Mouse Utopia should be jailed.
I’m not alone in this opinion. While they maybe fine with smart TVs and music players, most normal people balk at the prospect of sending their stoves online.
If you’re puzzled as to why, here’s author David V. Stewart’s harrowing account of his battle to exorcise Skynet from his thermostat in 100 degree weather.
As usual, David’s take covers most of the bases. People with time horizons longer than five minutes realize that the Internet of Things means:
- Internet service outages can deny you access to heat, food, and security.
- Death Cult megacorps can ban you from the above.
- Planned obsolescence turns products that used to be lindy into disposable money sinks.
All in the name of providing solutions to nonexistent problems.
The fact is that almost all home appliances are mature technologies that are simple, well-understood, and quite functional. In the last couple of months, I had to have my fridge and my AC fixed. Both jobs were done in less than an hour at reasonable prices.
And therein lies the rub for home electronics manufacturers. Most home consumer products, from TVs to to dryers to microwaves, are as good they’re gonna get – at least in terms of their core technologies. But the inexorable march of time (and inflation) requires appliance companies to roll out products with new bells and whistles each year. These are low-margin sectors, so manufactures need some reason to justify the necessary markup.
A good example of this dynamic was the 3D TV fad from a decade back. High definition displays had reached the point of diminishing returns in regard to image resolution. So the hunt was on for new gimmicks to bump up the price of next year’s model. Somebody came up with cribbing James Cameron’s push for 3D in movie theaters. They built similar 3D tech into big-screen TVs and sold them with the special glasses needed to obtain the effect. Customers were OK with wearing 3D specs in the dark but decided they’d rather not sit around the living room looking like dorks. So 3D failed to take hold.
The consumer tech business still follows the same principle behind 3D TVs, though. No well-adjusted person ever stopped during the commute home and thought, If only I could turn down my water heater from 130 to 120 with my phone! What happened instead was Big Tech inducing an army of nerd influencers to drum up artificial demand among normal folks.
There are two looming problems with this campaign, to the degree that it’s been successful. One, smart devices rely on the internet to work, and the internet is dead. White Millennial bugmen may shill for web-integrated toasters, but tech firms’ foreign indentured servants are proving unequal to the task of maintaining them. Second, the major threat of the unfolding Internet of Shit isn’t so much that a software glitch or woke cube jockey will ban you from driving. It’s that a portion of society deciding the risk is worthwhile mainstreams the erosion of private ownership.
“You will own nothing and be happy” is a stale meme, but Millennial geeks show no sign of hindering its implementation. If you don’t control what you buy, you can’t be said to own it. We now have a generation that has no problem with that statement.
So get a ten-year-old car, a used washing machine, and copies of your favorite movies on DVD.
And don’t give money to people who hate you.
IoT is one of the most bug-ridden, insecure blocks of code in the history of Computer Science. So typically advocated by the same group who fret about Russian haxxors.
Placing your trust in trash like this like owning a closet full of swimsuits while living in International Falls, Minnesota with the expectation that it’ll never snow.
Even worse, a lot of it is on commodity hardware churned out by the ChiComms. Of course it’s shoddy, even if it doesn’t have back-doors no one can close. The ChiComms steal everything that isn’t nailed down, and some things that are, so the mammon mob just about gave away their IP when they out-sourced to China. At least Esau got a bowl of stew when he sold his birthright.
It’s telling that most of the same Mammon Mobsters who outsourced manufacturing to China are also pushing the CCP as the big bad bogeyman.
I did computing in college, about four to six years ago. IoT was simply accepted as good and the inevitable next step.
The name for that is promissory idealism. Their childlike faith in it is touching.
I got a degree in CS about fifteen years ago. At that point no one was really talking about IoT. Instead the hot new “this is the future” talking point was electronic voting machines. The reaction of every single CS faculty was “are you insane? You are opening yourself up to all sorts of security issues to achieve nothing that couldn’t be solved by simply scanning in hand ballots.”
I ended up not going into CS as a job and so lost track of the pulse of academia after a couple of years of getting my degree. But based on what’s happened to academia generally I would not be surprised if the old guard was either purged or neutered, to be replaced by diversity hires who love talking about tech but can’t code worth a damn.
Man of the Atom,
Not mention a security nightmare. It reminds me of the hilarious satire Collapsing empire. I laughed hard at the Internet of things suffering from terminal entropy.
xavier
Nobody can articulate all the problems I have with the Internet of Things, not even me.
This comes pretty close, though.
If I tried to write this, it would have to have five unbroken lines of the letter “A” somewhere in it, probably.
Millennials are susceptible to this stuff because a lot of them have the attitude of “it’s crap to begin with, so why care if it’s more or less crap?” We saw this in computer games too. Gen Y can remember when day one horse armor was a controversy. But that was probably one of a millennials first real rpgs, and things got a lot worse real quick from that point. So for a millennial it’s just part of life to have exploitative DLC, microtransactions, forced server connections for games that don’t need them, etc. When Microsoft says that the next Xbox will require constant online connections, won’t let you trade used games, etc. they just roll with it.
Outside of games you really see this attitude when you talk about privacy. The millennial attitude is “my smart phone already invades my privacy anyway and I’m not giving that up, so why bother protecting any of my privacy?” At that point who cares about buying a device for Amazon or Google or whoever to spy on you as long as there is some minimal benefit (and for millennials “it’s shiny and I can brag about having the newest tech” counts as a benefit.)
Zoomers seem more split. Some are hardcore doomers with the attitude of “my parents ruined everything before I was born so why bother trying to improve anything.” Others are able to look at IoT applications without being distracted by the “it’s new!” defense (since everything is new and shit to a Zoomer) and see that it’s not worth having.
You can see that split in video games most easily. The “we need more polygons/higher res textures/etc. or it’s not a good video game” crowd are all millennials and Gen Y pop cultists. Zoomers are okay with “retro” video games or things like the SNES classic; despite not having any nostalgic connections with them. I mean, the peak Zoomer video game is Minecraft, why would they care about realistic graphics?
Millennials are Generation Sloth.
If you must upgrade to a “smart” home—which you shouldn’t—I have two suggestions:
1. Your devices should receive their marching orders from a central hub for which Internet connectivity is optional.
2. Don’t waste your time with the Energy Star certification for smart thermostats. The feds happily certify the Google Nest learning thermostat, which both requires a Google account for setup and inaccurately assesses the heat during a humid summer.
David V Stewart reminds us that the purpose of smart devices is to spy on you. The features that actually benefit you are afterthoughts.
The racket that is government certification could fill a whole series of posts.
The IoT is stupid, but a thermostat is one area where a remote-connected device makes sense. Being able to put your thermostat on an energy saving mode and then turning it on from your phone an hour before you come home is nice, as is tweaking the temperature from anywhere in your house, or creating a schedule more detailed than the capacity of a traditional thermostat, a feature I always found fairly useless.
In my experience, the main problem with this thing is that its internet connection is shoddy. Probably about 30-50% of the time, you change the temperature on your phone, and then… nothing happens. The AC doesn’t turn on, you have to walk up to the physical device on the wall and turn it on, negating one of the major theoretical benefits of such a thing.
But smart microwaves? Washing machines? Who cares? Putting the Internet into these appliances is stupid because unlike an air conditioner, you need to put something into it to get something out of it. The internet isn’t going to load my towels into the dryer, so why wouldn’t I just start it up with the buttons on the appliance?
A counterpoint to programming a billion temperature setpoints is that five hours of temperature setback is necessary to save meaningful money on your utility bill. The feds even recommend eight, which is already a third of the day.
Your experiences with your smartphone also highlight the second weakness of the Internet of Things: a wireless router’s inability to play nicely with both streaming devices and smart homes. It can be done, but it isn’t pretty.