Report: Rob van Kranenburg, The Internet of Things. A critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID. Report prepared by Rob van Kranenburg for the Institute of Network Cultures with contributions by Sean Dodson.

An important new report:

“The Internet of Things is the second issue in the series of Network Notebooks. It’s a critique of ambient technology and the all-seeing network of RFID by Rob van Kranenburg. Rob examines what impact RFID and other systems, will have on our cities and our wider society. He currently works at Waag Society as program leader for the Public Domain and wrote earlier an article about this topic in the Waag magazine and is the co-founder of the DIFR Network. The notebook features an introduction by journalist and writer Sean Dodson.

In Network Notebook #2, titled The Internet of Things, Rob van Kranenburg outlines his vision of the future. Rob tells of his early encounters with the kind of location-based technologies that will soon become commonplace, and what they may mean for us all. He explores the emergence of the “internet of things”, tracing us through its origins in the mundane back-end world of the international supply chain to the domestic applications that already exist in an embryonic stage. He also explains how the adoption of he technologies of the City Control is not inevitable, nor something that we must kindly accept nor sleepwalk into. In van Kranenburg’s account of the creation of the international network of Bricolabs, he also suggests how each of us can help contribute to building technologies of trust and empower ourselves in the age of mass surveillance and ambient technologies.

Here’s a first excerpt, chosen by the author:

“Europe’s Future and Emergent Technology Programs as well as the major corporate labs have fallen unequivocally for Ambient which for the first time in the history of technology sets forth its own disappearance as technology as fundamental to its success. The result will be dumb interfaces that hide all keys to the technology that drives it. Consequently it will keep citizens from being able not only to fix it when it is broken but to build on it, to play with it, to remake, remodel, and reuse it for their own ends. I believe this being able to negotiate stuff, stuff that is axiomatic thinking embodied, is called creativity. (p.28)

Unless we find new ways of scripting new forms of solidarities with digital technology, it seems like we can envisage two roads that both lead to less dialogue, less communication, less innovation, less business opportunities, less sustainable options. The one focuses on control in a fundamentally flux wireless environment. The other focuses on hiding the technological complexity behind ever more simple user friendly interfaces. In both cases there is no learning by citizens on how to function within such a system, thereby, opening up all kinds of breakdown scenarios. ( p.18)

Either the disciplining process that is going on at the level of national states will scale itself to even larger and damaging techno-logistic blocs and we must then fight that, period. Or the first cracks will show in the highly developed and techno-saturated countries and we will see civil war, or rather gang war and city states. This will, I believe, begin in Europe within the next five to ten years. It is the same inevitable logic, the other side of the coin. You cannot give citizens gadgets with some functionalities and expect them not to use it and stay within the confines of national states that have outsourced their currency and law (85% out of Brussels and rising), privatised all their services and then still try to collect up to 40% of the income of citizens as tax. Rich Bolivians organise their own networks pretty quickly when they feel threatened at last. Middle class Europe will do the same. The middle class is about to pull the plug. (p.22)

The question is, can we immobilize or reformulate the subject (the set of business practices and real people articulating their agency through these business practices of patents and intellectual property laws) in this way?

Seizing and scheming towards this opportunity to make sense, to have fully analyzed and grasped a situation – such as the recent individual agency in open source content-networks-software and hardware – will not lead to major organizational, political, and design breakthroughs, if we are not able to fully grasp the trajectory from thing as gathering places for spaces and discussion, from ‘matters of concern’:

“A heuristic use of the term ‘thing’ has also been adopted by Bruno Latour, who, after Heidegger, has worked to transform the semantic emphasis of ‘things’ from ‘matters of concern’. Drawing on older etymologies in which ‘thing’ denoted a gathering place, a space for discussion and negotiation; Latour has rehabilitated this sense of the term as a way out of the twin cul-de-sac of constructivism and objectivity”. The story is no longer metaphor, no longer as if or ‘as’ something else, no, the story is the thing now, it is the protocol. Thus Bricolabs could be the leader of a new movement that Aymeric Mansoux would call “fair-trade hardware”. (p.37)

This is the axiomatic EU deadlock and its inevitable demise in the 21st century. The way that it posits and thinks of technology as techné – pervasive computing – requires unequivocally that its citizens trust the environment. The way that it posits and thinks of building communities – safety as the default – requires unequivocally that its citizens distrust the environment. In this dilemma there is no way out. All its axiomatic requirements are met: the network has empowered and is empowering individual citizens to such an extent that they can start managing their private and public (is there a difference still?) lives for themselves, while Europe as an idea, as a story is still to abstract for citizens to outsource their newly-gained perceived autonomy to. (p.26)

In between we find the city of trust. It is not there yet. We have to build it. It takes off from the realisation that in a networked world small-scale open content, software and hardware – made for and used by artisans – does not have to remain physically local but can travel through friends across the world. Here the two modes of opposition are exemplified by Katherine Albrecht (privacy activist at CASPIAN and co-author of Spychips) and Melanie Rieback (researcher at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam). Melanie wrote the RFID virus and made an RFID Guardian – a tool that allows you to block some tags and accept others – showing that privacy by design is not only culturally and socially productive but business wise fostering privacy as a unique selling point.

The RFID Guardian is a small scale tool that can help us organise our privacy settings ourselves provided we will have an open source infrastructure and negotiated privacy policies (my settings on RFID reader enhanced phone guide me through stores and the supermarket). Katherine Albrecht took the lead as an expert on consumer privacy in unearthing numerous dubious patents on RFID, and expressing her concerns about the lack of an ethical framework in consumer tracing and tracking. In our discussions throughout the years, we realized we both were looking at more then a logistics operation, but a technological paradigm shift that we felt was coming dangerously close to our souls. To my soul, it feels as if the very space that is pregnant with meaning, with poetry, with love, is being filled up with binaries that look at me as a set of qualities, no longer human, as in celebrating my messiness, the in-betweens, all these prolonged moments in which action takes not place. Maybe the city of trust lies in these. (p.50)”

The Network Notebooks series is edited by Geert Lovink and Sabine Niederer. Network Notebooks #2 is supported by Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences (HvA) and Waag Society.”