‘Creepy’ New Internet Takes Jobs and Privacy, Sells Them to Consultants and Investment Banks?

The New York Review of Books recently published an article by Sue Halpern called “The Creepy New Wave of the Internet” that details the positions of four new books on the “Internet of Things,” the growing network of devices, machines, people, and resources that share data online automatically. It’s very readable, very realistic, and provides some interesting examples and anecdotes. The four books take different positions on the trend. In brief:

• Increased connectivity will lead to a third industrial revolution that overthrows capitalism by dropping production costs to near zero. We’ll move out of the “age of privacy” and into a utopian creative era where very few people hold traditional jobs.
• Enchanted (read: internet-connected) devices will radically transform human encounters.
• Systems will use personal data to anticipate individual needs. That personal data will be out of reach of the individual who created it, but not those willing to pay for it – perhaps for the purposes of advertising, law enforcement, or government surveillance.
• Certain segments of the population may revolt against the use and sharing of personal data online, as evidenced by the recent interest in ad-free social media site Ello.

In addition to discussing these books, Halpern raises interesting questions on the topic. What incentives do proprietary networks have to share data with other networks, and if there isn’t one single network of shared data, does the whole thing fall apart? What happens to pervasive online networks in the event of a widespread loss of power due to natural or human-inflicted disaster? How do we maintain security over all this data? The article as a whole paints a rather bleak portrait of the Internet of Things, where companies sell their users’ personal data for profit, where enhanced data management streamlines human jobs into nonexistence, and where a shocking amount of personal information is shared in shockingly insecure ways. Seems this trend is well upon us. And who benefits the most from it, according to Halpern? The “companies, consultants, and investment banks that saw it coming.” For a lighter look at the emerging 21^st Century, take a look at this Richard Scarry parody: