As with his annual closing remarks at SxSW, this little "book" is more of a rambling rant filled with buzzwords than an actual essay. Sterling tends to walk a fine line between insight and incoherence, but often falls into the latter. This is due in most part to poorly structured arguments and unsubstantiated claims. Sometimes this is forgiveable if what he does offer is profound or reached through plain logic or common sense. But too often he veers away from intelligent comments and makes stupid claims such as that California's economic, political, and climactic troubles are the fault of Silicon Valley tech giants. Really, Bruce? Earthquakes, drought and class struggle didn't exist before Google? It is a shame that he allows himself to go wild with his claims, because, for the most part, I agree with his sentiments about corporate capture of private life. The sloppy elements of this essay just make the other parts harder to accept and ruins it as a whole. However, I wouldn't try to dissuade anyone from reading it, since it's only 30 pages long and is mostly harmless. ( )

People are not Google’s 'Customers' or Even Google’s 'Users, but Its Feudal Livestock: “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” by Bruce Sterling “An IoT is not a consumer society. It’s a materialized network society. It’s like 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 with Big Data silos.”
 
In “The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things” by Bruce Sterling.
 
Imagine the following creepy scenario.
 
Picture yourself doing the number 2 on your recently bought high tech throne. Unfortunately your next door neighbour is a black-hat hacker. Do you want him to hack into your home system and flush your toilet while you're on it? With our current batch of politicians I can guarantee that's what will happen. I can't see them stepping up to the plate. We all also know that when it comes to safety, leaving self-regulation to the end-user doesn’t seem to work.  We all know what happened with credit cards; we all know what's still happening with customer data; it's clear as water it's not going to work for the IoT. What's wrong with this picture? Everyone who works in IT knows that if one wants to add security to a product, it's going to cost big money.  Making a gadget a safer product adds to the cost of it, and that just doesn’t work in this day and age. For IoT to become widespread we need cheap, but also safer products, and I don’t see that happening in my life time.
 
If you're into IoT and IT stuff in general, read on. ( )