Is that a computer in your pants? Cyberculture chronicler Howard Rheingold on smart mobs, smart environments, and smart choices in an age of connectivity

Reason, April, 2003 by Jesse Walker

In not too many years, there will be more objects communicating via the Internet than people. We have an environment that's beginning to have ambient awareness. "Intelligent rooms" could have sensors that pick up information you broadcast so that they would know who you are, and what your credit rating is, and what your record with this particular store is.

There's also wearable computing, so that it's not the environment that has the ambient awareness but your clothing that can communicate with objects and the environment. So here we have a very complicated situation: Our clothing, the objects we carry, the devices we encounter, and the places we encounter, in the future, will have information associated with them and in some cases the ability to compute.

reason: A lot of this is still in the research stage. We're still talking about that pure model of how things are supposed to work, before you fall into the messiness of how things work in the real world. When I read your book, I kept imagining myself turning on my computerized glasses, looking at an object, and seeing a 404 Error floating in midair.

Rheingold: One of the quotes in the book is that a side effect of this kind of future might be that nothing works and nobody knows why.

It used to be that if your automobile broke, the teenager down the street with the wrench could fix it. Now you have to have sophisticated equipment that can deal with microchips. We're entering a world in which the complexity of the devices and the system of interconnecting devices is beyond our capability to easily understand.

reason: The book mentions Mark Pesce's idea of "techno-animism." And animism is one of the first things I think of when you describe this world where there are spirits in everything, and they're communicating with each other, and you have to go to an expert to mediate between you and them.

On the other hand, Pesce is worried that "widespread popular beliefs that computationally colonized objects are intelligent...could lead to unpleasant unintended consequences." But a lot of people already react to recalcitrant objects as though they were intelligent. I yell at my car when it breaks down whether or not it has microchips in it.

Rheingold: I think this is qualitatively different. There's what used to be known as the "pathetic fallacy" of projecting human emotions onto objects. Here, the projection is facilitated by the object's calling you by name, knowing what the last thing you bought in the store was, knowing what your credit record is. When that happens, you quite naturally assume that it knows more than that. You don't know what it doesn't know about you, and therefore the room for that kind of projection is much more vast. It's not just an artifact of the human propensity to anthropomorphize things.

reason: You've pointed out that there are questions about who's going to write the information that's embedded in the environment--whether it will come from the top down or emerge from peer-to-peer communication. Do you think people would stand for any smart environment that tries to direct them instead of the other way around? The recent history of the Internet is a series of business models failing because companies thought they could channel people rather than just being there as tools for them.