The Creepiness Factor

The emergence of the Internet of Things, writes Sue Halpern in a November 2014 issue of the New York Review of Books, moves us in the direction of “pervasive connectivity,” which for many people has distinctly creepy undertones. Encountering a Google Glass wearer on the street is perceived as deeply intrusive to some passers-by. Other people celebrate the vision of a world where everything is connected to the Internet. David Rose, for instance, celebrates what he calls “enchanting” objects, like garage doors opening when they sense your arrival. Rose, an instructor at MIT, founded Ambient Devices, a company that embeds Internet connectivity into everyday devices like umbrellas and medicine vials.

In her piece, Halpern draws heavily and with a strong critical eye on Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism.  Rifkin spoke at Town Hall earlier this year to a packed downstairs crowd. I described some of my impressions of his talk in a piece, “A Technology Revolution and the Rebirth of the Commons,” that’s posted here in this blog’s “References” section. Rifkin affected my thinking about the ways technology is affecting the nature of work, perhaps primarily by introducing me to forces that hadn’t yet coalesced in my mind. Halpern expanded on this and brought the perspective of Rose and other writers to bear on the ideas.

Especially pertinent to our conversation about the changing nature of work, though, Halpern ends her article this way:

So here comes the Internet’s Third Wave. In its wake jobs will disappear, work will morph, and a lot of money will be made by companies, consultants, and investment banks that saw it coming. Privacy will disappear, too, and our intimate spaces will become advertising platforms – last December Google sent a letter to the SEC explaining how it might run ads on home appliances – and we may be too busy trying to get our toaster to communicate with our bathroom scale to notice. Technology, which allows us to augment and extend our native capabilities, tends to evolve haphazardly, and the future that is imagined for it – good or bad – is almost always historical, which is to say, naive.