Read The Epic Struggle of the Internet of Things for Free Online

all day, every day.
    This wouldn’t mean “lazy idleness” of any kind, as peasants used to fear when they couldn’t get the crops in. It would mean intense palace intrigue, an endless jostling for public esteem and self-actualisation. That’s what the people in this third category are interested in doing. They like fame and glory, they like being seen and heard, they like making a difference. They would like to see a society arranged so that this is all they ever have to do.
    I enjoy the company of people of this kind, being by temperament one of them myself, but they are problematic. The late Steve Jobs was the Napoleon of this tribe. Steve Jobs was intensely anti-materialistic – Jobs could scarcely abide to have a possession around him. Jobs didn’t care for wealth either, until he realised that he could upset the status quo by seizing a well-nigh infinite amount of cash.
    Never once did Jobs have the prudent habits of a proper steward of great fortune. Jobs was a mogul, a titan, cruel to his intimates, exploitative to those he employed. His real ambition was to dent the universe, to be insanely great, to be forever remembered. These aren’t necessarily cultural values that a civilisation wants to promote.
    If you take a guy who loves the sound of his own voice and give him power, he becomes a demagogue. If you give him money, he becomes a show-off. Give him the internet, and he’s a ceaselessly flaming activist; give him an Internet of Things, and he becomes a wrangler, a guy for whom every possible relationship to any possible object or service is some ever-ramifying, well-nigh metaphysical hacker session.
    The legions of unemployed youth today, who can’t get jobs, housing, health insurance and those other bounties of a vanished order, are mostly busy here. It’s what they do. That’s why this class represents our futurity. Not only are they doing genuinely novel and cultural things, but they owe no particular allegiance to the world of their parents. That world hasn’t done them many favours. Not only do they lack money, they’re also losing civil rights won over centuries: freedom of the press (there aren’t any “presses”), freedom of privacy (there isn’t any), freedom of assembly (not their favourite kinds of assembly – grim urban occupations and massive, sudden, indignant urban flash mobs).
    These people are what tomorrow has instead of a stable, bourgeois middle class.
    It’s no secret that the bourgeoisie is going, but it has been alleged that it would have a successor group called the “creative class”. The Internet of Things rewards wrangling, not “creativity”. It shows little pious regard for time-honoured creative pursuits such as ballet, opera, poetry, theatre and art cinema. Those time-consuming, attention-demanding, creative pursuits are obliterated by the allure of handheld interaction. The Internet of Things does grant forms of cultural fame and influence, even lavishly, but only when those are channelled and expressed through itself, on its own terms.
    The network has generated the shareables contingent, the makers and the open-source crowd. They’re also an Internet-of-Things coalition of sorts. They are united because they despise standard capitalist property relations, and yet, unlike the traditional Left, they don’t demand state control of means of production. Instead, they are devotees of a “network commons”, which is a commons, of a sort. However, it’s entirely the network’s commons.
    The old digital economy was horrified by “open source” – it endangered their revenue source, the copyrighted plastic disks they sold to consumers in boxes. The Big Five wrangle with open source – the biggest “open source hardware” project in the world is Facebook’s. Since they prosper through Big Data, they’ll cheerfully hand out software for free, internet services for free and – once it’s cheap enough – they will cheerfully hand out free hardware,