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too.
    These devices don’t have to be bought by consumers. A fridge that talks to your toaster is useless. A fridge that talks to your landlord is a different matter; it’s a hack of the bourgeois property system. The Internet of Things can profit from that dicey relationship. The IoT will wrangle the insurance, the public safety issues, the reputation systems, the rental fees, the shrink-wrapping.
    To judge by current developments toward the Internet of Things, one can expect a host of mutant oddities where today’s property relations are hacked and wrangled: transport (Uber, Lyft, Sidecar), shelter (AirBnB, HomeAway, Couchsurfing), finance (Kickstarter, Kiva, IndieGogo), trade education (Instructables, GitHub), office space (ShareDesk, Liquidspace). Maybe even 3D-printed giveaway furniture, crowd-financed solar panels, and urban-farmed socialised food.
    Mutated forms of electronic sociality are arising. Some resemble the trade guilds once common in the days of feudal aristocracy. Others are “smart city” machines that much resemble the urban political party machinery that distributed protection and favouritism. At the flip of a switch, any “smart city” can become a smart gated-community, fortress-like, secured and “resilient”.
    Log in and get the proper app, and an Internet of Things is at your feet. Fail to do that, or refuse on principle, and it suddenly everts – opportunities vanish, every automatic door is closed, it’s all greyed-out permission screens and argus-eyed security alarms.
    Any establishment will smile on its own and kick others aside; it was ever thus. The Internet of Things will kick in new ways, but it also offers some new ways of becoming established. The Internet of Things is not a monolithic, one-party surveillance empire. Instead, it amends the old-fashioned internet slogan of “Information wants to be free” to a new, more politically pointed, “Information about you wants to be free to us”. The IoT platform wants to become an establishment. It’s not a sinister platform for cyber war or a frothy divertissement for arcane gadgets. It wants to be social reality, it wants to be the way things are done in daily life.
    It’s hard to outguess its wrangling, unstable behaviour. However, it is easy to guess how it ends.
    Since the Internet of Things is built on silicon, on the tremendous instability of modern electronics, it’s built on literal sand. It’ll have its day for better or worse, but it is most certainly heading, at its own due pace, for that all-devouring junk heap that swallowed French Minitels, Japanese Walkmans and a hundred million bulbous American black-and-white vacuum-tube TVs.
    It does offer one serious improvement: because it is so mindful about “things”, it offers much better chances for humanity to mop up its own rubbish. That’s the one thing about it that historians might regard as progress.
    But everything about the Internet of Things that actually works, that functions in real life, is already obsolete. It will leave few visible monuments. If you hold your breath and close your eyes, you can almost see the last of it from here.

About the Author
     
    Bruce Sterling is an author, journalist, critic and a contributing editor of Wired magazine. Best known for his ten science fiction novels, he also writes short stories, book reviews, design criticism, opinion columns and introductions to books by authors ranging from Ernst Jünger to Jules Verne. His non-fiction works include The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier (1992), Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years (2003) and Shaping Things (2005).

About Strelka
     
    Strelka Institute for Media, Architecture and Design is an international education project founded in 2010. At its Moscow campus, Strelka hosts a postgraduate research programme on urbanism and city development. A philanthropic project, students study for free and develop the skills required for a strategic