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Thesis 21

Everyware recombines practices and technologies in ways that are greater than the sum of their parts.

The hundred-billion-dollar question: do the products and services we've been discussing truly constitute a system, a continuous fabric of computational awareness and response?

Some—including, it must be said, some of the most knowledgeable, prominent, and respected voices in academic ubicomp—would say that they clearly do not. Their viewpoint is that originators such as Mark Weiser never intended "ubiquitous" to mean anything but locally ubiquitous: present everywhere "in the woodwork" of a given, bounded place, not literally circumambient in the world. They might argue that it's obtuse, disingenuous, or technically naive to treat artifacts as diverse as a PayPass card, a SenseWear patch, a Sensacell module, a Miconic 10 elevator system, and a GAUDI display as either epiphenomena of a deeper cause or constituents of a coherent larger-scale system.

If I agreed with them, however, I wouldn't have bothered writing this book. All of these artifacts treat of nothing but the same ones and zeroes, and in principle there is no reason why they could not share information with each other. Indeed, in many cases there will be—or will appear to be—very good reasons why the streams of data they produce should be merged with the greater flow. I would go so far as to say that if the capacity exists, it will be leveraged.

To object that a given artifact was not designed with such applications in mind is to miss the point entirely. By reconsidering them all as network resources, everyware brings these systems into a new relationship with each other that is decidedly more than the sum of their parts. In the sections that follow, I will argue that, however discrete such network-capable systems may be at their design and inception, their interface with each other implies a significantly broader domain of action—a skein of numeric mediation that stretches from the contours of each individual human body outward to satellites in orbit.

I will argue, further, that since the technical capacity to fuse them already exists, we have to treat these various objects and services as instantiations of something larger—something that was already by 1990 slouching toward Palo Alto to be born; that it simply makes no sense to consider a biometric patch or a directional display in isolation—not when output from the one can furnish the other with input; and that if we're to make sense of the conjoined impact of these technologies, we have to attend to the effects they produce as a coordinated system of articulated parts.

Thesis 22

Everyware is relational.

One of the more significant effects we should prepare for is how fiercely relational our lives will become. In a world saturated with everyware, responses to the actions we take here and now will depend not only on our own past actions, but also on an arbitrarily large number of other inputs gathered from far afield.

At its most basic, all that "relational" means is that values stored in one database can be matched against those from another, to produce a more richly textured high-level picture than either could have done alone. But when the number of available databases on a network becomes very large, the number of kinds of facts they store is diverse, and there are applications able to call on many of them at once, some surprising things start to happen.

Consider the price of your morning cup of coffee. At present, as any businessperson will tell you, retail pricing is one of the black arts of capitalism. As with any other business, a coffee retailer bases its pricing structure on a calculus designed to produce a profit after accounting for all of the various costs involved in production, logistics, marketing, and staffing—and in many cases this calculus is best described as an educated guess.

The calculus is supposed to find a "sweet spot" that balances two concerns that must be brought together to conclude a sale: the minimum the retailer can afford