Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [42]
To so many of us, the idea of living autonomously long into old age, reasonably safe and comfortable in our own familiar surroundings, is going to be tremendously appealing, even irresistible—even if any such autonomy is underwritten by an unprecedented deployment of informatics in the home. And while nothing of the sort will happen without enormous and ongoing investment, societies may find these investments more palatable than other ways of addressing the issues they face. At least if things continue to move in the direction they're going now, societies facing the demographic transition will be hard-pressed to respond to the needs of their elders without some kind of intensive information-technological intervention.
Thesis 30
Everyware is strongly implied by the ostensible need for security in the post-9/11 era.
We live, it is often said, in a surveillance society, a regime of observation and control with tendrils that run much deeper than the camera on the subway platform, or even the unique identifier that lets authorities trace the movements of each transit-pass user.
If some of the specific exercises of this watchfulness originated recently—to speak with those who came to maturity anytime before the mid-1980s is to realize that people once showed up for flights with nothing more than cash in hand, opened savings accounts with a single check, or were hired without having to verify their citizenship—we know that the urge to observe and to constrain has deep, deep roots. It waxes and wanes in human history, sometimes hemmed in by other influences, other times given relatively free rein.
We just happen to be living through one of the latter periods, in which the impulse for surveillance reaches its maximum expression—its sprawling ambit in this case accommodated by the same technologies of interconnection that do so much to smooth the other aspects of our lives. If there was any hope of this burden significantly lightening in our lifetimes, though, it almost certainly disappeared alongside so many others, on the morning of September 11, 2001.
The ostensible prerogatives of public safety in the post–September 11 era have been neatly summarized by curators Terence Riley and Guy Nordenson, in their notes to the 2004 Museum of Modern Art show "Tall Buildings," as "reduce the public sphere, restrict access, and limit unmonitored activity." In practice, this has meant that previous ways of doing things in the city and the world will no longer do; our fear of terror, reinscribed by the bombings in Bali, Madrid and London, has on some level forced us to reassess the commitment to mobility our open societies are based on.
This is where everyware enters the picture. At the most basic level, it would be difficult to imagine a technology more suited to monitoring a population than one sutured together from RFID, GPS, networked biometric and other sensors, and relational databases; I'd even argue that everyware redefines not merely computing but surveillance as well.*
* A recent Washington Post article described a current U.S. government information-gathering operation in which a citizen's "[a]ny link to the known terrorist universe—a shared address or utility account, a check deposited, [or even] a telephone call" could trigger their being investigated. The discovery of such tenuous connections is precisely what relational databases are good for, and it's why privacy experts have been sounding warnings about data mining for years. And this is before the melding of such databases with the blanket of ubiquitous awareness implied by everyware.
But beyond simple observation there is control, and here too the class of information-processing systems we're discussing has a role to play. At the heart of all ambitions aimed at the curtailment of mobility is the demand that people be identifiable at all times—all else follows from that. In an everyware