Everyware_ The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing - Adam Greenfield [72]
My own contention is that, while the existence of this latter set of factors constitutes a critical brake on the longer-term development of everyware, the social and ethical questions I am most interested in are activated even by systems that are less total in ambition and extent—some of which are already deployed and fully operational. So we'll consider a few such operational systems as well. By the time the section concludes, I hope you will agree with me that however long it may take a full-fledged everyware to appear, the moment to begin developing a praxis appropriate to it is now.
Thesis 54
Many problems posed by everyware are highly resistant to comprehensive solution in the near term.
By now, the outlines of this thing we've been sketching are clear.
We've taken concepts originating in logistics, chip design, network theory, cultural anthropology, computer-supported collaborative work, and dozens of other disciplines, and fused them into a computing that has become genuinely ubiquitous in our lives, as present in our thoughts as it will be in our tools and jobs and cities.
Most of these "small pieces" are matters of the real world and the present day—a few, admittedly, only as incremental steps or standards adopted but not yet implemented. Even in many of the latter cases, though, we can reasonably expect that the necessary pieces of the puzzle will appear within the next year or two.
But even though we already have most of the componentry we'll ever require, there are excellent reasons to suppose that everyware will take decades to mature fully. Sprawling, amorphous, it touches on so many areas of our lives, complicates social and political debates that are already among the thorniest our societies have ever faced. In some cases, indeed, we may never fully master the challenges involved. The following are some of the factors that are actively inhibiting either the development or the chances for adoption of ubiquitous computing.
Thesis 55
The necessary standards for interoperability do not exist or are not yet widely observed.
A lack of widely observed standards in the dimensions of screw threading inhibited Charles Babbage in his quest to build the Difference Engine, the world's first computer, in the 1840s. A lack of standards in languages and operating systems kept electronic computers from communicating with each other for decades. Well into the era of the personal computer, a lack of standards kept software development balkanized. A lack of standards led to the so-called Browser Wars, which suppressed adoption of the World Wide Web straight into the early years of this decade, as institutions that wanted Web sites were forced to build different versions compatible with each browser then widely used.
This afflicts almost all technologies at some point during their evolution, not just computing. Every American owner of a VW Beetle remembers the hassle of driving a car engineered to metric tolerances in an English-measurement culture; to this day, travelers arriving by rail at the French-Spanish border are forced to change trains because the countries' standard track gauges differ. The matter of standards seems to be a place where we are always having to learn the same lesson.
In some cases, there's a reasonable excuse for one or another system's failure to observe the relevant convention; The Octopus smartcard scheme we'll be discussing, for example, uses an idiosyncratic RFID architecture that does not conform to the ISO 14443 standard, simply because it was first deployed before the standard itself was established.
In other cases, the thicket of incompatible would-be standards is a matter of jockeying for advantageous position in a market that has not yet fully matured. We see this in the wireless networking arena, for example, where it