Re: <nettime> Anthony Townsend: What if the smart cities of the future are chock full of bugs?

[John Hopkins <jhopkins@neoscenes.net>]

Morning meditations upon seeing that subject line...

> What if the smart cities of the future are chock full of bugs?

Or if the Internet of Things *is* the Internet of NSA's Things?

At this point anyone who has 'monitored' nettime over the last (almost 20 
years!) should realize the pattern: first comes the desire to prevail, then the 
technology to support that desire spills out of the womb of the 
military-industrial-academic(-counterculture) complex, then come the Siren 
(Server) songs of Silicon Valley along with hyperventilating dot-com VC-ism and 
the huffing of early-adopters, then comes the skeptical reception by European 
cultural/intellectual circles, then comes the need to 'keep up' by Eurocrats who 
then proffer cultural funding for creative industries to 'research' it all, then 
comes a slew of (re-action-ary) art projects about said technologies, several 
festivals, catalogs, exhibitions and earnest performances, and new 
'ground-breaking' academic programs upsetting the old media studies departments 
by "engaging" the 'new' technologies, then academic journals started up, (all 
along the hapless media-koolaid-drinking consumers spread around the world are 
doing what they do best), [and a bunch of other increasingly confusing mediated 
crap happens during the previous steps], and then folks are suddenly reminded 
where the technology came from originally and why it was made. doh!

The teats of technology rest on the bosom of an evolutionary product,
the human social system, that will do whatever it takes to project its
life into the future. This does not include optimizing the life of
the individual organism, but in optimizing the survivability of the
system.

hah,

jh
--
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Dr. John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD
ensconced, unarmed and dangerous in the burn zone
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/archives/70731
http://neoscenes.net/
http://tech-no-mad.net/blog/
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++





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