Bruce Sterling on Spimes

Last week Bruce Sterling’s talk at LIFT06 was extremely inspiring. Sterling went beyond the beyond of his role of obligatory novelist at a technical conference. Nicolas did a full transcript of the talk. The video is also available.

I enjoy that he does not describe spimes (a world I would call the Internet of Things 4.0) as a utopian system. However, I think the structure of his world of spimes is not different than today’s world. We already deal with legacy issues and protocratic problems like objects will work and other not. His quote:

Objects will work and other not, state of the art means break down next month, cutting edge will mean broken down last week”

can be put in present tense. Those are recurrent issues (heterogeneity of systems, quality assurance) and it is our recurrent way to deal with them (by moving to the next “thing”).

If fact, what the wrangler/protocrat Sterling describes might just be a pragmatic vision of ubicomp. “Smart-anything” objects?… NO! It is not stable, it is not universal! It is not ubiquitous! It is not computational! but it can be adopted because the interface makes my relationship to objects much simpler and more convenient.

Relation to my thesis: Inspiring non-utopian, sci-fi vision of ubicomp based on simple and convenient relationship with objects. Crunching the complexity of data is left to Google…