Interview with Rob van Kranenburg on the Internet of Things

I’ve taken the liberty to interview ubiquitous computing and Internet of Things luminary Rob van Kranenburg about some of his thoughts on the Internet of Things. Rob is the brains and the beauty behind Council, the multi-disciplinary bottom-up think tank taking a look at trying to shape the reality of networked everything before its too late. With Halfman I’m interesting in the design aspect of the Internet of Everyday Things and the reality of it for designers trying to make it a live-able and human compliant ‘thing’. Rob is leading the charge in this, so I asked him a few questions.

What do you think the Internet of Things is?

It is the networked ability of things to be approached in a radically
generic way that humans understand best.
It is to us what writing was to the Greek philosophers, book printing tot
he bourgeois individual, the browser to the baby boomer generation. So we
know what these have done, created ever more possibilities to express our
individuality. The question remains to be seen if IoT will bring even,
more to the point of atomization into smaller nodes or the possibility to
finally act globally as IoT does promise a radical transparency of data
and information.
What I think it is I will keep to myself for a while as I can only express
that in what would currently still be seen as poetry.

How do you explain it to people?

Where are the people? Or what ‘is’ people? Marketeers have great
difficulties these days. They realize we have become so (seemingly)
individual ( seemingly as we are ‘all’ on Facebook) that their old
techniques function no more. That is why all this data is being collected;
to find patterns yes but also to find what makes me ‘me’. So if marketing
no longer has groups or thematic clusters to work with, how could we – as
in forerunners – even begin to assume we can ‘explain’ anything to anyone?
That is why we have co founded bricolabs and I founded Council
(www.bricolabs.net, www.theinternetofthings.eu) as beehives of thought and
action. No need to advertise, we will see you when you get there. As
things are serious these days why waste energy on shooting so wide and
hoping to catch something?

How do you make them care? Should they care? Most people I think see it as
something scary that might happen some day, but there’s just as good of a
chance of it never really materialising.

The issue is ‘care’ itself. Most people drive a car. Very good friends of
me tell me ‘ It is my Freedom’. I think I can understand that, at least
for one Sunday afternoon ride. But there is an oil disaster going on
because you want your ‘right’ to personal mobility, so do you ‘care’? I
have no license as I don’t trust myself with speed so I have been in buses
and trains taxis and planes ( no saints) and I do realize that I don’t
care enough not to use that bus to go to a lecture. There is a slightly
better trade off as I use public transport. Other friends say: There is
simply too much data, where can I start? These are friends, not bad
people, yet somehow we all seem incapable of trading our local and
immediate agency for future better results when we do not live in a
dictatorship where fear of God, Stalin, or the Devil rule.

I read how you recently had an Internet of Things intro party for your
neighbours. How did that go?

It was great! The neighbour from across the street was there. My next door
neighbour turned out to be an engineer in web based stuff, my girlfriend
Kitty was there and Frederic whose appartment we could use made coffee and
cakes. I was more nervous then ever, speaking for people I see every day.
I live with my head in the air, that is where I am good, yet I realize
that if my local neighbourhood and immediate circle of friends would not
support me if things break down like in Detroit, all that expertise is
academic. Useless. We need tools, not talk.

What role do you see government vs. business in this in terms of intent? Do
you think most people feel this is something for government to protect them
from?

Governments are bound to fall pretty quickly everywhere. You can not stand
an attack on all your pillars. The first book was printed in 1455. By 1500
you could have the whole population literate, by 1580 the whole known
world of that time could have been networked neighbourhoods of balance,
joy and some singing. Why not? The first public library in the Netherlands
came about in 1917, and that because one fine man kept pushing! I find it
not such a great feat that you build institutions, schools, universities,
representative democracy when you rule for over 450 years in deciding what
is data, what is noise, what is data – what is information. Now look at
your Iphone. Take a look around and look at the first person you see. Then
imagine that you will give this person that you don’t know your vote for
four years to go to and sit in a place you don’t know and you hand over
half of your pay to outmoded organizational layers called governments or
countries that have privatized everything and lost their ability to rule
on anything. It simply can not last beyond 2012 🙂

That is why I am interested in IOT, as I see it as a possibility to become
a new organizational layer, the new form of the political, hardcoding
social values as well as logistical.

With Council (disclosure: I’m part of this thing too), there seems to be
pretty big interest and collaboration with people pretty deep in the
European Union government, and yet most of the full-scale rollouts of the
Internet of Things seem to be Asia. Thoughts?

Council will be in Moscow in September and we are giving input at the
moment for the biggest and most promising venue in 2010 for China “Global
Internet of Things 2010 conference” in Beijing on November 23-25.

I think the winning vision of IoT will not only export services but a new
political reality of the relationship between individuals, their tribes
(warm solidarity) and their ‘country’, the environment, the elderly, the
ones that are unlucky for a while and need support ( cold solidarity). As
such it is I believe the battlefield and the battle terrain for the 21th
century. It is also my belief that the world can unite in using this new
reality as a way to a gain agency in the huge challenges facing us:
climate change, migration, poverty, illiteracy, that are threathening
stability and simple life and

a) as the main manufacturer of things China can’ enforce’ its vision on
code, protocol, frequencies, spectrum and database policy
b) as a realtime enabler of (smart) cities not hampered by the western
notions of theory-practice but learning by doing the vision of networked
neighbourhoods might fit already current practice
c) as a society deeply philosophically and culturally embedded in social
and religious relationships with objects it can see beyond the mere
logistics, efficiency, control and first wave of building-business-on
top-of-existing –applications-and-services.

I argue very much for deep cooperation of the EU with Russia and China and
the BRIC countries to make devices, real hardware and “quick and dirty”
full range trajectories like Arrayent and Pachube.

Most people assume that this is basically the end of the world and the only
thing that is going to come out of the Internet of Things is some sort of
cross between Terminator and Robocop. Is it really that scary? Could you
foresee this going the way of Y2K, that the endtimes maybe aren’t just
around the corner?

Endtimes are always around the corner and human beings are simply another
form of life that is not necessary or good or bad in itself. The planet is
never in trouble, it will take care of itself. So I see no need to worry
there. It is a beginning of a new human agency. When I look at my students
that have grown up in the network I can not help but think of John
Wyndham’s book ‘The Midwich Cuckoos’. They have all the qualities to make
a beautiful hippie style world: they collaborate, theyt do not
discriminate between data sets, are very kind, open, yet a political and
incapable of talking to someone on the street that is not in their
network. I can not get them to worry about garbage 3.0 or sewerage 3.0.
They seem to think, as an entire generation! – that the world as it is is
a given somehow. In a recent conversation with a coffee lady at the
University she said that they seemed to live -all of them- in a different
layer – she no longer has talks or discussions about the state of the
world. They are nice to her, but do not see beyond her ‘function’ ( as
another friend stated when I told this story). This generation might very
well be the end of ‘time’ as we know it.

Where do you see the role of designers in this?

In the protocol.