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Internet of things: the greatest mass surveillance infrastructure ever?

Does the expanding network of connected devices herald a brave new compact for our digital lives -- or the end of politics?

by Julia Powles - The Guardian, Jul. 15, 2015 – 

The word "thing", in Old English, means a meeting or assembly. In the epic poem Beowulf, the eponymous hero declares he?ll "alone hold a thing" with the monster Grendel, who is terrorising the Danes in the great hall of Heorot. Beowulf uses "thing" euphemistically -- it is a meeting that immediately descends into a fight.

The Icelandic parliament is still called Althing (Alþingi). But over the ages, "things" have gradually evolved from meetings to matter. Today, we primarily use the term "thing" to refer to objects. Even in this sense, however, things are still core to our political and social lives.

An appreciation that things have always been about community and politics, whether literally, or through the creation and respect of systems of private property, provides a useful backdrop to the recent book, Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up, by writer and professor of communication, Philip N Howard.

Howard?s thesis is that the much-hyped internet of things - the expanding network of connected devices throughout our homes, bodies, streets and communities - heralds a new political age he calls "Pax Technica".


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