Thesis 27

Everyware is structurally latent in several emerging technologies.

The seemingly ineluctable logic of connection is not the only one driving the emergence of everyware. There is another type of determinism at work here, as well, harder to substantiate but no less real.

There must still be those, somewhere, who would insist that all technologies come into being neutral and uninflected, freely available for any use whatsoever. But ever since McLuhan, it's been a little difficult to take such a view seriously. A more nuanced stance would be that technologies do contain inherent potentials, gradients of connection. Each seems to fit into the puzzle that is the world in certain ways and not others.

This is not to say that social, juridical, and political forces do not exert shaping influences that are at least as significantotherwise we really would have architected our cities around the Segway, and RU-486 would be dispensed over every drugstore counter in the land. But it wouldn't have taken a surplus of imagination, even ahead of the fact, to discern the original Napster in Paul Baran's first paper on packet-switched networks, the Manhattan skyline in the Otis safety elevator patent, or the suburb and the strip mall latent in the heart of the internal combustion engine.

Let's draw three emerging technologies from the alphabet soup of new standards and specifications we face at the moment and take a look at what they seem to "want."

First, RFID, the tiny radio-frequency transponders that are already doing so much to revolutionize logistics. The fundamental characteristic of an RFID tag is cheapnessas of mid-2004, the unit production cost of a standard-issue passive tag stood at about fifty cents, but industry sources are unanimous in predicting a drop below five cents in the next few years.

Somewhere around the latter price point, it becomes economic to slap tags onto just about everything: every toothbrush, every replacement windshield wiper and orange-juice carton in existence. And given how incredibly useful the things arethey readily allow the tracking, sorting, and self-identification of items they're appended to, and much more besidesthere are likely to be few persuasive arguments against doing so. RFID "wants" to be everywhere and part of everything.

In networking, the next step beyond the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth standards we're familiar with is a technology called ultra-wideband (UWB), a lowpower scheme that relays data at rates upwards of 500 MB/secondaround ten times faster than current wireless. UWB is rich enough to support the transmission of multiple simultaneous streams of highdefinition video, agile and responsive enough to facilitate ad-hoc mesh networking.^[*] UWB wants to be the channel via which all the world's newly self-identifying artifacts transact and form spontaneous new connections.

^[*] An ad-hoc network is one that forms spontaneously, from whatever nodes are available at the moment. Mesh networking supports decentralized connectivity, with each node dynamically routing data to whichever neighbor affords the fastest connection at the moment. A scheme with both propertiesself-configuring, self-healing, and highly resistant to disruptionis ideal for everyware.

Of course, if you want to send a message, it helps to have an address to send it to. At the moment, the prospects for anything like ubiquitous computing at the global level are starkly limited by a shortage of available addresses. But as we'll see in Chapter 6, the new Internet Protocol, IPv6, provides for an enormous expansion in the available address spaceenough for every grain of sand on the planet to have its own IP address many times over, should such an improbable scenario ever prove desirable. Why specify such abyssal reaches of addressability, if not to allow every conceivable person, place, and artifact to have a comfortable spread of designators to call their own? IPv6 wants to transform everything in the world, even every part of every thing, into a node.

These are minuscule technologies, all of them: technologies of low power, low range, fine-grained resolution, and low costs. There is something in the nature of all of them that seemingly bespeaks a desire to become part of literally everything. Advertently or otherwise, we've created artifacts and standards that don't merely provide for such a thingthey almost seem to be telling us that this is what they want us to do with them.