Thesis 16

Everyware can be engaged inadvertently, unknowingly, or even unwillingly.

I hope it's obvious by now that one of the most significant ways in which everyware diverges from our experience of personal computing is that in all of the scenarios we've been exploring, it can be engaged even in the absence of an active, conscious decision to do so.

There are at least three modes in which this lack of agency becomes relevant. The first is the situation of inadvertency: I didn't mean to engage this system. I didn't mean to broadcast my current location to anybody who asks for it. I meant to do something elseperhaps set it such that only my friends and family could find meand I've forgotten the command that would limit this function or disable it entirely.

There's also the case where everyware is invoked unknowingly: I wasn't aware of this system's extent, domain of operation, capabilities, or ownership. I had no idea that this store tracked my movements through it and would mail me coupons for products I stood next to for more than ten seconds but didn't purchase. I didn't know that this toilet would test my urine for the breakdown products of opiates and communicate its findings to my doctor, my insurers, or law-enforcement personnel. (The consequences of unknowing engagement also affect children, the developmentally disabled, the mentally ill, and others who would be unable to grasp a ubiquitous system's region of influence and their exposure to same.)

Finally, there is the case where the user is unwilling: I don't want to be exposed to this system, but I have been compelled by simple expedience, by social convention, by exhaustion, by force of regulation or law to accept such an exposure. I don't want to wear an RFID nametag, but my job requires me to. I'd rather not have my precise weight be a matter of public record, but the only way from my desk to the bathroom has load sensors built into the flooring. I know that the bus will query my ID and maybe I don't want that, but the hour is late; despite my disinclination, I don't have the energy to find an alternative.

How different this is from most of the informational systems we're accustomed to, which, for the most part, require conscious action even if we are to betray ourselves. The passive nature of our exposure to the networked sensor grids and other methods of data collection implied by everyware implicates us whether we know it or not, want it or not. In such a regime, information is constantly being gathered and acted upon, sensed and responded to, archived and retrieved, in ways more subtle than those that function at present.

But inadvertent, unknowing, or unwilling engagement of everyware means more than a simple disinclination to be sensed or assayed. There is also our exposure to the output of ubiquitous systems, to the regularized, normalized, optimized courses of action that so often result from the algorithmic pursuit of some nominal profile. Maybe we'd prefer the room to remain refreshingly crisp overnight, not "comfortably" warm; maybe we actually get a charge from the sensation of fighting upstream against the great surge of commuters emerging from the station at 8:45 each morning. Or maybe we simply want to revel in the freedom to choose such things, however uncomfortable, rather than have the choices made for us.

Right now, these aspects of our environment are freely variable, not connected to anything else except in the most tenuous and existential way. Where networked information-processing systems are installed, this is no longer necessarily the case.