Page 112 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

8 THE NEXT INTERNET 99

management of cities and overall transportation, as automated vehicles take
to the streets and highways made ‘smart’ by sensors embedded everywhere.
Heightened monitoring will also extend to the home, promising greater
control over heating and cooling, ordering food and supplies and to the
body as well, where sensors will continuously monitor fitness, blood
pressure, heart rate and the performance of vital organs. This sounds
futuristic and, depending on your point of view, either dystopian or uto-
pian, but it speaks to the power of the new technology and to the fun-
damental differences between the original Internet and its successor.
Companies have been quick to take advantage of their leading positions
in the digital world to expand into the Internet of Things. Prime examples
include Google’s driverless car, the Apple Watch and Amazon’s embrace of
robotics in its warehouses to speed the work of order fulfillment. Amazon
is also beginning to use drones for deliveries, and is developing entirely new
forms of packaging containing pushbuttons that automate ordering refills.
The Internet of Things has also given new life to an old industrial firm,
General Electric, which was remade in the 1990s by shifting from manu-
facturing to finance. GE has now all but abandoned the increasingly reg-
ulated world of banking only to emerge as a dominant player producing
devices essential to the Internet of Things and making use of them in its
own industrial processes. Along with the benefits to corporations, the
Internet of Things holds out great promise for the military, because it
greatly strengthens opportunities to automate warfare through robotics
and drone weapon delivery, in addition to enhancing and automating the
management of troops (Gusterson 2015).
For business, one enormously valuable result of monitoring every device
and connecting them in a global grid of objects is the exponential growth
in commercially useful data. Making use of this surge in data will require
both new cloud data centres and widespread use of data analysis. As
Manyika et al. (2015) put it, “Currently, most Internet of Things data are
not used. For example, on an oil rig that has 30,000 sensors, only one
percent of the data are examined. That’s because this information is used
mostly to detect and control anomalies—not for optimization and pre-
diction, which provide the greatest value.” How to use data, internally and
as a marketable commodity, is one of the biggest challenges facing the
Internet of Things industry.
Most of what is written about the Next Internet is technical or pro-
motional, emphasizing the engineering required to build it or touting the
potential in sometimes dreamily hyperbolic terms: nonstop leisure,