Collateral damage & curious obsessions

A recent article, New Questions for the Internet of Things, by John Thackara (author of In the Bubble - Designing in a Complex World), provides an overview of some issues that were raised at Doors of Perception 7 in 2002 and more recently at Lift France 09.

One important theme he covers is technology's "collateral damage" (i.e. where a technical development that aims to ameliorate something, adversely affects something else). While the whole article is great reading, since Thackara's specialty is lifting up technological logs to find the bugs underneath that few people want to discuss, one extract in particular is worth quoting at length:

But an important condition has to be met. Connected environments of the kind that Pachube enables, and the Internet of Things as a whole, are not a step forwards if they guzzle matter and energy as pofligately as the internet of emails does.

In Gunter Pauli's language, we should only deploy it if we can demonstrate that there will be no "collateral damage". And that's a big "if".

It's not a question of technology versus nature. As Janine Benyus framed this can-we-use-it? issue at Doors 7: "I don’t think any technology is unnatural. We are biological, and we created technology, after all. As a biologist, the question for me is not whether our technology is natural, but how well adapted it is to life on earth over the long term. Our designs are not well adapted yet".

A second big "if" for the Internet of Thing concerns the degree to which digital monitoring tools may make us blind in ways that we do not intend - especially when they provide us with an artificial and hence misleading directness of perception.

This raises questions of its own that Pachube needs to bear in mind: is there an acceptable amount of 'collateral damage' that the Internet of Things will give rise to? How will people (or the Environment, as an equally important stakeholder) express what "acceptable" means?

Also at Lift 09 there was a delightful presentation by Pierre Mounier about how Google should be managed by a cultural heritage institution like UNESCO, since it's a keeper of sorts of cultural artifacts. When people make use of Google's innovations and services (docs, maps, etc.), there is collateral damage to their privacy, and, presumably collateral damage (complex enough to be impossible to calculate) to other societal institutions – but they're often prepared to do so for some benefit (this blog, for example, is hosted by Google's Blogger; we made that choice because it happens to simplify scalable hosting, collaborative authorship, etc.).

Pachube, which aims to be a data-brokerage for objects, devices, sensors, spimes, environments, etc., will face similar dilemmas: even though our intention is to make the development of such systems simpler and more participative and collaborative, given that Pachube can be used as a machine-to-machine control-system, how do we ensure that participation and collaboration (or Thackara's "curious obsessions") actually ensue? How do these contradictions get resolved – and should they be? Do all logical inconsistencies need to be resolved in order to continue?

We don't have answers yet and in a sense it's important that we don't: what's vital is that there be a means (or a platform) through which answers to such questions can be determined by the stakeholders who are affected by those answers. In the Internet of Things (or ecosystem of environments as I have called it), I would like to think that Pachube could be part of that platform.