If as a citizen you can no longer fix your own car…
Posted: February 5th, 2009 | 2 Comments »Finally got some time to meet-up and discuss with Rob van Kranenburg yesterday in Amsterdam at Waag. It’s been a while that we only briefly exchanged during conferences and I wanted to know more about his work. It also immediately led me to read his recent book about the internet of things.
There is one aspect of his work that I find strikingly important and that is developed in the book: the connection between objects characteristics and people’s agency. See these excerpts:
“Just think back a decade or so. Did you not see cars on pavements and guys (mostly) trying to fix them? Where are they now? They are in professional garages as they all run on software. The guys cannot fix that. Now extrapolate this to your home, the streets you walk and drive on, the cities you roam, the offices in which you work. Can you imagine they would one day simply not function? Not open, close, give heat, air…
As citizens will at some point soon no longer be aware of what we have lost in terms of personal agency. We will get very afraid of any kind of action, and probably also the very notion of change, innovation – resisting anything that will look like a drawback, like losing something, losing functionalities, connectivities, the very stuff that they think is what makes us human.
(…)
If as a citizen you can no longer fix your own car – which is a quite recent phenomenon – because it is software driven, you have lost more then your ability to fix your own car, you have lost the very belief in a situation in which there are no professional garages, no just in time logistics, no independent mechanics, no small initiatives. (…) Any change in the background, in the axioms that make up the environment has tremendous consequences on the level of agency of citizens. They become helpless very soon, as they have no clue how to operate what is ‘running in the background’, let alone fix things if they go wrong. As such, Ambient intelligence presumes a totalizing, anti-democratic logic.“
Why do I blog this? these excerpts echoes with lots of various discussions I have lately during a foresight project concerning the future of the internet. The importance of hardware and knowledge about it is a crux issue that seems a bit left aside in the occidental world (as if it was ok to shy away from techniques and infrastructures). There are some consequences of this situation and Rob describes both what they are and how to act in his book.
Interesting thought – but I’m not sure how accurate the observation is. People who grew up in a world of mechanical objects were able to repair/fix/enhance mechanical cars. The opposite might now be true: those of us who have grown up in a digital world might be capable of fixing software but baffled by complex mechanical objects. Although I studied industrial design and thus have an affinity to the physical (mechanical/solid/object/product), I feel like I could figure out and eventually understand a pile of code as much as I could a mechanical part. It’s just a question of literacy (whether with a particular programming language or a physical/mechanical one), and needs balance between the two. After all, what use is code without hardware for it to run on, but also increasingly, what use is hardware without software to control it?
(The next thought is whether end-users have access to the code or if it’s all wrapped in proprietary and inaccessible forms – perhaps that will change as more people have the skills to dive in on their own? how do business models fit into that (for the car makers, for garages, for users)? Do you want overclocked cars on the road, that go faster but suffer from instability, anyway? ?How would it all work? But that’s an entire separate thread).
I approach this phenomena a little differently (but in a similar vein to Mayo’s ‘next thought’). I have tended to focus on the eventual problem being that use of physical objects (such as repair of a car) will not only be harder to do, but will actually be prevented. In other words, the technology will prevent you from repairing it yourself and require you to pay the carmaker to repair it. Further, possible circumvention of that technology will be contractually prohibited and remotely detectable. Rights management of physical objects is what worries me an internet of things (or ubiquitous computing, ambient intelligence, etc.).
Maybe I’m overly paranoid about corporate motivations and not placing sufficient confidence in the market.
I originally wrote about this in terms of a displacement of personal property rights by technology or a combination of technology and contract. I’m currently working a more basic approach and trying to place computer mediation of the physical world into a traditional liberty framework (primarily Berlin’s framework).