The Way of the Future?: Spimes and the Internet of Things

I usually don’t understand much that goes on in the digital realm; computers are generally beyond me. In the past few months, I have only just begun to develop an appreciation for the far-reaching implications of changing technology – the way we obtain, organize and process information is undergoing a revolution right under our noses, whether we pay attention to it or not. In our digital history class, we have discussed technologies like OCR (optical character recognition) that are probably quite obvious to the computer-savvy among us, but I have to be honest – it had never crossed my mind to wonder how Google or JSTOR worked, even though I use them all the time. Although it has sometimes been a struggle for me to wrap my mind around these new concepts, I am starting to appreciate how important it is to try and understand this very foreign world. And when I came across something called a spime in one of our readings for class, I actually got kind of excited.

A spime is a term coined by Bruce Sterling, a science fiction novelist and design critic, to explain a theoretical object that has a computerized tag that can identify it and allow it to communicate. It can be precisely located, and tracked, in time and space. They are networked and reveal metadata about themselves. Owners would be able to personalize this data. Eventually, all of this information would become an Internet of things, through which we could see relationships between objects and users.

Sterling first introduced the idea in 2004, when he coined the term for the theoretical object because “it needs a noun so that we can think about it”[1]. Now, Spime Inc. is a Silicone Valley company which advertises several products on its website, several of which are software for mobile phones, but one of which also claims that “It can be deployed at homes to track your assets and locate children”. I’m certainly not going to pretend that I understand the technology or even most of what’s on the website. But I am intrigued.

There are several interesting implications. Sterling emphasized the non-renewability of many of our resources and the importance of knowing the resources we have, and using them:

“Our material culture is not sustainable. Its resources are not renewable. We cannot turn our entire planet's crust into obsolete objects. We need to locate valuable objects that are dead, and fold them back into the product stream. In order to do this, we need to know where they are, and what happened to them. We need to document the life cycles of objects. We need to know where to take them when they are defunct.
In practice, this is going to mean tagging and historicizing everything. Once we tag many things, we will find that there is no good place to stop tagging.”[2]

So yes, there are very interesting implications for industry, and for the potential to improve the products we use every day. But there are also implications for history. Imagine if every object dug up in an archaeological expedition was a spime. What more could that teach us? How much easier would the jobs of historians be? It’s true that we are talking about an internet of things, not of ideas, and while objects are incredibly valuable tools for understanding history, they alone are not enough. Nevertheless, this idea could have far-reaching implications for how we understand the present and (in the future) our past.

Despite the possible problems with theft, fraud, and invasion of privacy, the idea of being able to embed our objects with this kind of tag is an intriguing one. Interestingly, however, although three and half years have passed since Sterling first coined the term (and speaking of new ways of organizing information), there is still no Wikipedia entry for spimes. It seems the internet of things has not arrived quite yet. But I’ll be ready when it does.

[1]Bruce Sterling, "When Blobjects Rule the Earth", SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004
[2] Bruce Sterling, "When Blobjects Rule the Earth", SIGGRAPH, Los Angeles, August 2004