Adam Greenfield is the author of Everyware, a thoughtful and expansive examination of how the digital dissolving of the transactions that shape our lives will affect us as human beings.
One of the effects of Everyware (or ubiquitous computing, or ambient intelligence, or pervasive computing, to use some of the ambiguous terminology in common use) is that the things we use are going to change in ways we don’t expect. Our running shoes will transmit our health data elsewhere, maybe to our home computer. Maybe to our insurance provider. (Didn’t run this week? Your friendly neighborhood actuary just adjusted your life insurance premium according to the trend of poorer health. Shouldn’t have bought that sundae yesterday with your credit card.) The tradeoffs in privacy and convenience are nowhere near simple, and it’s going to be difficult to opt out, especially if you’re not aware of what’s happening.
Anyway, when Adam starts musing about what we carry around in our pockets as a bare minimum, I perk up my ears. Especially with this title:
Suspect device 006: Tools for today, analog edition
…At least for the relatively privileged and globalized cohort the Intel research focused on, this amounted to a very few near-universals: house keys, car key or transit pass, ATM and credit cards, mobile phone.
And it should surprise nobody – least of all Intel, right? – that these objects are all at most the physical tokens of transactions that are increasingly become digital. As Uncle Marsh might have put it, they’re all well on their way to being “angelized,” desubstantiated and diffused throughout the environment. Between RFID, universal wireless Internet access, and the various kinds of biometric-signature recognition and identity verification becoming available, it’s hard to imagine that the negotiation we now inscribe in a house key or a transit pass need reside in crude matter for terribly much longer.
But what about that large set of daily essentials we tote along with us that do not refer to some virtual transaction? As interested as I am in ensuring that the latter are imagined and executed with an appropriate degree of finesse, I’m still more interested in equipping myself for the implacable demands of the actual. And that requires good gear: thoughtfully designed, functional objects that allow me to live my life happily, comfortably, and in a manner as near to frictionless as is practically achievable.
Oddly, one of those things is not the Fisher Space Pen. Although I’m seriously considering taking a dremel to mine, after reading why Adam goes with the Other Woman of miniature pens…