Link: Wired News: All the World's a Tag.
Okay, I like this article a lot, but.... "The authorities." When it comes to computers, I sure worry a lot about "the authorities." I worry that there is nothing left of them. If "the authorities" know so much and are so totally snoopy and information-aware, how come my daily mail's full of spam containing fifty or sixty attempted felonies? I'm not saying there's no such thing as a privacy threat, but this sounds like guys on the set of MAD MAX complaining about the police brutality.
Just as a thought experiment, imagine there was tagged ubicomp everyware in Baghdad today. Do you think there'd be more, or fewer teenage carbomb suicides and kidnappees with drill-holes in their heads? Can you really imagine there'd be some kind of eerie magical techno-calm there? It all depends on who's deploying the smart-dust and reading the screens, right? But the ones reading the screens ARE the ones with the bombs and the drills... If your society is in a bad scene, the ubicomp screens are just another aspect of the bombs and the drills. Techies imagining that ubicomp brings police omnipotence is like Alfred Nobel imagining that dynamite brings world peace.
You gotta get past the techno-determinist "shock and awe" part. Getting all boggled down in the awe is not a productive strategic way to think. There are a lot of societies that have tried to install total police surveillance. When that happens, the secret police are always way too busy spying on each other to get any damn work done in the streets. Those are very unstable societies. Even if you roll out ubicomp, tag everything and Vladimir Putin becomes World President, the clock continues to tick. Does polonium in the teapots make Russia a more stable society in the long run? Putin is supposed to leave power in two years. Every man jack in the FSB is gonna be staring into their teacups and wondering if they can swallow their next meal.
