Internet-ontologies-Things: Smart Objects, Hidden Problems, and Their Symmetries

This book argues how power mobilizes various algorithmic and ontological objects—from a smartwatch to a smart building—to identify a greater number of hidden problems within the physical domains of the IoT, from the wearer’s body to her smart city. The Internet of Things is the vast system of devices, objects, non-human animals, and people that collect and transfer data via a wireless network that does not require human interaction. It is now common in software studies to think of algorithmic objects, like the ‘things’ in the Internet of Things, as ontological agents as much as we humans are. While recent post-humanist philosophies, such as speculative realism and its object-oriented ontology, have supported this methodological elevation of objects to autonomous and sentient beings, this philosophical discourse is overlooked as well as the transformation that has happened to the materiality of our everyday lives embedded with these smart objects. From this changing infrastructure, Internet-ontologies-Things discovers the new form of economic and political power whose algorithmic governance finds its justification from our newly-cultivated paranoia about unknown computational problems.