The Problem With The Internet Of Things

This post, authored by James Alexander, is republished with permission from The Daily Sceptic

In the good old days when London Calling marked the week even more than the publication of the Spectator or the Beano, I heard our general editor, Toby Young, use the phrase ‘jot and tittle’. It means, simply, ‘every little mark’, every little bit of script, down to the last dotted i and crossed t. It is Biblical. I thought of it again, when, completely by accident, I stumbled across the Internet of Things.

Have you heard of this? Well, if you work for Accenture or the World Economic Forum this is old news. They started blathering about it in 2014. But for a pilgrim like me it was a discovery: as strange as the Indian, or Chocolate, or the Tomato.          

Internet of Things, or IoT for short. Google it.

Let me put all this in several steps. Because, as usual, there is progress.

I

The Internet of Things is the invention of the blue-sky dullards of around 10 years ago. I found a remarkable and depressing document, published by the World Economic Forum in 2015, entitled ‘Industrial Internet of Things’ – in collaboration with Accenture. Accenture? Who, who? (One of those evil corporations that hired all the clever undergraduates on graduation. Bluesman Robert Johnson in the 1990s: “I went down to McKinsey: Got down on my knees…” – that’s the song Crossroads if you don’t recognise it.) The WEF’s tagline on this document is ‘Committed to Improving the State of the World’. (Nice bit of trickery with language there. Notice how the world state hides in plain sight.)

The WEF did not claim to invent the term ‘The Internet of Things’. But it was terribly excited about it. It will “bring unprecedented opportunities”. But hang on. What is this thing, the Internet of Things? Here is a definition from p. 3:

Technological change [which] will combine the global reach of the internet with a new ability to directly control the physical world, including the machines, factories and infrastructure that define the modern landscape.

In short, “massive volumes of data”, “improved operational efficiency”, “collaboration between humans and machines”, It is a cross between Open AI, Amazon and Siri, then: and of course ornamented by the Chinese Social Credit system. It will result, says the WEF, in an “outcome economy”. Ever heard of that? There will no longer be products, it boldly claims, only “outcome-based services” that “deliver measurable results to customers”. In order to get whatever this means in practice, they say we need more “cybersecurity”, and, above all, more “interoperability”. Yes, indeed. “Industries, government and academia need to collaborate.” Oh, they do, do they?

The pamphlet is strewn with hopeful dross from various CEOs: “The Internet of Things is a ground zero for a new phase of global transformation…” And, a bit illiterately: “The Internet of Things is everything that has been promised to be.”

And it gives examples, which all seem to involve sensors, so that we can tell if a valve is failing or a dam breaking or an elevator beginning to creak. Oh, and mention is made of Oakland, California, where Shotspotter apparently used microphones to locate gunshots, ha, ha. We are told – remember this is as early as 2015 – that Monsanto, that innocent and benevolent corporation, has mapped “all 25 million farming fields in America” to understand “which seeds will grow best” – why, er, Monsanto’s of course!

There is occasional admission of a dark side. It mentions automation: it will, the report says on p. 7, “take over lower-wage and lower-skilled jobs that are repetitive and unsafe for humans”. And on p. 19 it says “there is also potential for conflict among stakeholders”. Farmers, for instance, have fears. But let’s not discuss these fears.

The whole document is boring fearless juggernaut rubbish. But that was 10 years ago.

II

And this is not the only Internet Imperialism we have to worry about. For if, first, we have the Internet of Things, then, of course, we have to ask about the human side. I wondered about it, idly, and asked Google, and even though I used the dread phrase ‘Internet of Man’ (having not yet broken through the glass ceiling of my own prejudice), I immediately found reference to all manner of second-order bilge: the Internet of Everything, the Internet of Bodies, the Internet of People, and the Internet of Humans.

Apparently the ‘Internet of Humans’ was first coined as a phrase by Roberto Viola of the European Commission in a speech in 2017.

He offered this vision:

Seamless interaction between [the] real and virtual world, cooperation between man and artificial intelligent agents will shape the future providing for example better health care and safer and cleaner transport systems.

Aye, it’s all about health and transport, eh, Viola? Nice harmonies at the top, but discords below, eh, Viola? Far below, since he didn’t mention them. The future was so bright, he had to wear Google glasses. The entire speech was a fusing together of blockchain on the one hand with openness, diversity and inclusion on the other.

That was in 2017. But in 2025, things are still being sold to us. Only a month or two ago an exciting article was published in the academic journal Human-Centric Intelligent Systems by Ghazanfar Ali Safdar of Bedford University and two colleagues. It is entitled: ‘Internet of Things to Internet of Humans: A Perception.’ They point out very reasonably that all this chunder about the Internet of Things excludes what Graham Greene called The Human Factor. “Internet of Things (IoT), focuses mainly on the application of the internet to things while paying little attention to human perspectives.” Good! Unfortunately, the aim of Prof Safdar and his colleagues seems to be to make sure that humans are somehow nudged or persuaded to accept the Internet of Things. Trust will come from “Inclusion and Engagement, Privacy and Security”, etc. Yes, indeed: “The IoH leverages existing IoT frameworks, integrating human-centric considerations to enhance usability, trust and inclusivity.” In other words, as Pink Floyd used to put it, Welcome to the Machine.

They don’t even slightly consider the possibility that we might have a principled hostility to all of this. Nay. We have tiny worries about safety, privacy etc, and must be cossetted and coddled.

They want to make sure that every jot and tittle is taken care of.

III

Let me try to raise morale rather than lower it, with a bit of philology.

Anyone with any sort of critical sense should be interested in Nietzsche’s original subject of philology. Philology is, literally, love of words – and reason. And my inclination, in preference to reading a thousand publications by the WEF, is to engage in a bit of amateur philology. I had a happy morning. Let me share my findings.

‘Jot and tittle’ is a paraphrase of a line in the Gospel of Matthew. In Matthew 5.18 Jesus says: “For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.” That is from the translation in the Authorised, or King James version: the one ordered by our only intellectual king – though Elizabeth I and Henry II were no fools – to replace all the Bibles already in existence that had not only puritan translations (“love” not “charity,” “congregation” not “church,” “overseer” not “bishop”) but also, worse, puritan marginal annotations. The King James Version, remarkably, was one of the first Bibles that strove not to tell us what to think about our mighty original text.

As all the Melvyn Braggs and David Crystals like to say, the King James Version was mostly compiled out of earlier translations. With that in mind, I checked the old English bibles. Let’s have some of them, going backwards in time:

• The New International Version of the dull 20th century (cited for the sake of historical irony): “not the smallest letter, not the least stroke of a pen.”
• The Authorised Version of 1611: “one iote or one title”, in later editions rendered “one jot or one tittle”.
• The Bishops’ Bible of 1568: “one iotte, or one title.”
• The Geneva Bible of 1560 – translated by Englishmen – and NB the Bible used by Shakespeare: “one jot or one tittle.”
• The Coverdale Bible of 1535: “one iott or one tyttle.”
• The Tyndale New Testament of 1525: “one iott or one tytle.”
• The Wycliffe Bible of 1382 (written in Middle English so still just about readable): “o lettir or o titel.”
• The Wessex Gospels of 1175 (in Old English): “an .i. oððe an prike.”
• The original is of course Greek. Here is the Greek using Latin letters: iota hen e mia keraia. Iota is the letter ‘i’, while keraia is from keras and means horn, signifying a flourish of the pen.

The difference between Middle English and Old English is astounding. The Wessex Gospels were written in Old English, which is so littered with thorns and whatnot that it is almost unreadable. Indeed, it looks very Tolkienesque (the word for ‘world’ – kosmos in Greek – in the Gospel of John is ‘midden-earde’). Witness the history of language, going backwards through Tyndale and Wycliffe to Wessex:

• In the beginnynge was the worde and the worde was with God: and the worde was God.
• In the bigynnyng was the word, and the word was at God, and God was the word.
• On anginne ærest wæs word. & þæt word wæs mid gode. & god wæs þt word.

Anyhow, the point is that “jot and tittle” is, if not Old English, then coming into being in Middle English, and there complete in the early Modern English of Tyndale. (Modern English was invented between the time of Henry VII and James II, and then refined under the Georges to become the great hypocritical and barefaced lying language it has since become. For more on this, see Bill Gates, below.)

Why have I written all this at the foot of an observation about the ‘Internet of Things’ and the ‘Internet of Humans’? Why, because I think that all of that is stale, impact-and-output orientated horror, dull, opportunistic balderdash, and that one should never waste time with it, or allow anyone else to waste time with it, without recalling, at all times, the power of language, literature and truth to put everything in perspective.

They might be trying to impose draconian stuff on us using the acronym IoT but, if so, then we Tittles – or, better translation (in Old English), Pricks – should resist as best we can.

Plus, it is always good to be reminded that, as Jesus put it, God’s Law will remain, no matter whatever our overlords and technocrats do, until heaven and earth pass away.

IV

For those of you who don’t like the Bible, I can demonstrate how ubiquitous the ‘Internet of Things’ and ‘Internet of Humans’ now is:

• The ‘Internet of Everything’ is a course in Part II Engineering at the University of Cambridge.
• ‘Internet-of-Things’ is in a course run by the Harvard Division of Continuing Education.
• ‘Things of the Internet’ is the pedantically adjusted title of a course run in Computer Science at the University of Oxford.
• Here are articles on the ‘Internet of Things‘, the ‘Internet of Bodies‘ and the ‘Internet of People‘.
• And of course a book on the ‘Internet of Women‘.
• You’ll be glad to know Bill Gates is pleased by all these developments. He says in his latest utterance that we will only need three sets of people, once AI kicks in: 1. computer programmers of course, 2. energy engineers and 3. biologists! – because they are creative!

Notice how innocent/not-so-innocent Bill Gates does not mention philologists or critics (or philosophers or historians, for that matter). Aye, he thinks we won’t need anyone to watch his use of language. He, and his allies (WEF, Accenture, Google etc), will be able to use language in whatever way they want. Whereas I think that the only way we will survive this technological onslaught is to remain critically and philologically conscious.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.

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