Bruce Sterling: No Trust Keepers are Trusted

Bruce Sterling in conversation with Scott Burnham.

From his books Shaping Things to Tomorrow Now: Envisioning the Next Fifty Years, writer and technology theorist Bruce Sterling is intimately acquainted with some of the more complex issues at the heart of an Internet of Things. During a larger conversation with Scott Burnham about trust in society and online, Sterling talks here about his thoughts on privacy, trust and governance within an age of ubiquitous computing and the Internet of Things.

SB: Privacy is a big concern for many people in the context of trust, but the topic isn’t dealt with much in your work with the Internet of Things. Is it an issue for you?

BS: I wouldn’t say that it is a non-issue, but I think it’s kind of a primitive issue. It’s the first thing people always bring up in connection with ubiquity issues — invasions of privacy and so forth. You see people digging down to that, but, point of fact: there’s very little coherent action being done in the way of either systematically invading our privacy or systematically defending our privacy, so it’s all hype. It’s an all-purpose term that seems to have very little practical consequence in terms of the way these technologies are developed and deployed.

SB: Is too much being made about privacy?

BS: Focusing on a term like privacy makes the assumption that the developers of this technology are primarily individuals or sort of autonomous individuals who have something to hide, and that’s not really the case. People involved in RFID chains aren’t interested in privacy, not because they are thinking “my wife will find out I’m having an affair” due to a lack of privacy in the system, but it is more a matter of “I’m in the value chain and it’s in my commercial interest to have some opacity”. If you’re the Pentagon or Wal-Mart, you don’t want everyone to know where the stuff you are selling came from. They don’t want you to know for commercial reasons, business reasons and even military reasons.

SB: So commercial issues are more of a factor in this realm than personal privacy?

BS: It’s like saying that China’s refusal to commit to RFID and their decision to promulgate their own RFID standard had nothing to do with privacy and everything to do with China’s mercantile geopolitical aspects. The personal privacy element is not irrelevant but it’s just not the determining factor. It’s not what’s making things happen. I think the term transparency is more useful than privacy. Privacy somehow brings it into a domestic sphere and suggests that there are just certain things that the public should not know about. Transparency is much more a matter of what does the state want to know, what do commercial competitors want to know about one and other, how do we protect our intellectual property, and so forth. Those factors have had much more of a determining shape on the way ubiquity is deployed and spread around.

SB: And with this ubiquity comes a lot of personal data being produced and transmitted.

BS: Sure, I mean think of issues like who do you trust with the geo-locative data that’s coming off your cell phone? But you’re not going to be in control of that flow of data. You’re not going to be presented with a check box that you can understand. You’re not just going to walk into somebody’s apartment and say “Oh by the way, is it alright if I shut off every Internet connected device within a fifty yard radius of my body” to say nothing if you go out into the street or into a mall? I mean you’re not going to be able to do that any more than you can shut off the video in downtown London and it’s never going to be presented to you as a choice and if it is presented to you as a choice like say Twitter where you can have a locked account, it will be seen as an eccentric thing to do.

SB: Is it possible to have industry leadership in these issues?

BS: In the US, the reason RFID failed was that nobody would go along with the tit tats of the Pentagon and Walmart even though they were the largest military industrial nexus and the biggest retailer in the US. People saw that joining them may have been to their advantage but they just sort of foolishly resisted an ability to streamline and rationalize this distribution system and that’s the way our population is clearly going. I mean we’re abandoning trust in institutions. We’re in a state of damn near ontological chaos actually.

SB: What does this mean for an Internet of Things?

BS: Consider trust in the Internet of Things in terms of other networks that we have — the Internet itself or the cell phone network or influence networks or political parties or the public sphere of political discourse or trade relations between countries or between suppliers or supply chains. None of those are trust centric — I mean trust in terms of something that is verified. There’s nobody around there that would say, “Hi, we’re the most trustworthy supplier of whatever. You trust me, I trust you, our word is our bond”. That’s not a selling point. And it’s not the deal breaker for the Internet of Things. The deal breaker for Internet of Things is subtler. It’s stuff like lack of coding standards and the implicit refusal by somebody in the value chain to follow standards, or mulish reactions by the installed based on something else, etc.

SB: Is there a way to resolve this?

BS: If I were to think, “Could there be a better engineered trust system?” I would begin to doubt if any such thing would ever be built. It’s against the entire sort of small pieces loosely joined effort of the Internet that would require a kind of comprehensive governmental, social overview which is just not there in our G zero world. There is nobody we would trust to bring out our sources of trust. There is no trust keeper that is universally trusted by any group.

SB: Are there trusted networks that developed more organically?

BS: Well, two or three examples sort of leap to mind. The first is bar coding which is an analog Internet of Things. A lot of things have barcodes on them. There are distinct commercial advantages to having barcodes. You’re not really allowed to join the barcode union unless you pon-y up a certain amount of money and have at least a return address. That’s why you never see barcodes on homemade objects or handmade objects. But it’s not a seal of quality. It doesn’t guarantee anything about the nature of the object for which it’s applied, it just needs to work under certain circumstances and it has really worked pretty effectively. Now, compare this to something like QR codes which you can print out yourself and stick on anything and they like open up all kinds of other potentials. If I’m wearing a badge with a QR code and you click it with your cell phone, take a camera phone shot of it, what is the relationship between the two of us? I mean for all you know there may be goatse picture there or maybe I’m going to rickroll you. So that kind of thing has been put out there but nobody has ever said “we’ve got a trust certified QR code”.

SB: Can you envision a trusted system within the Internet of Things in the future?

BS: We’re seeing a lot of initiatives bubbling around that have a very web 2.0 kind of approach to it. I think it’s going to develop, but by the time we have one, the very idea of an Internet may seem archaic. Your sense of comfort or trust may be like a Cloud thing or there’ll just be a sort of creepy feeling you have when enter a city and you suddenly get the sense that “hey - there’s a lot of urban informatics going on here”. Or you turn the corner and feel much more comfortable and just want to lie down. That’s what trust in ubiquity might feel like.

This interview was originally published in Trust Design: The Internet of Things. The publication can be ordered along with Volume 28 here.