The Naked Future (3 page)

It is, quite simply, all of the computerized sensory information that can be gathered and transmitted in real time about what is happening right now. When this happens to machines we call this big data. When it happens to us we call it sensing.

In many ways, this expanding, computer-connected environment is inconspicuous (as Weiser intended). The presence of sensors able to detect ammonia, a common component of explosive material, in the New York City subway is not something I devote thought to when I'm taking the downtown 6 train; I'm just glad it's there.
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The Internet of Things is not a far-off dream; it's here. We've been accepting the presence of more sensors in our environment for decades now. It's impossible to argue against the usefulness of Japan's EEW, or radon detection devices in subterranean structures, or home security systems that sense when a door is being opened and alert the police and homeowner. The average 777 has so many sensors on board that a three-hour flight can generate a terabyte of data. Twenty flights generate the data equivalent of every piece of text in the Library of Congress.

For the owners of the copper wires, the fiber-optic cables, the cell phone towers, and the servers on which the Internet runs, the growth of the Internet of Things means massive future profits. The firm Gartner has predicted that the global market for “contextually aware computing” will exceed $96 billion per year by 2015. It's no wonder such companies as Cisco, IBM, and Verizon spend millions of dollars in ad, marketing, and grant campaigns to persuade the world that a “smarter” planet is so very good for everyone. And it is, in many ways. But first and foremost, a smarter planet is good for them.

Importantly, the Internet of Things is not solely the product of companies and governments. It's become a homegrown
phenomenon as much as a big telecom money machine, and it's empowering regular people in some very surprising ways.

On March 11, 2011, engineer Seigo Ishino was at his office in the city of Kawasaki near Tokyo when the EEW system sounded. Like any rational person caught in a massive tremor, he crawled under his desk until the quake passed. He emerged a few minutes later unscathed but, as a result of the seismic event that had just occurred, his life was now far more complicated than it had been just that morning. News of technical problems at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant spread quickly in those early hours through Japan and then around the globe. Tokyo was close enough to Fukushima (about 160 miles) that the meltdown posed a serious concern particularly for children and pregnant women, as radiation is most harmful to babies and kids. Seigo's wife was eight months pregnant at the time. He was faced with some hard choices. Was the level of radioactive cesium and iodine spewing out of the plant dangerous enough to compel him to relocate his family farther south? If so, he needed to act quickly to get a train ticket, as the price was rapidly ascending. There was also the question of where they would stay, and how he would earn money because he would effectively be abdicating his duties at his present job and had no job prospects outside of Tokyo. Was the danger significant enough to warrant an evacuation from Japan? The many thousands of foreigners who were attempting to leave that week were also driving up the cost of airfare and there were questions about how to obtain an exit visa. Alternatively, was it safe to stay where he was? What about the food and the water supply? He needed more information.

The Kan administration's press secretary, Yukio Edano, began giving regular press conferences, clad in a bizarre blue jumpsuit, to inform the public that radiation levels were not dangerous and that the situation at the troubled plant was under control. The official messaging took a turn for the ridiculous on March 12 when
the Kan administration assured the public that the pressure levels at the reactor had stabilized only to then admit, a few hours later, that a massive buildup of pressure had blown the walls off the reactor building. Yukio Edano again took to the podium to steadfastly affirm that the situation was improving as the reactor in the picture behind him smoked and fumed.

Seigo elected to stay but, like millions of other Japanese, he no longer trusted the official story that was coming from the government and from TEPCO, the corporate entity that operated the plant, both of which he regards as “most untruthful.”

Seigo was a member of an international group of community designers, engineers, hackers, and hobbyists who built sensors and installed them in buildings and other aspects of the built environment to monitor energy use. The community was centered around a platform called Pachube (now Cosm), which allows users with sensor data to share it in real time on the group's site. Not long after the news of the meltdown spread throughout Japan, thousands of people across the country were tweeting Geiger counter data and hundreds of Pachube users were streaming their data directly to the Pachube site.

Seigo began work on a smartphone app (for Android) that combined Google Maps, real-time information about radiation levels, and publicly available data about wind currents. The resulting Winds of Fukushima app worked as a sort of living map that provided constant information not just on where radiation existed but also
where it was going
,
in the form of bright blue arrows.

Of particular concern to Seigo was the safety of food and drinking water. The Winds of Fukushima app confirmed that radiation was spreading far wider than the government was indicating in news reports. Seigo began to buy his food from the south side of Japan and drink water imported from the United States.

Winds of Fukushima is hardly a technological miracle. It takes a very conventional stream of data (current wind direction), combines it with a second data stream (real-time readings of radiation),
and makes this new, combined data available in a format that the public can easily find and use: a Google map. Its most revolutionary aspect is how quickly it emerged in the wake of the disaster. A decade ago, the task of coordinating among hundreds of Geiger counter–armed volunteers, building a platform for all of them to stream data, and finding a vendor willing to sell the software internationally was neither cheap nor easy. Thanks to communities of interconnected amateur techies, open APIs like Google Maps, and direct-to-market software vending platforms like the Android app stores, Seigo was able to build and publish Winds of Fukushima from a small Yokohama apartment in virtually no time at all. The app went live in the Android store about six weeks after the initial quake but it actually took Seigo only a few days to create it (though he admits he barely slept).

Pachube was started by an architect named Usman Haque who wanted to build a sensing feature into his building designs so that, years after construction, he and his fellow designers could log on to Pachube and get a sense of how the buildings were being used. He wanted to let the occupants, too, reconfigure their living environments around their actual use patterns, their living data. Today, the Cosm system that acquired Pachube allows developers to build apps, programs, and immediately derive insights off massive amounts of data coming from a suddenly awake world.

“Everyone gets insight into the environment around them, data contributors get applications that are directly relevant to their immediate environment, and application developers get access to a marketplace for their software,” Pachube evangelist Ed Borden remarked in a blog post.

A world that senses its occupants and shares that information may be one where people become much smarter about how they live. It's also a world where information that is accessible only to government suddenly becomes available to hackers and activists. Depending on the content of that information, and the method you go about obtaining it, a simple civic act such as trying to fix your
local sewer system can look provocative to the local authority whose power you just usurped, as another Pachube user named Leif Percifield discovered in New York.

The date is April 18, 2012. Leif Percifield, a few of his friends, and I are in canoes in Brooklyn's famous Gowanus Canal. A shy drizzle rains down on us as we paddle out over rusted bicycles, tin cans, and other bits of metal and plastic that have imbedded themselves in this canal bed. The air smells slightly of sewage, which is why we're here.

We reach our destination, the portion of the canal that meets Bond and Fourth streets. Leif secures a shoe-box-size plastic container with a solar panel atop it to a mooring above the combined sewer overflow pipe, or CSO. Two long wires extend from the device; these are tipped at the end by a small sensor. Leif made the box, which is a prototype, the day before using off-the-shelf components (an Arduino motherboard) and parts he created himself with a printable circuit-board machine at Parsons School of Design. Leif plunges his hands into the water, elbow deep, to affix the sensor tip as close as possible to the pipe. When he's done, he does a cursory clean of his hands and checks his iPhone.

“It works!” he says. The sunken sensor is now broadcasting the temperature and conductivity of the water. Hotter water, and water with more electricity conducting minerals, are sure signs of sewage runoff.

Just about everyone in New York takes for granted a few key facts about the Gowanus Canal. The most important of these is that it's beyond fixing. Not only does sewage water run into the canal when it rains but the water is laden with decades' worth of heavy toxic metals, which has earned its designation as a Superfund site, one of the most poisonous environments in the United States. The U.S. Clean Water Act says the city of New York is
supposed to clean this place up, remove the metals, and keep sewage from spilling into its waters. But before that can happen New York City and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers must conduct a feasibility study, which neither New York City, the EPA, nor the army are in any hurry to complete.

“The numbers that we have say that three hundred million gallons of sewage go into the Gowanus Canal a year,” says Leif. He adds that the numbers are based on computer models and he believes them to be flawed. Members of the community have accused the New York Department of Energy of tweaking the data in order to put off the costly work of fixing the storm runoff problem.

Leif's goal is to get people in the city to participate in rehabilitating the canal. That's not easy. But if he can map where flows are bigger or smaller, he thinks he can put together a more accurate assessment of what's going on and essentially predict how dirty the water will be on any given day as a result of environmental factors. This information is of no real use to one person but a community can edit their water usage, their showering and flushing, based on the sewage water level. The name of Leif's blog says it all:
Don't Flush Me
.

You would expect the city would appreciate Leif's efforts to better monitor the sewer system. But his relationship with local New York City authorities quickly became rocky. His previous project literally got him in a lot of hot water: he actually went into the city sewer system to fit it with a network of sensors.

“The air is not pleasant,” he says of the New York underground. “But I was thinking it would be putrid. Instead it was more acrid. And it was incredibly hot, twenty-five degrees hotter underground than aboveground. People use hot water, you know, and hot things come out of your body.”

The sensors he attempted to install were supposed to read the water level and a fast rise was a good indication of coming overflow. The experiment didn't pan out. The sensors didn't stay in place and the Bluetooth signal inside the sewer was too weak. The
data was trapped. Had the sensor system functioned, he would have been the second person in history to be able to predict when the sewers were going to overflow. The first was Cynthia Rudin, an MIT researcher who figured it out with a statistical formula.

Leif's project was simple, commonsense infrastructure stewardship. But when he posted a few pictures of his adventure online he immediately got a call from New York's city officials. They ordered him downtown and made it clear that he was “in trouble” for what he had done. He was told to cease his activities. Leif believes this is because of how he was able to show how easy it is to get into the New York City sewage system.

Leif has grown better at working with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection but his experience reveals how complicated our relationship with authority becomes in this interconnected era. The program Leif put in place all by himself was very similar to ones in place in Maryland and Washington, D.C., to manage sewage run off in the Chesapeake Bay, but the latter are managed by local authorities with little citizen input so they're less controversial (and arguably rather ineffective). Everyone can agree, at least publicly, that fixing sewage backup should be a top priority. But when citizens armed with sensor boards suddenly start outflanking government on government's own turf, tensions can rise.

Most of us grew up in an environment where we comfortably assumed that local government always had more information than we did about what was going on within our city, certainly the best data on the state of infrastructure. We also instinctively trust local government as the provider of information during an emergency, even when it's an emergency in which we're directly involved. See a fire? Call 911 and ask for services, wait for someone to come to where you are and tell you what's happening. This is an inefficient way to collect and distribute information during a time of crisis.

The Internet of Things is ushering in a new era of proactive citizenry. It's an era where much of the most important information during a fire, a flood, a citywide disaster doesn't come from
government but from you and your suddenly empowered neighbors, people like Gordon Jones.