The Weekly Screed (#706)

The thing is…
by David Benjamin

“The thing is to put a motor in yourself.”
                                            — Frank Zappa

LAS VEGAS — According to all the banners, keynote speakers and shameless self-promoters at this year's Consumer Electronics Saturnalia (CES), the thing is the “Internet of Things.”

The very term sounds momentous. I fairly trembled at its vast scope and Promethean implications until — on the first keynote night of the circus — B.K. Yoon, head honcho for consumer electronics at Samsung, tried to explain how the Internet of Things (Eye Oh Tea) will endemically “change people’s lives for the better while transforming society and revolutionizing industries” the world over. In other words, “My name is Ozymandias, thing of things…”

The thing is that Yoon seemed to be having trouble with the concept of “things.” I don’t blame him. Socrates and Einstein could probably talk for days about what exactly constitutes a “thing” and come away from the whole thing cranky, disheveled and irresolute.

“Thing” is a word that encompasses everything and clarifies just about nothing. Yet, here at CES, I watched 160,000 non-philological geeks and post-metaphysical hustlers clogging up Sin City, trying to plug their particular “thing” into a vast nebulous “cloud” of concept, communications and cutthroat commerce.

But what’s a “thing,” guys?

When someone says, “my things,” of course, they know exactly what those precious, proprietary things are. It’s my stuff. It’s the contents of a handbag. Or, it’s the buildings, grounds, beachfront and mineral rights of a mansion in the Hamptons. Or, it’s a shopping cart pushed around Skid Row, accumulating aluminum beer cans, plastic sheeting and half-eaten Whoppers.

When someone says, “Boy, that’s something!”, it is… some thing. But what? It could be anything.

When people say, “The thing is…”, they know what the thing is. It’s the point, the crux of the matter, the rhetorical coup de grace that silences all debate. Except that someone else’s “thing” usually manages to survive this crushing blow, and — in less than Socratic symmetry — the dispute rages on, both full of things and thingless. All things being relative, even Einstein would understand this.

The Thing is also a classic sci-fi film in which James Arness, dressed in a sort of asbestos gorilla suit, plays a raging, superhuman extraterrestrial who terrorizes an arctic research outpost.

If the Internet of Things were a flying-saucer refugee that terrorizes arctic research outposts, it would bring blessed clarity to the endless hype of CES and the bewildering vagueness of IoT. But movie monsters are, definitely, not what B.K. and his army of yoonies are trying to explicate. James Arness, even if he stripped off his badass E.T. outfit and turned into Marshal Dillon, would be too easy a “thing” to pin down.

The thing is that the “Internet of People” (Eye Oh Pea?), which most of us now use daily to post Facebook drivel, answer e-mail, delete spam, watch dirty movies and buy socks from Amazon, has exhausted its run as The Next Big Thing. The all-new, latest-thing Eye Oh Tea consists of products — that is, devices — that is, gadgets, doo-hickies and buzzing, spinning gewgaws — that is, things! that are styled to dazzle the gullible consumer and create “infinite possibilities” of income for the gadget-peddlers.

But what are the things — in an era of vast income inequality and stagnant income among us non-Yoons in the 99 percent — that husband the irresistible power to squeeze the last drop of blood from the mood rock of consumer culture? What things do we want to connect to our other things to reassure us that we’re relevant, that we — human beings — belong to the Internet of Things just as surely as our smartphone, smartwatch, smartpad, smartTV, smartfridge and brain-wave detecting smart-hat (one of Yoon’s brainstorms) belong?

What things do we still not have? What things are left that we could possibly want? Which things do we need so much that we’re willing to mortgage the future and blow our kids’ college fund, so that we might plug into a home network that reads our consumer tendencies so accurately that it can advise us — at ten-second intervals, forever — of all the things we don’t yet have but surely covet and certainly need?

Yoon told a huge audience at CES that the thing we all want (little did we imagine) is a seamlessly interactive technology that will effortlessly manage our wine cellars. Wine cellars? Yes, surprising. But he had a point. The thing is, not only do I need a wine-cellar solution. I need wine and I need a cellar. Not to mention a house above the cellar. And an income that would allow me to buy all that cabernet, chenin blanc and pinot noir, seamlessly, effortlessly.

But the thing is, I’m not sure I want the things that B.K. wants for me. Neither the wine thing nor the brain-wave thing. Nor the thing that that drives my car for me. Nor the thing that beeps six times every minute unto death, reporting on the GPS coordinates of my entire family — none of whom, I’m pretty sure, wants me to know where they are.

Here’s the thing: I do my thing. B.K. Yoon does his thing. This is not a thing for me. But it is for Yoon, and for all the believers in the IoT Party. They want to identify the thing and the things so immersive that we are all absorbed — people and stuff alike — into their Internet of Things, like ‘toons plopped into Judge Doom’s vatful of “dip.”

All this “thing” talk at CES carried me back to my college summer as a camp counselor. The camp, which mixed kids from all points in Chicago, was built and maintained by a rugged crew of Job Corps workers, most of them on release from jail or drug rehab.

The “work camp” counselors, who had to keep the Job Corps parolees on a tight leash, were behavioral pros whose arsenal included toughness, discipline, compassion, persuasion and keen psychology. There were arguments among the work campers but never a fight, because of four pacific words that the counselors — and then the work campers — had turned into a mantra. So infectious and effective was this phrase that it became a golden rule for everyone, applicable to all problems that bubbled up from the volatile melting pot in our little corner of Chicago.

When you said it — “Ain’t no big thing” — you had to chill. Whatever it was, whatever had you at wit’s end, whatever indefinable thing that for the moment was clouding your mind and firing your emotions, no…

Ain’t no big thing.

I come away from CES this year wondering if that might turn out to be the motto, the benediction, the main thing, perhaps even the epitaph for the Internet of Things.