The Internet of Things

This term ‘The Internet of Things’ has been thrown around a lot lately.  It is silly.  I didn’t get it; I still don’t think I do.  But then I turned, as I always seem to, to Heidegger.  Yes, from the silly to the…  Nah, I won’t say sublime. 

So what if ‘The Internet of Things’ is really just a new interpretation of the ‘Being of beings?’  For Heidegger (and this is really watering it down, but…) the ‘Being of beings’ is Being; it is the center of the network that gives everything meaning and purpose.  However, we can never get at Being, really.  We can get at beings and the essence of a being—we can know things and what makes a thing that specific thing.  And often that is enough if we ever get that far.

So Being is this unknown thing that gives itself to beings and helps shape what they are as things.  OK.  OK?  So what if the internet is Being and the things are beings…  or things.  This gets messy, but I think we can learn something from following this path away.  

The internet has all sorts of stuff in it.  That stuff is information.  The things in the phrase in question are devices that get that information.  Our things, or devices, get emails, Facebook notifications and weather.  The mirror that shows us our stocks and the weather forecast as it shows us ourselves all are made useful by that information that they get from the internet.  They are nothing without that information.  It is the internet that makes the things useful.  The internet is the Being that gives meaning and significance to the beings, devices. 

In that sense the phrase Internet of Things is actually quite ingenuous.  Thought I am sure that it was not created with that in mind.  But we can take it that way, or at least I will.  That way gives it some substance.  And really that is a rather true way of looking at it.  We often see ourselves in terms of the internet these days: we are what we listen to, watch, (maybe even read!) on the internet.   We are what we post on the internet to an even greater extent.

Yet, if we stop at that—that the internet brings us information via our devices and we are what we consume or what we disseminate over it—then we miss something.  We miss depth or real substance of any kind.  After all, the information on the internet is not substantial at all; it has almost no physical weight or force to it.  We cannot stop at the internet and what it gives us unless we want to become only electrical impulses, only thoughts. 

Here is where the connection to Heidegger’s ‘Being of beings’ and ‘The Internet of Things’ both falls apart and is very telling.  It falls apart because Heidegger says we can never get at Being, especially not through beings.  We can get hints at it, but we need to move beyond them to get at Being…  and even then Being always slips away.  However, we can always get at the internet via our devices—provided that the connection is decent.  The analogy falls apart there.  But that does not mean that we need to discard the analogy and give up the path.  No, this is where we MUST push it further.  We must push beyond this messiness, this rocky patch where the path seems to end. 

Past this apparent impasse we find the truth in the phrase ‘The Internet of Things’ and the wisdom in Heidegger’s ‘Being of beings.’  If we push just a bit further we must ask this question: Where does the internet get its information from?  All of the information on the internet is from a world.  Maybe it does not come from the world in terms of the physical rocks, flesh and water of the world.  Much of it comes from there, but some comes from the personal worlds of others.  It comes from the minds of flesh and blood people, and what is in their minds is a world too. 

Regardless of whether is comes from the physical world or the world in other minds, the information on the internet does not come from the internet.   What we need to learn from this analysis of the term ‘The Internet of Things’ is that a world exists out there aside from the internet.  There is a world that has given rise to the internet, and that is the real world.  The internet can make that world smaller by seeming to collapse the time and distance in the real world, but that real world and those distances still exist.  We need to resist getting lost in that collapse and keep from getting distanced from what is near.  We need to not lose the world as we gain the internet.  We need to use the internet and its things to enhance the world.  (But not in the sense of Google Glasses.) We need to always be connected to the world around us.  And more importantly the people in that world.