I recently poked my head in at an Event, of a sort which I understand has become rather fashionable lately. A few dozen people of various ages, generally of the bright & creative varieties, with a prominent dose of aggressive self-promoters.
The theme of the event involved Wearable Computing, and the Internet of Things.
It was alarming.
Seems like an awful lot of the people there had plans for monitoring one aspect or another of their (hypothetical) customers' lives, every moment of every day.
And all these Cool Gadgets would be networked together, and linked to the Cloud.
And recording how you move, how you drive, where you go, and everything said in your presence.
In The Future, there will be no need for Big Brother to watch you. You'll watch yourself. And having an OFF switch on your television (that watches you!) will be a crime.
The Location which hosted the Event is another flavor of dystopia*. It's culturally, but not geographically, part of Silicon Valley: that is, people are doing, basically, Silicon Valley Stuff, but it's a few miles away, where rents are marginally lower.
You've read recently about how (unexpectedly!) open-plan offices are turning out to be a Bad Idea? Well... imagine a giant open-plan office inhabited by dozens of tiny startup companies, with their territories marked by signs.
This, it seems, is the Arrangement for startups that have gotten a little funding, but not the $10 million to have their own workspace.
So, not only are there the usual distractions of the open-plan office, but there are distractions from other companies sharing the same space. And, of course, no privacy nor secrecy whatsoever.
Which, I suppose, makes a kind of sense if all the nominal "companies" get their funding from the company that's lending them the space. It just reinforces the point that they're all subsidiaries of Big Idea Corp., and the startuppers with the little ideas no longer own their ideas.
And, as long as a few of them succeed, Big Idea Corp. cashes in. Encouraging the free flow of ideas among venturelets helps the winners win big, for the greater benefit of the sponsors.
So, if you've got** the sort of money it takes to rent a big office building and dribble out cash to a bunch of small groups with cool ideas, this could be a fine business model. If you're a small group with a cool idea, remember: them as has, gets.
Y'know, that farm in Tennessee sounds better all the time.
* The spelling checker thinks I mean "dustpan".
** Or can get from investors, such as perhaps the state pension fund.
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