Thesis 38

Everyware is problematic because it is hard to see literally.

Like bio- and nanotechnology, everyware is a contemporary technics whose physical traces can be difficult or even impossible to see with the unaided eye.

It's a minuscule technology. Its material constituents are for the most part sensors, processors, and memory chips of centimeter scale or smaller, connected (where they require physical connections at all) via printed, woven, or otherwise conformal circuitry.

It's a dissembling technology: those constituents are embedded in objects whose outer form may offer no clue as to their functionality.

It's also, of course, a wireless technology, its calls and responses riding through the environment on modulated radio waves.

All of these qualities make everyware quite hard to discern in its particulars—especially as compared to earlier computing paradigms with their obvious outcroppings of High Technology.

We should get used to the idea that there will henceforth be little correlation between the appearance of an artifact and its capabilities—no obvious indications as to how to invoke basic functionality nor that the artifact is capable of doing anything at all. When even a space that appears entirely empty may in fact contain—to all intents, may be—a powerful information processing system, we can no longer rely on appearances to guide us.