The Internet of Things is not a single technology but a movement, an organized campaign for the massive adoption of new standards. Sociologists and anthropologists of information technology have found that movements have a vanguard of enthusiasts and early adopters urging their organizations on the bandwagon- and sometimes confronting a coun-terforce of skeptics. Careers can depend on which side prevails. But movement thinking is no substitute for imagining all that can go wrong. Neither evangelists nor agnostics can always foresee the ultimate, often unintended positive and negative consequences of new systems. Over the decades, good guys and bad guys can be reversed. Historians of transportation have reminded us of how Utopian the private internal combustion engine once appeared, a solution to the health menace of horse manure and even of dead horses on city streets. In small numbers, automobiles seemed positively benign. Bicyclists had cried out for better roads, helping create cyclist-unfriendly thoroughfares. If the new vehicles began to erode streetcar use, many progressive writers applauded this blow to monopolists. Remember the song for Charles Foster Kane in the film? He "has the traction magnates on the run." Railroads then became environmentally friendly again, until (as the New Yorker recently reported) protesters in England have been digging and living in tunnels to prevent damage to a historic forest by a new high-speed line. And vaping, promoted as hightech harm reduction, has become a new youth addiction.
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