Uncle Sam Wants Your Fitbit: The Fight for Internet Freedom Gets Physical

This article appears in the May edition of Reason Magazine

We are at the dawn of the Internet of Things—a world full of smart devices equipped with sensors, all hooked up to a digital universe that will become as omnipresent as the air we breathe. Imagine every appliance in your home, every machine in your office, and every device in your car constantly communicating with a network and offering you a fully customizable, personalized experience. Besides neato gadgets and productivity gains, this hyper-connected future will also mean a new wave of policy wars, as politicians panic over privacy, security, intellectual property, occupational disruptions, technical standards, and more.

Behind these battles will be a grander clash of visions over the future course of technology. The initial boom of digital entrepreneurship was powered by largely unfettered experiments with new technologies and business models. Will we preserve and extend this ethos going forward? Or will technological reactionaries pre-emptively eliminate every hypothetical risk posed by the next generation of Internet-enabled things, perhaps regulating them out of existence before they even come to be?

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