Having spent 10 years being a nuisance about how most digital technology would work better if it used other aspects of the human sensory umwelt than the 3” focal area we dedicate to our our phones. So with the arrival of Google’s Matter in 2022 a unifying alliance between a complex myriad of of competing IOT technologies it felt like a golden opportunity to course-correct on the future of personal- and ubiquitous-computing.

products/google-nest/new-in-google-home-io22/

Matter is an open standard for smart home technology that lets your device work with any Matter-certified ecosystem using a single protocol.

If that doesn’t mean much to you then don’t worry - it’s just another catastrophic missed opportunity to make the world a little less screen obsessed and reduce our diet of gamified misinformation and dopamine fuelled consumerism. The technology is there, the possibilities are endless, the benefits are vast - but it is not sexy or cool - or, more importantly, it is not more profitable than selling phones so, it is, effectively evolving like the cognitive equivalent of the climate crisis.

What do I mean?

Well, we could change the world. Make information ubiquitous, neutral, equitable. Or, more simply, we should make digital more invisible. We should want to improve the world we live in. But we don’t. Somethings seem so obvious, and I often think that my inability to convey that is a profound personal failure.