The IoF
Frog and Toad Look Forward to a Brighter Future
Frog and Toad had just arrived at the pick-up site for their $2000-a-head “digital detox” weekend camping trip. They unpacked their brand new tents and put their phones and tablets and Fitbits in the trunk of Frog’s car.
“No Snapchat or Twitter or streaming video,” said Toad. “Why did I sign up for this with you? My weekend is spoiled.”
“Have some gluten-free trail mix,” said Frog. “The weekend will soon be over. If you promise not to complain too much about your phone, I will tell you a story while we are waiting,” said Frog.
“Oh, good,” said Toad.
“When I was small, not much bigger than a pollywog,” said Frog, “my father said to me, ‘Son, today you have to have a landline to connect your PC to the internet, but in the future everything will be a computer, and every computer will be online all the time. The Internet of Things is just around the corner.’”
“I wanted the Internet of Things to arrive. I wanted to find that Internet, and to have those Things. I waited a long time, until finally Google Glass came out. I bought a pair of network-connected glasses, to see if it was the beginning of the Internet of Things.”
“And was it?” asked Toad.
“No,” said Frog. “They were a pain to use, Google’s APIs couldn’t figure out what I was saying most of the time, and once I got punched for wearing them in a French McDonalds.”
“Then I decided to outfit my entire house with internet-enabled smoke detectors,” said Frog, “to see if the Internet of Things was there.”
“Did you find it there?” asked Toad.
“No,” said Frog. “The smoke-detectors woke me up with a false alarm at 3am one night, and the button wouldn’t silence them, so I took them all down and smashed each one with a hammer.”
“Nest is the worst,” nodded Toad.
Frog continued, “I had to fly for business a few days later, and in the airport I saw an ad for a refrigerator that could alert my phone when I was running low on milk. So I decided to buy it to see if it was the Internet of Things.”
“Was it?” asked Toad.
“No,” said Frog. “I had to return it, after it was hacked via an un-patched vulnerability in the ice-maker. Some Russian gang had added it to a botnet. My ISP cut off my internet for almost a week.”
“You must have been tired,” said Toad.
“I was tired,” said Frog, “and all my Soylent had gone bad.”
“But the next week I had an epiphany. I left work one afternoon and got in my Tesla. I enabled the auto-pilot and streamed Fight Club as it drove me home… that’s one of my favorite movies, you know.”
“You’ve mentioned it,” said Toad.
“Anyway,” continued Frog, “when I arrived home, my meal delivery service had left a box of ingredients on my doorstep, and the Bluetooth lock on my front door recognized the fob in my pocket when I leaned down to pick it up. As I cooked dinner alone, I realized something profound.”
“What did you realize?” asked Toad.
“I realized that what will sustain me, what truly enriches my life, aren’t Things but People. I realized that what I need is an Internet of Friends and Family,” said Frog, “and as I turned on my sleep tracker app that night, I added an entry in my reminder app to remind me to call my father.”
“You found it!” said Toad.
“Yes,” said Frog, “a truly humane Internet, that is what everyone needs. Which is why I think our next app should use augmented reality. It’ll be like Pokemon Go, but you’ll search for virtual friends instead of cartoon characters.”
“Look,” said Toad, “the summer camp bus has arrived.”
Frog and Toad jogged down the hill, happy to have finally found the Internet of Things they’d always dreamed of.
