Within the past few months I’ve been rather quiet with my views on technology.

It hasn’t been deliberate, but rather reactionary to the changes within the consumer landscape that has caused me to rethink just where I believe consumer trends are going.

For the first time in six years the smartphone is no longer the focal point of innovation. We are seeing the outreach of companies and ideas using the smartphone as a key to whatever it is we may now want to connect into our lives. Much like the wallet, while useful for centralizing all that critical data, the overall idea is that it (the smartphone) will open the door to things that improve your well-being. But as a vehicle for innovation, the smartphone hardware has become standarized and rather generic. As the software becomes the core focus, branching out into a diversity of areas, we are beginning to see the true value that the promises of cloud computing may offer us.

The ubiquity of an interconnected life where everything down to your undergarments has a reason to track the slightest tidbit of data that can be relayed back into something useful.

Now.
Name a product.
An object.

Anything in your house. Anything you could possibly buy.

I’ll bet you $10 that there is a company trying to make it “smarter”. To connect to something that will transmit a bit of information that will become centralized within a space.

What we, or any other force, will do with this newfound entrenchment of ubiquitous connections remains to be seen. On the level of the individual I’m inclined to think that there will be some power-users who will love the absolute macro control they will be able to have over themselves and those around them. Others, like me, will see it as noise that is useful but maybe not a priority within my life.

Yet for the societies at large I’m finally becoming an optimist. I hope we start applying decades of data gathering down into policies that can improve the society at large. Making mass-transit smarter. Improving water management. Smart farming and nutritions to feed an ever growing human population. Space flight and exploration. Social services and a streamlined tax-code(s).

In my dreams, this endgame that technology is pushing ever closer to, I want to see people at large question the reasons for our predestined prejudices on the personal and national level. Opening the way for a stronger sense of coexistence that is interwoven into the satisfaction of the society that was made possible with the advent of near-instant communications on a global scale.

This scale, while unparalleled, has been under the threat of every form of government. Even the gatekeepers, in this case the Americans, are failing to maintain the integrity of this system. Patent trolls, censorship, corporate interests and a failing federal government that views governing as a form of socialist propaganda.

To keep this flood of ideas and concepts alive it’s going to fall on the active participation of the society at large, one that must maintain a conscious investment for the greater well-being of the services we have come to take for granted. We’ve seen what happens when companies like Comcast and Verizon are able to run amuck without any oversight. We as citizens need to be aware and participate in the system to ensure that critical balance between the desires of the public and the will of the markets.

The past six years have been fun, and borderline terrifying.
But I’m looking forward to the next six.

-Weston Powers