Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing

Thesis 42

In everyware, many issues are decided at the level of architecture, and therefore do not admit to any substantive recourse in real time.

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig argues, in his book Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, that the deep structural design of informatic systems—their architecture—has important implications for the degree of freedom people are allowed in using those systems, forever after. Whether consciously or not, values are encoded into a technology, in preference to others that might have been, and then enacted whenever the technology is employed.

For example, the Internet was originally designed so that the ...