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Future

The Hidden Tyranny Of "The Internet Of Things"

Connecting it all
Connecting it all
Ronaldo Lemos

-OpEd-

SAO PAULO — Imagine the following situation: You go to the bathroom, but because you're in a hurry, you head toward the exit without washing your hands. As you try to open the door, you notice that it has locked automatically. An alarm bell sounds. Only then you understand that the door won't open until you press the soap button and wash your hands.

It may sound like fiction, but this technology already exists and is in use. It's called the Safeguard Germ Alarm.

This is one of the least visible aspects of the so-called "Internet of things," namely its use for social control. Objects of all kinds that we use daily — from refrigerators, fans and irons to locks, cars, chairs, even our beds — soon will be fitted with sensors and made capable of connecting to the Internet.

The refrigerator will warn you when you're running out of milk; your bed will tell health care services that you haven't been sleeping well; and the bathroom will lock you in to basic hygiene habits.

Embedded as it is with political visions, this technology is far from neutral. In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt suggested the creation of the equivalent of "spell checkers" for hate speech and harassment on the Internet. Some speech interfaces already include such controls that automatically correct words and censor profanity.

And what about "behavior checkers"? Fitness tracker bracelets, which encourage people to exercise and eat well, are a good example. A better one is Pavlok, branded as "the first behavior change wearable that breaks bad habits." It promises to help users change their evil ways within five days, in large part by releasing electric shocks. The device comes with three pre-loaded apps, including one called Wake Up, whose aim is just what it sounds like.

Another Pavlok app is called Productive, which is meant to monitor online habits, punishing users when they're distracted from their work. There's also Fit, which follows diet and exercise routines and disciplines users who don't meet their goals. As the company says, "Pavlok doesn't just track what you do. It transforms who you are."

This type of system makes individuals accountable for the full weight of their "failures," but ignores the deeper causes to many issues. In the words of technology writer Evgeny Morozov: "Politics cease to be a common adventure and turn into an individualistic show for the consumer, in which we entrust the search for social solutions to apps."

One in three people don't wash their hands after using the bathroom. You can take my word for it that locking the door automatically isn't going to solve that issue. And remember, many a tyranny in history originated from a desire to do good.

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Society

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

Rudolf Höss was the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp who lived with his family close to the camp. Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest, a favorite to win at the Cannes Festival, tells Höss' story, but fails to address the true inhumanity of Nazism, says Die Welt's film critic.

Where 'The Zone Of Interest' Won't Go On Auschwitz — A German Critique Of New Nazi Film

A still from The Zone of Interest by

Hanns-Georg Rodek

-Essay-

BERLIN — This garden is the pride and joy of Hedwig, the housewife. She has planned and laid out everything — the vegetable beds and fruit trees and the greenhouse and the bathtub.

Her kingdom is bordered on one long side by a high, barbed-wire wall. Gravel paths lead to the family home, a two-story building with clean lines, no architectural frills. Her husband praises her when he comes home after work, and their three children — ages two to five — play carefree in the little "paradise," as the mother calls her refuge.

The wall is the outer wall of the concentration camp Auschwitz; in the "paradise" lives the camp commander Rudolf Höss with his family.

The film is called The Zone of Interest — after the German term "Interessengebiet," which the Nazis used to euphemistically name the restricted zone around Auschwitz — and it is a favorite among critics at this week's Cannes Film Festival.

The audacity of director Jonathan Glazer's style takes your breath away, and it doesn't quickly come back.

It is a British-Polish production in which only German is spoken. The real house of the Höss family was not directly on the wall, but some distance away, but from the upper floor, Höss's daughter Brigitte later recalled, she could see the prisoners' quarters and the chimneys of the old crematorium.

Glazer moved the house right up against the wall for the sake of his experimental arrangement, a piece of artistic license that can certainly be justified.

And so one watches the Höss family go about their daily lives: guiding visitors through the little garden, splashing in the tub, eating dinner in the house, being served by the domestic help, who are all silent prisoners. What happens behind the wall, they could hear and smell. They must have heard and smelled it. You can see the red glow over the crematorium at night. You hear the screams of the tortured and the shots of the guards. The Höss family blocks all this out.

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