Mundane computing and the web of data — on treating the network as electricity for everyday objects, given at Webstock.
The talk's central image was electricity: think of the network — access to the internet, and everything computable behind it — as an animating spark, the same way electricity brought new life and function to objects a century earlier. What might be possible once that spark reaches every device in the home, or on the street?
Much of the talk was a case against the obvious failure mode of "smart" objects — washing machines that beep at you regardless of what else you're doing, GPS devices that scold you for a wrong turn. The fix wasn't more screens or more shouting; it was giving devices the good manners to talk quietly to an app instead, and stay out of the way otherwise.
A running thread was MUJI as a model: beautifully unremarkable industrial design, invited into the home precisely because it doesn't insist on being noticed. Connected devices, the talk argued, should aim for exactly that kind of quiet competence.