Hallo allemaal,

So many stories! I am thinking, then again basically I have only one narrative. Somehow all my life my main feeling is always there is something wrong. Quite normal! I studied Literature an d languages in order to get away from anything ‘useful’. Then, I stumbled on what is now Internet of Things and realized I had found a monster of epic proportions that I either was going to eat for which I would need all my senses out faculties, so it would feed me, or without such an enemy I would lose myself in fighting a thousand fights all feeding my addictive nature and then I would not be able to resist relieving stres by any means necessary which would wear me down and make me feel unhappy with myself.
So I choose course one and I have now nearly closed the loop. In 20 years I have build a large network in Council, set up iotdaty.org, became a Twitter IoT Influencer and keynote speaker and purely on the basis of arguments wrote proposals that put me now in the strategy group for the ngi.eu initiative. I can talk to policy makers all across the world. I can enter the room because I am an IoT expert or guru. That is the reason I became that. To be able to talk to any one. So now that I am able to, I realize there is very little use in that. People have been trying to tell me that, but I am a stubborn person. I only trust myself and maybe four other people and then of course there is what I call the tribe or the pack, people you understand fully just by looking into their eyes, realizing it is a full blood borderless zone of worry , pain and longing. First I thought I am making building blocks for them, for us, then I realize that for us there is no ‘us’ just those who make it or not. Making it can be seen as growing calmer and sober and deepening your skills in dreaming and being, no need to act and no need to ‘take care’ or think that you have to ‘take care’. I now see my work, our work; as the potential to build new spaces and conceive of the very notions of what makes up these spaces. So I take myself a bit more serious now. Concretely that means two more years in trying to get a big system shift real (see below: Industry 5.0). But I know that even if that plan would work it would be a horror of a world, as the best we can do now is to assist in building an inclusive Matrix, seeing IoT as a support structure for the planet (full resource management), for people (mental health is issue number 1 fueled by technology and now it should assist? Yes), and for machines (who are growingly soft and hardware hybrid and aware). Indeed, the best we can build is Mordor light. What we will probably get all over the planet is Mordor + as states and companies, wed to each other since the days of weary Kings are disciplining more and more seeing people as ‘entities’. My only hope was always to take over the attractors to the drivers themself and I am pushing my story as high up as possible. Others are doing brilliant work at immense personal and mental cost fully aware of what I have just described, as City CTO as EU technical building b lock builders in EU projects (they are on brico) so in a way we are achieving what we set out to do: become to new conceptual leaders, bringing these scenarios below to the highest EU and other policy makers.
But again, will it breath? Can it blush? Will there be any shame, any love left in this?
This is a big big gamble.
Still I think in times of ontological shifts the only flight can be to try to take over the systematic drivers themselves, not fight a thousand small ones that in such times only ac t as triggers for the old system to discipline, ever more and more. This is no time for martyrs.
In two years I will be out of this narrative. My plan is to start coaching. I kind of like the idea of a boat.
When I saw this IoT enfolding in a flash around 2000 my image was: 500 smart cities aka military zones and Mad Max in between. I still think this is the logical trajectory. For the first time I am encountering resistance in my story building for the EU, old lines of power are getting worried we - blockchain, decentralization, platform economies….- might actually escape their pre ordained ecosystems (like GAFA captured the first waves of freedom in tcp-ip, pass on the packet), so I will push on without much hope of succes. And like I said, what kind of success would that be! All people, objects and processes in the grid. Mordor + is this plus a few people looking at all the data. Mordor light is this but all of us ;looking at all the data. In a way I still argue that this is a kind of Machno platforms with a light form of organization: communism on infrsatructure and permission less on services. It is as if all the light have been switched on full, Luciferian. It will and IoT is exposing all overhead, corruption and waste. But at what cost? Are humans so daft and dumb that they are going willingly into this transparency? Maybe it it is the price they have to pay for the wreckage and ruins in animal and biodiversity? Hmm, that would mean we are in the presence of Judgement day! A bit too wild for a simple dreamer like me.

I just want got go sleeping in the midday sun, dream of playing football and ay mother calling me home for dinner and me not hearing that,
We heard, but did not ‘hear’. We kept playing.
Which kid can keep playing nowadays with the leash on as phone?

I love Tolkien. If there will be a boat we will be on it acting out the scene :) waving as the last men and women sail away, for the era of he hybrid to start,

But smiling as I write this as personally I am getting lighter by the day and very happy, also happy to start getting out more in a few years, most certainly to Brazil!

Greetings, Rob









Industry 5.0

Audience: all strategic decision makers: .biz, .gov, .mil, .intel.
Scale: Europe as a 500 million zone
Timeframe: 3 – 5 – 7 years
Scope: an unlimited and abundant value model harnessing data, platforms and AI in common governance system, the logical and necessary step after the euro, the digital single market, and GDPR is to own and regulate the drivers of the Digital Transition and not the repercussions. We are experiencing the last potential zone of transition with humans in agency. This implies that patterns of change still follow forms that are set by deeply rooted human fears, hopes and dreams. The next iteration will not follow our ‘normal’ pattern of change. This is the most important insight from which consequent planning must develop.
Mindset: War. Creating digital twins of any item (goods, persons and industrial iot systems) has created a plane of agency that is invisible but running alongside analogue objects, persons and processes. Any governance of the ‘real, must include a governance of the virtual. We propose to build the governance model for this duality. This duality has an ‘extra’, as the artificial intelligence - which is basically the most experiential intelligence as it comes from sensors measuring the most mundane of occurrences: heat, speed, rhythm, noise, depth…… This then creates a ‘hybrid’. Governance of this ‘hybrid’ is new. China has set the example but is also struggling to find the balance between centralization and decentralization. As they started from a centralization position, their tendency is towards more control. In Europe we can build a better balance between centralization and decentralization as we can argue aa governance from this position of the hybrid, not from an analogue set of assumptions about the world.
If successful: Leadership in governance models, these can be re-iterated in Africa. Leadership in circular economy and because of full resource management of devices (any device, consumer or industrial) and resources (energy, water, food…) such a governance is the only inclusive and democratic way to mitigate Climate Change risks.
The cost of not doing this: Breakdown of the union in 5-10 years. Citizens stop paying taxes models in crisis over fifty years delivering poor services. gov start disciplining and protecting the model with violence (Spain, France) and halting innovation (GDPR)

Goods, persons, houses, situations and Industrial processes all radiate data and create digital twins. These twins exist as sets of properties in an analytic layer that is in many hands at the moment but not really under multi stakeholder control. Whoever or whatever gains agency in and on that layer (which defines governance of the everyday) must grasp the practice and theory of assigning, withdrawing, validating and defining the very nature of entitlements; who/what/when/where exists how and why? The situation is hybrid in the sense that the digital twins actually begin to actuate back in the ‘analogue’ objects. This is the moment of ontological change. It demands a new toolset on the notion of identity itself. Uncoupling identity in thinking of “entitlements’ opens up a new field of value and services. In the case of self-driving cars this way of thinking could argue for liability not with real person-identities but with ‘entitlements’; any combination of a particular driver (with particular points on a passport and certain characteristics) and a particular car. This reasoning can be extended to any service in the network.
The current role for institutional actors towards the digital is to regulate and fine. These tools have run their course. The implementation of penalties and fines is not real time, biased by party politics, and hinders innovation and risk- taking especially by small actors at fringes.
We propose a concrete three-step process to build a vibrant inclusive democratic internet ecosystem by 2025.

The first step is started: regulating data in GDPR.

The second is regulating digital signatures for persons, eIDas is achieved. Future internet services composition will develop in digital signatures to be achieved in Taskforce Services (TS), and resilient architectures to be achieved in digital signatures in Taskforce Infrastructures (TI).

Digital Signatures for services (banking, payment, energy, education, care, mobility, connectivity…) and Digital Signatures for architectures (virtual and analogue enablers of connectivity) are defined by stakeholders that organize themselves, ICANN style, without any commercial intent to take profit elsewhere. They are a tool to complement current actions on procurement and local agency as in this kind of SLA it does not matter that the original data sets and analytical platforms are not under your control. In this manner local stakeholders are a priority part of building the next layer of value, naming the new entities that are formed when AI inspired intelligence starts to see patterns unrecognizable before. Prof. Dr. Michael ten Hompel, Managing Director at Fraunhofer-Institut for ‘Materialfluss und Logistik’, describes the consequences for something as “solid” as logistics:

“The logical consequence of the Internet of Things is not just a new philosophy of how we can control our production and logistics. It completely changes the paradigms of conventional supply chain management. Within the Internet of Things the supply chain will be created in real time: Entities, consisting of objects and a piece of (agent based) software, generates the resulting supply chain ‘on the move.’ Therefor the sequences of operations are not predicted. This leads to a new understanding of how to handle our logistic management which won’t be a supply chain (!) anymore.”

This reasoning on logistics can be extended to any service in the network, from wearables, to smart homes, connected and autonomous vehicles and smart city applications. Digital signatures can then also be defined as situational contracts “combining the IoT ability to track real-time environmental conditions with the transparency and irreversibility of smart contracts. Together they allow a diverse set of actors to wrangle new forms of granular environmental governance.”

The third step is to embed these signatures for persons, services and architectures into a sustainable
framework for access and identity.

This could be brokered by 
•    substituting the passport for a device (running Estonian e-card) talking to friendly servers, platforms and Clouds running public algorithms and ethical AI, enabling direct democracy through local referenda and embedding contributions from taxpayers in a rich value layer fostering innovative public and private services in a comprehensive sovereign framework
•    adding security, framework and architectural checks for any device when it receives a electrical appliance label
•    regulating the router market, in, IP and 5G and adding security, framework and architectural checks for any router
•    and…

The purpose of brokering a collective roadmap along these lines can be done within the workplan of the CSA NGI Forward, Strategy CSA of Next Generation Internet.