Revenge by Gadget

It was interesting to see the Wall Street Journal picking up on a trend we've been watching at Make: magazine, namely the emergence of devices that let people interfere with other people's devices. In an article entitled Revenge by Gadget, the Journal noted:

Thanks to the falling cost of microcontroller chips and the lure of easy online sales, inventors are turning out record numbers of gadgets. One growing subset of these inventions: products that help people neutralize antisocial behavior at the push of a button.

Devices featured in the article include the "Bark Control Birdhouse", which responds to barking dogs by emitting an ultrasound pulse that will silence the dogs, the "no contact jacket", which can be used to shock an attacker, and the TV-B-Gone, which is a keychain universal remote that allows you to turn off televisions in public places. (Make has featured a number of projects involving the TV-B-Gone.) They left out the even more insidious cell phone jammers.

While I'm not sure I approve of the trend of interfering with other people's tech (christened "annoyancetech" by Foo Chris Csikszentmihalyi), we only call the plays. We don't make them. The pattern of attack-response, spy-counterspy, seems basic to human behavior. And as devices become an integral part of our daily experience and shared space, we can expect to see devices supporting all kinds of human behavior. As the y-combinator t-shirt says, inventors learn to "Make something people want."

But in addition, what this story shows is something I've called "the hacker progression." That is, new technology often first shows up as a series of hacks done by people who play with technology for the fun of it. Then you get to small inventors. Once some of those succeed, the technology gets established, and mainstream companies get into the act. In short, "watching the alpha geeks" is often a good way to predict future economic activity.

In this particular case, the alpha geek trend on which we based the idea of Make: Magazine is the convergence of cheap electronics (both for sale and as materials scavenged and repurposed from obsolescent gear), a weariness with consumer culture leading to a DIY resurgence, and the increasing ease of embedding computer intelligence into ordinary objects.

Make: primarily celebrates the homebrew hacker, but we're seeing more and more economic activity, indicating that this trend is entering its second phase. The early signs of commercialization noted by the WSJ article, will soon turn into a flood. Among the trends that will pour more fuel on the fire:

• The on-demand manufacturing revolution. There used to be a gulf between the hardware hackers we celebrate in the pages of Make and the kind of stuff we buy in stores. That barrier is breaking down, as new on-demand manufacturing networks put not just the workshop but factories in China at the hacker's disposal. (We covered this topic in the O'Reilly Radar Executive Briefing at Etech earlier this year.)

• Open Source Hardware. Realizing that any successful consumer device will be cloned in a matter of weeks or months, entrepreneurs are increasingly taking lessons from open source software, building business models that don't depend on proprietary IP, but instead releasing their designs in hope of building revenue in new ways. (We're planning a special report on this trend in a future issue of Release 2.0. If you're working on an open source hardware project, let us know.)

• The sensor revolution. More and more sensors of various types are becoming available, making it possible to build devices that respond intelligently to more kinds of external stimuli. We're closely watching this trend. We're especially interested in new types of user interface that will be enabled by sensors (think Nintendo Wii), and the spread of networked sensors, which will bring together the world of embedded intelligence with the world of collective intelligence that we call Web 2.0. (Send in any tips or links you have on these topics!)