Tom Coates, The Age of Point-at-Things, April 26th 2005It’s like there are two views of the world - the solid one around us and the Matrix-style flowing green lines one. In this second world, until you give a thing a name - until you can point at it in greenspace - it simply doesn’t exist…
Now I know that the creation of universal and world-unique identifiers for things must seem one of the most tedious concepts or projects known to man. But I believe that it’s fundamental to our technological development - and particularly our ability to take our ever-increasing computing power and increasingly interconnected appliances and merge them seemlessly with the environment around us. The greenspace of the Matrix needs to merge with the physical - they need to become indistinguishable. Until we can point at, until we can pick up, until we can handle, we will never be able to use these concepts around us effectively.
