ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses ubiquitous computing and related matters. It provides an attention to a range of “big picture” issues pertaining to infrastructure, energy and resource use, and socio-economic integration—centering on questions of sustainability and civil rights, touching upon some theoretical and historical issues where relevant. In the era of Big Data, useful information is generated less by sophisticated algorithms working on limited data than by relatively simple statistical processes working on almost unlimited data. The application of algorithmic automation across diverse aspects of human activity is one of the hallmarks of ubicomp. The advent of global ubiquity offers new repressive apparatus to the Nation State, and simultaneously challenges the coherence of the Nation State—a reality acknowledged by some states which control Internet communications. Two decades ago (in 1989), the fall of the Berlin wall was lauded in the west as the victory of democracy and free speech over state surveillance and repression, typified by the vilified Stasi of East Germany.
