Is the internet the problem?

As ever, Julian is both almost certainly right about this and has the clarity of thought to state it properly (and as ever buried in a post mostly about other things):

I have the view that the “Internet” part of the “Internet of Things” is the problem, with all these servers, gateways, analytics, and remote controls from anywhere in the world. None of it does anything useful, because the value of data and control of a thing is inversely proportional to your remoteness from it in time and space.

The answer is therefore going to be nearby. It’s not ever going to be found from pushing it out to some faraway server in China.

What we really want are “Things with Internet Technology”. That is stuff with Wifi, Webpages and Wisdom. No nonsense, fun, and easily reprogrammable on an escalator of betterness to a high plane than the bare ground we start with.