Think Hegelian.

The smartphone gave us pocket comms and information. Unfortunately, with the Jevons paradox and Gresham's Law impacting on our fundamentally limited attention -- rivality is the counterpoint of virality -- we're in a world in which distractions, distortions, impositions, agency, and privacy are up for grabs.

Contra several assertions within this thread, we've seen information systems and regimes which have lasted far beyond 50 years: speech and language themselves, early writing systems, clay tablets, papayrus, block printing, moveable type, increased literacy, ever cheaper and faster publishing methods, voice, image, moving image, and broadcast. More recently networks with some degree of peer-to-peer and mass comms integrated.

There have been advances and regressions. When Gutenberg first pulled the lever on his press in Europe, there were 30,000 books on the continent. Not 30,000 titles, but 30,000 books, total. There were 50 million by the end of the century, nearly a billion by 1800. Reproduction rates went from about 120 impressions an hour, to over one million with the steam-powered rotary presses of the late 19th century and early 20th, which promoted populist wars in Cuba, the Philippines, and the muddy trenches of Normandy.

Liberalisation in the 19th century lead to a fundamentalist backlash amongst early 20th century religious groups, particularly in the United States, the descendents of which are still active in creationist, young-earth, and global-warming denialist cults.

Mobile devices of today strike me as akin to patent-medicine and radium-water peddlers of an earlier age. We're waking up to the fact that these technologies have both positive and negative elements. The boosters, ben-evans amongst them, keep preaching more and faster, shades of the jetpack, flying car, meal-in-a-pill, and plastic-prefab-house fantasies of the 1930s through 1960s.

Instead, we realised that not all marketing claims are justified, that pollution presents real hazards, that there's something to be said for modestly-traditional housing and clothing styles (the 1990s grunge fad looked little like Lost in Space or Space 1999).

We're discovering that our social networks and bubble-filtered news meshes poorly with liberal democracy, or carefully-cultivated brand-consciousness, in the case of YouTube. Spam and phone solicitations crowd out what few moments of uninterrupted time we can find -- the technorati now revel in not being connected, rather than jacking in to their email every five minutes. A practice which was freakish in 1999, naff today.

Among the largest disruptions of the 1990s was a small local events-and-items listing which was passed about via email. Turns out that it accomplished, at far less cost, and price, what newspaper classifieds did at the time.

Whilst Moore's Law appears to be winding down in terms of chip density and capacity, the cost component of it isn't, and we still have the fact that computing costs are falling by roughly an order of magnitude each decade. This means that what Google accomplished in the 1990s, Facebook could achieve at roughly 1/10 the cost, and today's Emerging Threats will be able to achieve at 1/10 the cost of Facebook, 1/100th that of Google.

It also means that the cost horizon is shifting, from making and obtaining compute devices, to managing and organising them. If you're interested in getting a log of conditions over the life of a package shipment, you can slap a $5 SOC unit in the packaging and have it phone home when it finds WiFi (or 4GL) at its destination. In ten years, that will be a $0.50 SOC, in twenty, $0.05.

We're likely to have tens or hundreds of billions of such devices, all around us. Which at such price-points, won't be worth the time to property engineer, secure, harden, or patch.

Collectively, these will have a considerable amount of processing power.

And though most of these devices won't be tied in to physical systems, that compute power might be put to use finding those that are and ... persuading them in various ways. Lights. Heating systems. Automated vacuums. Industrial control machinery. Drones. Self-driving vehicles.

Food for thought.