Internet of Jams

In David Byrne’s book, “How Music Works,” he talks about the mixtape:

“The mixtapes we made for ourselves were musical mirrors. The sadness, anger, or frustration you might be feeling at a given time could be encapsulated in the song selection. You made mixtapes that corresponded to emotional states and they’d be available to pop into the deck when each feeling needed reinforcing or soothing. The mixtape was your friend, your psychiatrist, and your solace. […] The gift of a mixtape was very personal. Often they were made for exactly one person, no one else. A radio program with one listener. Each song carefully chosen with love and humor as if to say, ‘this is who I am and by this tape, you will know me better.’”

As an elder millennial, I remember the transition from mixtapes to CDs mixes (which I think we still called mixtapes) and eventually iTunes Shared Libraries and playlists that were shared on our local network via Bonjour (coincidentally, the inventor of which I recently collaborated with on a Thread Group webinar). Some of us eventually started putting our AIM screen names as the title of our Shared Libraries, a mechanism via which I made my best friends in college (one of whom turned out to be Amulets!).

This mixtape/playlist was initially made for myself. On a run at some point during the pandemic, the phrase ‘internet of jams’ just popped into my head and I had a giggle and started added songs. It’s evolved over the past four years, and I’ve probably listened to it hundreds of times. Over so many repeated listens, I think I’ve squeezed out every single reference to the internet of things out of some of my favorite songs/artists that I could manage. Sometimes, when I feel a little down or overwhelmed at work, I listen to the playlist to remind myself why I do what I do. I thought there might be some folks out there who’d appreciate a glimpse into my smart home experience set to a playlist of alternative, indie, new wave, and post-punk grooves with some witchy vibes:

Internet of Jams, playlist by annieolivetree.

And it wouldn’t be complete without liner notes, so, I wrote this accompaniment to the music:

1. Electricity - Orchestral Manoeuvers in the Dark

“The ultimate discovery.” Without electricity, none of this works.

2. Digital Witness - St. Vincent

This one is less about the internet of things and more about the ubiquity of the internet everywhere and how humans interact with the world where the internet connects us all the time. “Digital witnesses. What’s the point of even sleeping? If I can’t show it, if you can’t see me? What’s the point of doing anything?”

3. I Turn My Camera On - Spoon

When, oh when, will I be able to turn my Matter cameras on? (Spoiler alert—j/k, you won’t find any leaks here). Seriously though, cameras. I love being able to check on my house when I’m away. I love being able to check on my home when I’m sitting at my desk. Most recently, as this is the first year in my new house, I’ve been using my outdoor cameras to track sunshine in the yard as I’m planning out my lawn and garden. I love a data-driven approach, but this hasn’t proved to be as useful as just moving pots around and seeing where plants thrive.

4. Mirror in the Bathroom - The English Beat

Remember a couple years ago when smart mirrors came out? That’s why this song is on here. I saw the English Beat (or the Beat if you’re English, I guess) while I was in grad school in Houston over ten years ago. I won tickets “on the radio”, which was actually through a corresponding Twitter contest while the station played music (this was during Twitter’s prime, when of course you couldn’t just listen to the radio, you also had to follow the station’s Twitter feed). The pop quiz was about movies the English Beat’s songs were featured in. I answered first—this song in Grosse Pointe Blank, one of my favorite movies of all time.

5. Strange Powers - The Magnetic Fields

First connection on this playlist of smart devices to witchcraft. When I first started working at the Zigbee Alliance, now the Connectivity Standards Alliance, the CEO Tobin Richardson (my former boss) gave me a copy of “Enchanted Objects” by David Rose. I’m not sure I ever finished the book, but the idea of smart devices doing magical stuff in your home has always stuck with me. Sure, my lightbulbs that are aligned to circadian schedules aren’t quite the same as the soothing flicker of candlelight to cast a spell by, but when my lights help me regulate my mood and settle my kids for bed, it does make me feel a bit witchy.

There’re also references in this song to the staggering electric bills in Las Vegas due to the insane amount of lights (some of which are large-scale installations powered by Zigbee, but those ones clearly not being the big contributor to the electric bills with their low power consumption) and the consumer being king (and unhappiness being treason—we’ll get to that later). And that of course brings us to Las Vegas and the Consumer Electronics Show.

6. Heaven or Las Vegas - Cocteau Twins

I had never visited Las Vegas until working in this field. Not sure exactly what Elizabeth Fraser is singing about here, but this song is great and reminds me of flying to CES.

7. Black Coffee In Bed - Squeeze

For a long time, my all-time favorite smart device was my smart coffee maker with a built-in grinder. Coffee has long been a routine for me, setting it up at night and waking up to freshly brewed coffee, yet I have always HATED pressing the buttons and setting up the schedules manually. I usually wake up at different times throughout the week, depending on whether I’m getting my kids up for school or if I have early meetings with Europe or not. So, manually setting the coffee every night is a huge pain. That first coffee maker rocked my world. I’d set the water at night, and it would grind the right amount of coffee and brew automagically. I could set the schedules lazily from my bed right before turning over to sleep. I’d get notifications when it was done. I mean, duh, I could hear the grinder and smell the coffee, but the notifications were enjoyable and comforting, an assurance the coffee has completed downstairs and my house hadn’t caught fire, I suppose.

It was all working great until the water sensor started malfunctioning. Then the device always thought it had two cups of water and sometimes would try to brew when there wasn’t actually water in the tank! I dealt with that for a while and was just extra careful about it, until it gradually registered more and more water on an empty tank. I did reach out to the company and they easily replaced the machine, which was almost a year old at that point. The second machine worked great again for about six months until it started having some kind of heating malfunction where at the end of the brew cycle it would just get hotter and hotter. One day I burnt my hand on the side of the machine and decided that was enough. Sadly, I had to get rid of it. I won’t call out the brand, but it was one of those companies that was just putting smarts into any kind of device. The coffee maker, for example, only came with setup instructions for the app, no info at all on cleaning, maintenance, or tips for brewing the perfect cup. At the end of the day, I think smart devices need to be smartified by the people who know how to make the dumb version.

Now, I have a dumb, non-programmable coffee maker connected to a Matter smart plug. I have a routine set up in Google Home to turn it on at a specific time (which I still do adjust as part of my nightly screen rituals), and another separate routine to turn it off everyday at the same time. It works, but I do long for the smarts inside the device. Hopefully by the time this $25 machine craps out, a worthy replacement will be available.

8. Daft Punk is Playing at My House - LCD Soundsystem

This one’s on here for the robots in the basement. But really because in 2020 during the pandemic, Silicon Labs hosted its first Works With virtual conference and this song played during a break between sessions. Back when I was working at the Alliance, I always thought the Silabs folks were cool and good people and it seemed like a great place to work. Attending that conference and hearing this song, I thought dang, they also have good taste in music? Not saying I eventually sought a job at Silabs because someone put LCD Soundsystem on a playlist, but maybe it was a contributing factor when I put in my application.

9. Within Your Reach - The Replacements

This one’s here for smoke alarms and other sensors whose batteries die at inconvenient times and definitely never within your reach. A great case for Thread, I think!

10. Enjoy the Silence - Depeche Mode

This is so goofy, but at some point when asking my smart speaker about the weather, Alexa would report and then add on, “Enjoy the Sunshine” and for whatever reason I always expected her to say, “Enjoy the Silence.” Yes, girl, I will.

11. Another Girl Another Planet - The Only Ones

Space travel is surely powered by connected devices and Zigbee recently played a part in our exploration of Mars. The line, “Long journeys wear me out; I know I can’t live without it,” also resonates during those long overseas trips to standards groups meetings that us standards nerds need to embark on multiple times a year. Not quite space travel, but feels like it sometimes.

12. Camarillo Brillo - Frank Zappa

Just another witchy reference and one of the greatest songs ever written. This magic mama’s stereo was four-way and that’s probably about as high tech as her house was, what with her rancid poncho, tarot cards, and castanets.

13. Scenic World (Lon Gisland Version) - Beirut

Smart home scene support, of course. In a smart home, scenes are groups of automatons that are triggered at the same time. So, you might have a nighttime scene that warms up and dims a bunch of lights across the house as well as turns down the volume on your smart speakers. Or perhaps a movie night scene that mutes notifications, turns the lights red in the living room, and prevents the robot vacuum from running. If I’m being honest, I just haven’t ever gotten scenes to work well in my house. I have all these automatons running separately, controlled via different ecosystems. One day, I hope we solve this problem with Matter.

14. Sleep the Clock Around - Belle and Sebastian

This one’s about sleepy end devices, of course. Intermittently connected, ultra low-power sensors. I was really into this song and played it on repeat when I got my first iPod (gen3) and set of earbuds in my freshman year of college. The sound on those earbuds was so shitty, I used to press them into my ears so I could hear the bass. But the aesthetic of walking around campus with those earbuds in was more important for a year or two until I switched back to the over-the-ear Sony headphones I used to use with my Discman that actually produced decent sound. That decision eventually led me to my first pair of Sennheisers that I definitely “needed” for doing acoustic analyses and not just bopping at my desk to the same songs on repeat.

15. Human Behavior - Björk

This one’s dedicated to all of us who work with the human factors — UX researchers, marketers, product managers. My first job out of grad school was product manager for an open source association management software within a website design agency. Given my background in ethnographic research, I was immediately drawn to the User Experience aspect of the job. My god, watching people click around your website and do exactly the opposite of what you expect them to do is so fascinating, yet frustrating! “Definitely no logic…”

16. Rip It Up - Orange Juice

And then of course, once you observe what humans do with your technology, you might need to rip up those well-laid plans and start again. Sidenote, I only recently ‘discovered’ this band via interesting album artwork I saw on r/vinyl. I was delighted to learn this band is fronted by Edwyn Collins, singer of “Girl Like You,” another one of my favorite songs from my childhood, as it was featured in Empire Records.

17. Technical (You’re So) - The Magnetic Fields

How did I manage to sneak another obscure Magnetic Fields song on here? This one’s dedicated to Matter’s Technical Sub Group and how they go “hacking around the world” to build this 1,000+ page spec, test plans, and SDK. “You’re all counter-culture demigods.”

18. There is a Light That Never Goes Out - The Smiths

I have this three-way light fixture with some smart bulbs in it (again, not gonna call out any technologies or brands here), and for the longest time one of those bulbs just refused to participate in my ‘lights out’ automation at night. Every morning for a few months, I’d wake up to this single, solitary light that would never go out.

Happy to report, those bulbs finally received a firmware update and they work reliably now like they should.

19. Bassem Sabry - of Montreal

I couldn’t leave this playlist without a song from my all-time favorite band. If you’re familiar with any of Kevin Barnes’ music, you’ll know his lyrics are notoriously esoteric, but good god his harmonies are *chef’s kiss*. So this gem off Aureate Gloom has quick references to “voltage” and “conduits,” coming back to where this list started with the building blocks of electrical currents. It also features regular occurrences of double-claps, reminiscent of the early days of the smart home with “The Clapper,” and a funky bass line that brings the Matter Disco Valve to mind (the Disco Valve was conceived after I made this playlist, but I couldn’t include such a song without mentioning the most magical drink dispenser ever created). And then, of course, “I believe in witches, I believe in you,” reminding us to keep things a little magical.

20. Matter Vs. Space - Beulah

Admittedly, not Beulah’s best song, but I couldn’t not include a song that has Matter right in the title.

21. I get a strange kind of pleasure just from hanging on - John Vanderslice

And one final shout out to Thread to round out this playlist. I’m not actually very familiar with this artist, but the first time I heard this song, it conjured up this image for me of my helpful home gently guiding me to be a normal human and not so desperately depressed and anxious. Get up, shower, go to work, just keep hanging in there. Won’t that be nice when someday our smart homes and the internet in general start making us feel better instead of worse? That’s an exaggeration, of course. I do get a strange kind of pleasure in doing the work that I do for the Internet of Things, engaging in the communities I do online (definitely consider myself a Redditor, not a TikTok-er), and the interactions I have with my connected devices.

I find it truly interesting how we ‘communicate’ with our devices and how they can make us feel. Fitness trackers are a great example of what I’m trying to describe. I’m on my fourth brand/type of tracker and there’s such a fine line between providing valuable insights and making people feel miserable about themselves because they just couldn’t bring themselves to even get out of the house let alone exercise for an entire week. My Ōura ring is the first tracker that has consistently made me feel good about myself and be more kind to myself. The way it synthesizes bits of data to provide actionable insights into my health and fitness has been an eye-opener. I understand more about how my decisions during the day affect my sleep and ability for my body to recover and prepare for the next day (I now know that even a glass of alcohol will destroy any chance of rest I might have overnight). It’s helped me be kinder to myself when I’m just feeling tired or down (I also now know that travel absolutely destroys me and I have to be extra caring and gentle with myself to prepare and recover).

I’ve been teased about letting my scores affect how I approach my day, especially when my scores are low: “you only feel tired because your tracker is telling you you slept poorly.” Well yeah, I guess that’s true to some extent, but I’m okay with that. Because it’s more like my scores are showing me that what I’m feeling is real and I don’t need to “just get out of my head.” I can actually give myself a break once in a while, which is a nice change of pace for my brain.

Speaking of which, I’ve been writing these liner notes in all my spare moments over the past week and my ring says it’s past my bedtime. Not sure if you listened to the playlist and/or read this rambling accompaniment to it (which ended up being much longer than I anticipated; I just have a lot of thoughts when I listen to music!), but there it is. The Internet of Jams. Good night y’all!