Bruce Sterling really is an exhausting kind of guy. If I understand his current drift, CafePress is a sort of version 0.01 factory for the production of "spimes", which he defines as "manufactured objects whose informational support is so overwhelmingly extensive and rich that they are regarded as material instantiations of an immaterial system". The t-shirts and mugs and mousepads produced by CafePress would be fully-fledged spimes if they came with RFIDs and were engineered to self-destruct on command like that bizarre polymer which biodegrades into fertilizer & viable sunflower seed.

Not that this whole "Internet of Things"/"Spime" thing is a *new* thing from Sterling. The construction-materials-with-built-in-directions which his protagonists use to build their research labs in Distraction strike me as an early version of the spime, if an unnamed version thereof.

I really ought to blogroll Mely, from whom I ganked this. Next time I remember to open the templates before starting a post, I promise...