Forget the IoT. Meet the IoZ: our Internet of Zombie things

“The end starts slowly, and then comes all at once in most fictional depictions of the ‘zombie apocalypse’. In HBO’s The Last of Us, based on the post-apocalyptic plot of a classic video game, a mutated strain of the Cordyceps fungus turns its human hosts in to twitchy, cannibalistic zombies. Human civilization is brought to its knees in a matter of days. There’s also a quick collapse in the comic book series The Walking Dead. Then there’s Station 11, another post-apocalyptic story on HBO, adapted by the novel by Emily St. John Mandel, in which a virulent strain of influenza wipes out 99.9% of humans in the space of a couple weeks.

In reality though, disease and illness work their “magic” on human society gradually and over much longer periods of time: new diseases spread, people get sick and die, societies adapt but the disease leaves its mark.

I think that kind of slow rolling crisis that slowly undermines and weakens a system is a good image to keep in mind as we contemplate a less talked-about “zombie apocalypse:” the one that is bubbling up among our connected stuff on the fast-growing Internet of Things.”