The social fabric of object allies

Weeknotes 370 - We give objects jobs to do for us. Now they're forming an entourage of allies. What kind of social fabric are they creating—and where do we fit in? And the latest of last weeks news on human-AI-things collabs.

Interpretation by Midjourney

Dear reader!

Hope you have had a relaxing week, with family or friends, or just winding down. I did, but I'd like to share some thoughts and links I've captured this week to close the year. I am thinking about some changes to the newsletter for 2026, as you do with new years, and potentially do a wrap-up of last year and certainly a look ahead to the next year. In this newsletter, I keep last week's lens.

Not any specific to share about personal experiences last week. I was in Hannover for a pre xmas weekend break. Good city for the Xmas experience for sure. I was there in 2000 for the Expo with the famous Dutch pavilion of MVDRV. It is still there, and it has only been renovated now. It lost its feel imho. The whole area is slowly being turned into a business district, with new housing next to it. I have seen more integrated Expo make-overs (Lisbon is famous) and also fewer (Sevilla).

The slow pace of the make-over is maybe a theme in Hannover; one of the most interesting things to see was the Ihne-Zentrum building. A seventies brutalist like complex set up in the best traditions of urbanist design of that era (the Bijlmer in Amsterdam had the same socially oriented setup). The complex is half empty; the shopping centre is no longer there, but people are still living, and new groups like student housing are being added. It could be an interesting social community complex, and I am wondering if there is new potential for these types of “city in city” concepts. If you are interested, this is a short documentary on the complex.

How we relate to our physical space as a social construct is an interesting lens when this physical space becomes more of an active social actor. That is something I had to think about while listening to two podcasts last week. Is there s a future social fabric of object allies?

NB: we have some new videos from TH/NGS in the playlist: the hot-takes by some participants as captured by Peet.

This week’s triggered thought

Watching Nate B. Johnson's take on chain reactions in AI, he made a point worth sitting with: we're past measuring AI's direct impact. The real story now is the second-order effects—the trickle-down consequences of AI seeping into the mundane tools we use every day.

This reminded me of the old Little Britain comedy sketch: "Computer says no." That phrase captured something essential about how computing changed daily life—not through dramatic transformation, but through quiet bureaucratic creep. The computer became both an impact and an excuse. Not my decision, the computer's decision.

Will "AI says no" be different? It might be trickier. "Computer says no" was localized—a screen, a terminal, a specific system. AI is becoming ambient, embedded in email, search results, homes, cars. When AI is everywhere, the excuse becomes harder to locate and easier to deploy. This connects to something Tom Giarriello said on Julian Bleecker's podcast. He frames our relationship with objects not in terms of function or brand, but as jobs we delegate to them. We give objects jobs to do for us. And increasingly, these objects form what he calls an "entourage of allies."

Objects as allies. Not just tools, not just products—allies with delegated tasks. We've explored for years how AI becomes part of our physical environment—objects with agency, digital twins holding patterns and predictions, Actor-Network Theory treating objects as actors. The question that opens up here is what happens when these object-allies start connecting to each other, forming swarms, clusters, and ultimately: a social fabric of things. Your thermostat talks to your calendar which talks to your car which talks to the traffic system. Each object doing its delegated job, allied with you—but also allied with other objects, and increasingly with AI systems you didn't directly choose.

This raises an interesting parallel. In our human social world, we operate across multiple layers of relations: strong ties with family, weak ties with acquaintances, neighborhood bonds, professional connections, ad hoc relations with strangers at an event. These layers form our social fabric, each with different qualities of trust, obligation, and exchange.

What kind of social fabric are the object-allies forming? Do they have equivalents of strong and weak ties? Are our personal devices in a kind of family relation while the city's infrastructure forms a looser network of acquaintances? And more pressing: where do we sit in this emerging structure? Are we part of this new social fabric, or outside it—served by it, perhaps, but not truly members?

Seven years ago, when we started Cities of Things, the focus was on individual objects with agency and identity. The conversation has shifted. Objects are becoming touchpoints into larger AI systems. The question of participatory AI*—whether these systems work with us rather than around us—depends on understanding these new social structures. The entourage of allies is forming. Whether it remains an entourage that serves us, or develops its own logic of relations, is worth watching carefully.

*) So I started a self-commissioned research project with Cities of Things to reflect on 7 years of this lens on living with smart objects in our cities. I will interview several experts that were of defining importance in the last seven years, and this reference to participatory AI vs objects as partners came up in one of the first interviews with Maria Luce Lupetti. I will keep you posted on the research here.

About me

I'm an independent researcher through co-design, curator, and “critical creative”, working on human-AI-things relationships. You can contact me if you'd like to unravel the impact and opportunities through research, co-design, speculative workshops, curate communities, and more.

Currently working on: Cities of Things, ThingsCon, Civic Protocol Economies.

Notions from last week’s news

Human-AI partnerships

Six mental models for working with, or three if you do not have a paid subscription, I think, apart from the specific models here, this is a useful way to understand the possible relation we might have or want with AI.

Don’t forget the past when ‘designing’ paths into the future. And as side-thought: nothing wrong to keep calling it a machine. That’s what it is after all.

Do you know how these coding agents actually work? Check under the hood.

The benefits of relationships with AI.

Robotic performances

Will this exoskeleton respond to the commands of the dog’s owner?

Self driving in China is a bumpy road too.

Definitions: are these robots or (smart) sensors? It is clear what sells better.

These are mostly open doors. But I like the third one, to make it more explicit and build a relationship with the AI.

How fast is China growing in robotics? Or is there still work to do?

With humanoids, you can think of two ways: those that try to adapt to human environments, aiming to be the best-fitting robots. Or the ones that try to learn from proven human (or animal) capabilities. Like sensing.

Immersive connectedness

A sweet project. A nice example of an assistive device.

A typical example of an AI-touchpoint device. Is the ring changing and being enhanced with AI, or is it about the new connections it makes with the intelligence? Rhetorical question, of course.

Tech societies

The risk of inflated expectations in AI with ditto investments is not a new take, but as it is one of the signature stories of 2025, it's worth sharing here. He is borrowing the term of Doctorow (Enshittification).

More bubble talk and takes.

Chinese models are in their second iteration and more serious even a new competitor for AI players.

I agree with Frank, as I mentioned earlier in this newsletter, one of the significant uses of AI tooling is that we can easily start building our personal tooling. Not so much personal media, but tooling. That is different. And democratising, potentially (and let’s hope this wave will be protected from big tech hostile takeovers).

The play in AI is having the right mix of components, from technology to inference. And the right people, this is considered an acquihire for a large part.

Only now?

Next to physical things, also digital repairs…

2025 > 2026

What media leaders got wrong in 2025. According to themselves.

Actually, interesting uses of AI in 2025. That is the promise of this overview. That still confuses sometimes smart objects with AI, imho. And some are more concepts, which is fine, of course. Two perspectives. And another take: personal gadgets.

Will 2026 bring private intruding AI?

Weekly paper to check

On my list to check; The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI

In a context where the stabilization of AI as a figure enables further investments in associated techniques and technologies, AI's status as controversial works to reiterate both its ontological status and its agency. It follows that interventions into the field of AI controversies that fail to trouble and destabilise the figure of AI risk contributing to its uncontroversial reproduction.

Suchman, L. (2023). The uncontroversial ‘thingness’ of AI. Big Data & Society, 10(2), 20539517231206794.

https://doi.org/10.1177/20539517231206794

What’s up for the coming week?

Still a holiday week. Next week we can expect more. I will keep an eye on what is the vibe of CES. Is it consumer robotics edition? Like a bathroom cleaner.

Still on the list: The Illusion of Thinking at v2.

Week 370: The social fabric of object allies