IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - September 2020 - 9

Book Reviews
Jacob Ossar

A Billion Little Pieces
A Billion Little Pieces: RFID and Infrastructures of Identification
By Jordan Frith. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press, 2019, 304 pp. Part of the Infrastructures Series,
Geoffrey C. Bowker and Paul N. Edwards, Eds.
adio Frequency Identification (RFID) is a
key part of the infrastructure underlying the burgeoning
Internet of Things. RFID tags, which
can be attached to objects and
then scanned with readers to give
these objects a digital signature,
can be as small as a grain of rice.
To take just a few examples, RFID
tags can be embedded in subway
cards, articles of clothing in retail
shops, and living beings like livestock or even humans. Infrastructure is, often by design, difficult to
notice. We tend to take even large,
visible infrastructure like roads and
bridges for granted unless we
encounter a pothole or a traffic
jam. RFID, even though it underlies
electronic toll collection and other
systems we interact with every day
and is poised to become practically
ubiquitous, is far less conspicuous.
Jordan Firth's A Billion Little Pieces
aims to bring RFID into the foreground, giving readers a sense of
what the technology is, how it is
being and could be used, and how
concerned we should be about its
implications, especially those
regarding privacy.
This book is not aimed at people well-acquainted with RFID. A
good portion is devoted to explaining what RFID is, tracing its devel-

opment, and giving a general
overview of its uses. Those seeking an in-depth treatment of the
physics of RFID or detailed technical specifications of RFID tags are
explicitly enjoined to look elsewhere. Already knowledgeable
readers might find later chapters
discussing the social implications
of RFID more interesting, but the
contents of these chapters will
also likely not come as news to
people who have thought about
these issues.
While the book does not presume any special knowledge of
RFID or technical background on
the part of its readers, if you are
unfamiliar with the style of writing
favored by continental theorists like
Foucault, some of Frith's prose can
be jarring. For example, rather than
write about RFID being used to
track the movements of "people,"
he prefers the term "bodies." Perhaps this jargon is warranted since,
as he explains, one important use
of RFID is in managing livestock.
Still, even in contexts like access to
subways or toll roads where it's
clear no non-humans are involved,
Frith favors phrases like "the mobility of bodies." However, writing in
this stilted fashion can remind us
that, from the point of view of an
RFID tag, human beings are just
another object.
Locutions of this sort appear
throughout the book but are thickest in the introduction, which

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.3012313
Date of current version: 2 September 2020

SEPTEMBER 2020

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IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

invokes theoretical jargon from
fields like sociology, philosophy,
and communications studies. But
the book as a whole is not as
abstruse as the introduction might
suggest. A few of the more jargon-y
terms F rith employs show up
throughout the book, e.g., "spimes,"
coined by futurist Bruce Stirling,
which refers to objects that are able
to relate their own histories. However, in most cases Frith will introduce a concept, briefly describe
how RFID is a good example of it,
and then move on without returning
to it again. In the more descriptive
chapters about the history and
details of RFID technology, the writing is notably less abstract with
fewer recondite citations.
The main argument of A Billion
Little Pieces is that RFID is best
understood as an "infrastructure of
identification." The key function of
RFID tags is to allow individual
objects (which can be shipping pallets, toll transponders in cars, articles of clothing in retail stores,
livestock, etc.) to be identified in a
way that can be read and then processed digitally. To function, RFID
tags must be part of a system that
includes readers to scan the tags
and software that adds the scanned
information to a database or manipulates it in some way. The bulk of
the book is devoted to filling in the
details about these systems and
the various things they can be used
to do.

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