There is a place in my world for objects with agency, just not a very large one.

I was pondering in the shower this morning as I usually do about the assigned "Why Things Matter" article. I was looking at my shampoo bottle and thinking to myself, "No, I do not want a little micro chip in my shampoo bottle that reports to other shampoo bottles how much shampoo I used and when before posting it on the Shampoo Consumption Habits in Massachusetts website." There are bigger problems in the world that could be solved far more directly and cheaply than how Julian Bleeker suggests through blogjects. Aside from looking like he used the Microsoft Word "synonyms" option on every word to make them as big and hard to understand as possible, his essay did have a point, albeit a largely invalid one.
Having pollution sensors on birds or broadcasting micro chips in our car exhaust pipes isn't a half bad idea (although the pigeon-mounted sensors really should have monitored altitude too, but I'll let that slide). The way industrialized countries are contributing negatively to the environment begs for some sort of urgency in understanding and correcting the most imminent of our pollution related problems. I feel that the process of deploying and responding to blogjects and their reports is a lengthly one. A straight forward scientific study and report with the same funding might be a little bit less thorough than allowing the blogjects to do their thing over a period of years, but the time saved might be more important than the accuracy of the findings. The other side of the argument of course is that most people don't browse through scientific reports on their free-time, but they may check out the blogjects on pollution website. Getting the public excited about keeping the earth clean is probably the best way to go about cleaning up the environment. This is why I feel that blogjects will definitely have a place in our future, but this place still doesn't include my future shampoo bottles.
Actually, if I were doing a project on rising levels of shampoo usage on weekends, those blogjects might come in handy. But really, how often is that going to happen? I would argue that putting a blogject on a shampoo bottle is not much different than putting one on migrating whales. It interests only a small group of people, but costs a lot of money to implement (money that could be spent making Chinese production cleaner or feeding starving people in less developed countries). "Critter cams that disseminate a realtime video stream from a Kapok tree in the Amazonian rain forest or an RSS feed and podcast from a school of migrating whales showing all kinds of meaningful environmental data would definitely make it into my news aggregator," says Bleecker. If this actually happened to him right now, I might ask ten years from now how many times he actually took time out of his busy day to admire the migrating whale blogs, I suspect he could count the number of times on his right hand. We get enough junk mail as it is. Chain E-mails are fun to receive when you get your first one, but it's not so fun when you get your 20th. The fun starts to turn into bitterness. While blogjects might take the world by storm for the first few years, there might be a point when there is just too much internet clutter from the sheer amount of specialized and to most people, uninteresting data produced by the object-bloggers. Their great "agency" may start to get on our nerves.
I say we should send a hellish army of blogjects against our world's greatest problems. And if we suddenly suspected that using Head and Shoulders shampoo gives you and everybody around you cancer I'd be the first to turn my shampoo bottle into a soap dispensing, internet blogging, first class internet citizen. So far that hasn't happened yet.