As many of us deal with the madness of the Mobile World Congress, no buzzword rings quite as loudly at this year’s event as the Internet of Things (IoT).

IoT is a handy buzzword for anything connected wirelessly. Wi-Fi-enabled lightbulb for your house? IoT. Electronic armband tracking you getting off your butt? IoT. Data-driven irrigation system for industrial farming? Still IoT. Nowadays you can just slap a Wi-Fi or BLE module on something and it becomes part of the IoT whether it be the Pura cat water fountain, the Belty smart belt or Sensoria smart socks (Note: Belty the smart belt is a real dumb name). The term has become so all-encompassing to lose any meaning --yet not endowed with enough meaning to real matter to anyone but a cheesy marketer, TV producer or conference organizer. Perhaps it’s high time to put a "smart" fork in it and call it officially dead.

Road to meaninglessness is paved with good intentions

Internet of Things used to be a good mental crutch at the dawn of the new century when Kevin Ashton came up with the term. PCs took the world by storm in the 80s and 90s and the consumer Internet had just turned from a novelty into a mainstream driver of information revolution, triggering a wave that was lifting a myriad of Dotcom startups into multi-million dollar businesses (and then sent many of them crashing on the rocks, but I digress). Back then it was important to have a term describing the concept of Internet escaping the confines of personal computers and becoming interwoven into the physical world.

Then, this handy concept became reality. We started carrying around always-connected supercomputers/phones. We’ve replaced offline video game consoles with powerful media centers, each with its respective app ecosystem. We’ve started making payments through wireless terminals, setting up remote-controlled smart homes, analyzing data harvested from the physical world on a city-wide scale… and none of it is new anymore. Indeed, the space has exploded with ever growing amounts of money flowing its way and the number of connected devices reaching tens of billions but it only proves we’re already well beyond early adoption.

We do not need a mental crutch to visualize the connected world anymore. We see it everywhere, because the Internet is ubiquitous. Connectivity is the new norm. It’s part of the fabric of the physical world and literally has engulfed us. Thousands of Bluetooth beacons are deployed across the world, providing apps with ambient location intelligence, more granular than ever before. Retailers either did or soon will equip their stores with Wi-Fi, making sure everyone is connected when shopping. Agriculture uses precision farming on enormous scale to optimize growth in crops and ensure health among livestock. Pointing out difference between the Internet of Things and just the Internet is totally pointless.

It’s not about things

Another problem with IoT as a term is the fallacy it introduces, the mindset in which it’s the “things” that are important. And indeed when you say that by 2020 there will be 70 billion connected devices, it’s easy to imagine a Wi-Fi-enabled Roomba vacuuming a house warmed by Nest and locked by Lockitron (actually that’s pretty much my apartment in Poland right now). But that’s just the surface layer, the tip of the iceberg. The Internet, encompassing both physical and digital worlds, promises much more than the infamous tweeting fridge. And yet talking about the Internet of Things seems to obscure the really powerful stuff: sensors gathering all sorts of information that can be used in consumer and industrial setting, data processing, APIs connecting all these… that is the true substance of the Internet. Not a smart sex toy.

So, should we scrap Internet of Things in favor of another term? Yeah, its about time. Back in the 80s Mark Weiser came up with a much more suitable one, ubiquitous computing. But ubiquitous computing sounded to complex and abstract. And no wonder: the idea was a Googlesque moonshot back in the day --something that seemed so far away.

So instead we should settle for something simpler, something that blends into everyday life just like being always connected did over time. Let’s make IoT follow the footsteps of information superhighway and let it fade into just being the Internet...you know, the thing Al Gore invented.