I do like a bit of science fiction. I’m sure many would have me down as an avid consumer of Dickens or Proust, wandering lonely as a cloud, all haughty with pride, weighed down with prejudice and mad from the farting crowd. Couldn’t be farther from the truth – I’ve always had a fascination with the future, and those who write about it, and that fascination has only become greater as more and more of the stuff that I read about becomes less science fiction and more established fact.

Which – and you’ll see where I’m going with this – is happening more and more quickly these days. The speed at which tech becomes available and is assimilated into the everyday means that not only is science fiction from last year simply the way we live today, but it’s also out of date. Predictions fulfilled or shown to be wrong (Google Glass?) almost before the ink has dried.

Take the Internet of Things – I read a story recently (in Twelve Tomorrows, MIT’s science fiction anthology for 2014) in which (amongst other things) the protagonist’s fridge was in cahoots with her toilet, and only allowing her to eat a certain amount of calories every day, comprised of certain types of foodstuffs. Then I went to conference where a (quite strange) fellow delegate was talking about this in real terms.

(Which was disappointing. The bits I’ve always liked best about science fiction were the ray guns. And the spaceships. And the robots and the aliens. And when it all becomes tangible, what do I get? Toilets talking to fridges. Which is, apparently, the consumer-facing end of the Internet of Things, the‘sexy’ bit, the bit that allows everyone to visualise and therefore understand. Aliens, I say! Ray guns!)

Actually, of course, the Internet of Things is not about toilets and fridges. (Which is a relief. Although, sadly, it’s not about ray guns either.) It’s about using technology to gather enormous amounts of data which would have either been impossible to gather before, or would have been prohibitively costly to gather, and then using that data to enhance the customer experience.

I’m sorry, did I say “Enhance the customer experience?” I meant “Generate hitherto undreamt-of amounts of revenue.”

The Internet of Things, some would have us believe, is simply the rush of industry in general to get a piece of what the Big Five – that’s (in no particular order) our old friends Amazon, Google, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook – have been doing for years. Grab the personal data, aggregate the personal data, cut the personal data, sell the personal data – and while, in the broader sense of the IoT, there are many laudable uses of the data, such as augmenting care programmes for the elderly and monitoring driver patterns to enhance road safety, the demand for data inevitably sounds the death knell of privacy.

Arguably, this couldn’t have happened without social media. Imagine, if you will, a world without Facebook or Twitter, where people are unaccustomed to sharing every detail of their lives (in the most mind-numbing detail).

How would this world (which exists, clearly – it would have split off from the one we live in the moment a student called Mark Zuckerberg pushed the button on Facemash in 2003 – that’s causality for you. Probably) react to the idea of constant and complete monitoring of everyday life?

If I can update the famous Zuckerberg quotation for 2015 – privacy is no longer. We have given it away in our rush to make sure everyone knows what we had for dinner, where we are, what we’re looking at and who we’re with. The ground has been laid for the next step and we probably won’t even notice when it’s been taken.

Meanwhile, I’m looking for the way into the world without social. I know parallel universes exist – I read about them in a work of science fiction.