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And every time such objects speak, they must speak their name; to be meaningful, the object must identify itself as a singular instantiation or conceptually as an instance of the product it represents.

This development, as well as the dramatic extension of access to the internet (46 percent of the world’s population in 2016, compared to 17.6 percent a decade before³⁹), has produced new challenges for the universal naming system of TCP/IP. Since 1983, the underlying numbering system for all networked devices has been specified in a protocol called “IPv4.” However, this faces the imminent threat of address space exhaustion, as only 4.3 billion addresses are available in this naming scheme.⁴⁰

When the internet was mainly “pages,” this was enough slots for unique names. But now that it extends to a myriad of devices and “things,” the naming scheme has to be extended. To address this problem, a voluntary group of experts, the Internet Engineering Task Force, has since 1992 been working on a successor protocol, IPv6, launched as a parallel scheme in 2012. IPv6 will support 3.4×10³⁸ addresses.⁴¹ Or to put this another way, that’s an increase from 4,300,000,000 possible proper names to 340,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 internet-wide proper names.

Behind these are many more proper names that have been created locally by way of extension to these IP addresses – the pathway of forward slashes after the domain name in a URL, or the email address, or the device identifier on the other side of a gateway. And if the scope for proper naming here becomes not enough, experts will surely agree to revise the top-level TCP/IP naming scheme once again, while of course preserving the integrity of the older one. There might be resistances to scaling, called in the trade “address exhaustion.” But these are just that, resistances that are never insurmountable.

So here are the social facts: we have just one global system of proper naming of computer-networked meanings and, by extension, the things to which they refer. Now we are proper-naming more and more things (in our grammar, specifying instances). These are objects, moreover, that can speak to their data, but they only speak meaningfully when they also speak to their unambiguous specificity.

Nor is there anything particularly mathematical about the numbers; you can’t add the number that instantiates the sensor at your doorbell with the sensor on your wrist. Every number points to an incalculable singularity. It is a name and not a quantity in a grammatical sense. And of course, in terms of our theory of meaning-transpositions, instantiations could also be named in words, uniquely as is the case for URLs that are not impracticably long, or vaguely as is the case for “Mary’s iPhone.”

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³⁸ www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

³⁹ www.internetlivestats.com

⁴⁰ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4

⁴¹ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv6

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Cope, Bill, and Mary Kalantzis. 2020. Making Sense: Reference, Agency and Structure in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press, pp. 94-96. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316459645

The Internet of Things §MS1.1.1g