"Officials assigned the trees ID numbers and email addresses in 2013 as part of a program designed to make it easier for citizens to report problems like dangerous branches. The “unintended but positive consequence,” as the chair of Melbourne’s Environment Portfolio, Councillor Arron Wood, put it to me in an email, was that people did more than just report issues. They also wrote directly to the trees, which have received thousands of messages—everything from banal greetings and questions about current events to love letters and existential dilemmas...
The move toward the Internet of Things only encourages the sense that our objects are not actually just things but acquaintances."
I think this says a lot more about humans than it does about technology, or the Internet of things. It's mostly just a sweet story about how grateful we are for the parts of our environments that make us feel at home.
The email on tree gender is probably a cute way to educate kids about how gender isn't binary? Or it's just cute to imagine a parks and rec person writing it.
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