Early Indications - May 2008
Review Essay
Nicholas Carr, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google (New York: Norton, 2008)
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2008)
In many ways, Nick Carr and Clay Shirky are mirror images of each other. Carr attended and later worked at Harvard; Shirky graduated from Yale and teaches at NYU. Carr worked at Mercer Management Consulting; Shirky at a Web startup. Both publish heavily visited blogs. Carr sits on the Encyclopedia Britannica editorial board; Shirky contributes to Wikipedia. Each published in "old media" earlier this year, their books appearing mere weeks apart. They address many of the same issues, but often draw different conclusions. In doing so, they situate themselves in a timeless dialogue about the nature and cost of technological progress.
Judging by the rapid sales of the book based on his "Last Lecture" at Carnegie Mellon, computer science professor and terminal cancer patient Randy Pausch has clearly struck a mass-market nerve. The book elaborates on the themes addressed in the lecture and in subsequent national television appearances, imparting life lessons from the perspective of a dying 47-year-old who will not watch his children mature, marry, or multiply. For our purposes, the key point of the book is Pausch's distinction between two kinds of people: Tiggers and Eeyores, based on the characters from the world of Winnie the Pooh.
Carr exhibits many traits of an Eeyore. After arguing that computing (via Google, Amazon Web services, and other instances of "the World Wide Computer") has become a utility sharing many attributes with Edison's successful flavor of electricity, Carr shifts the book's focus. On page 110, he states that the consequences of grid/utility computing "are the subject of the rest of this book." After that point, the news is often interpreted as bleak. More on Carr's inner
Eeyore in a moment.
Carr's treatment of the electricity metaphor is less than robust. "In contrast to the switch-over to electric utilities," he notes, "buyers don't face an all-or-nothing choice when it comes to computing."(117) Two immediate problems emerge. First of all, the invention of electrical distribution wasn't a switch-over: for most consumers, radio, television, and air conditioning were not "switchovers" from other tools but appeared sui generis, and the move from candles or oil lamps to light bulbs was more momentous than an economist's substitution. Secondly, people and enterprises often face real alternatives among utilities: ovens and clothes dryers and even air conditioners frequently run on gas, and furnaces run on oil or propane. Automobiles generate power off the grid; batteries store it.
The more important point here is that even though utility models allow capability to run through a pipe or wire, there remains considerable expertise in the construction of the appliances that run on the utility. But information, and information processing, differ substantially from electric current even though all three can run over networks; an information appliance may not compare neatly to a toaster. I think Carr is wrong, and focused on the technology rather than the information, when he asserts that "Business units and even individual employees will be able to control the processing of information directly, without the need for legions of technical specialists." (118) I suppose there is wiggle room, depending on how you define "legions," but the complexity of enterprise information -- its politics, accounting, and governance much more than its hardware du jour -- will not be eliminated any time soon.
Carr's overall point about information processing as a utility covers familiar ground, which is not to say he's off base: the scale of investment by major firms (from Amazon to Yahoo) in massive data centers is well worth contemplating and analyzing. The Big Switch he's talking about most passionately, however, is off the grid: regardless of the fate of corporate IT shops, utility computing is a Bad Thing for individuals. Consider:
Privacy becomes obsolete:
"Soon, the World Wide Computer will know where we are and what we're doing at almost every instant of the day." (123)
Inequality is amplified:
"[The Long Tail] is a vision of a world in which more and more of the wealth produced by markets is likely to be funneled to 'a small fraction' of particularly talented individuals." (147)
Most people's jobs will lose meaning or even disappear:
"Computerization creates new work, but it's work that can be done by machines. People aren't necessary." (136)
Great works of art will be marginalized:
"We may find that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity - many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep." (157) and "Two of the hopes most dear to the Internet optimists -- that the web will create a more bountiful culture and that it will promote greater harmony and understanding -- should be treated with skepticism. Cultural impoverishment and social fragmentation seem equally likely
outcomes." (167)
Evil will run rampant:
"There is reason to believe that our cybernetic meadow [itself the creation of "techno-utopians" like John Perry Barlow, who Carr implies are taken seriously] may be something less than a new Eden." (125) and "The very qualities that make the World Wide Computer so useful to many -- its universality and its openness -- make it dangerous as well." (171)
In the end, death is the last refuge for the inheritors of the Old Ways:
"The full power and consequence of a new technology are unleashed only when those who have grown up with it become adults and begin to push their outdated parents to the margins. As the older generations die, they take with them their knowledge of what was lost when the new technology arrived, and only the sense of what was gained remains."
(233)
