Broadband connection is increasingly being seen as a basic utility for households in the UK, both in terms of the benefits of connectivity and also things like access to services such as BBC iPlayer and others. The government’s Universal Service Commitment announced in the Digital Britain report of 2009 aims to make this expectation a reality for all.
In The Big Switch Nicholas Carr looks in detail at the rise of internet technology as a utility, comparing it to the rise of electricity as a utility and reflecting on the changes it bodes in society, culture and economics. Such changes, he argues will be ‘epochal’, by which I think he means very, very large:
Electric light altered the rhythms of life, electric assembly lines, electric assembly lines redefined industry and work, and electric appliances brought the Industrial Revolution into the home. Cheap and affordable electricity shaped the world we live in today. (11)
When electricitybegan to be delivered into the home and factory, not by individual generators but by central grids, electricity became a utility – a universal service which everyone could benefit from. In Part 1 of The Big Switch, Carr charts this story from Henry Burden’s water wheel in the 1850s through Edison’s innovations in electricity production and distribution to the breakthough into a central electricity grid pioneered by Samuel Insull. It was Insull who held the key to electricity as a universal utility by realising that with new technologies electricity supply could be consolidated in enormous central stations which would meet the demands of even the largest industrial consumer. He was also the first to realise the power of the network effect: ‘as a utility served more customers, it would become more efficient, allowing it to cut the costs of power further and in turn attract more customers’ (39). If this is the history of electricity production, distribution, and consumption, what are the lessons to be learned for the development of computing as a utility?
The most instructive similarity between electricity and computation is that they are both general purpose technologies; platforms rather than discrete tools which can be used to construct many different applications. The more ubiquitous the applications, the more opaque the technology that acts as its platform. We don’t think of the electricity supply when we are styling hair, instead we think about how beautiful our new hair tongs will make our hair. In the same way we don’t think of our own computer’s chip when Google comes up with 834,000 results in 0.2 seconds for a term we entered in its search box. In both cases the technology is delivered at great speed over a network, takes advantage of economies of scale, and innovates constantly to improve the service.
Of course, many of us have already begun to use computer technology as a utility. Google as a search application is just the most central of its services to encapsulate the utility model. The application Google Docs allows users to take advantage of Google’s chips, memory and storage devices to write documents, create and deliver presentations, and store accounts information in spreadsheets. The Web is now full of such services. One of the results is a general re-thinking of what your computer is. Once we filled a big fat box next to our desk with programmes and worried about how much hard disk space we had to store them all. Now we’re increasingly satisfied with a laptop and a lightening connection to the Web where we read, write, listen, watch, save, store and share (pretty much) whatever we want. All the processing power that’s needed to do all this is now available on the Web and more is coming. At the moment it’s still a matter of the ‘early adopters’ who are using and experimenting with such services (though some big companies and institutions are clearly taking advantage of the cost cutting benefits of outsourcing for example memory and storage capacity) but Carr asks us to imagine what it will be like when the only computer is the internet computer and where we simply plug in when we need to ‘do digital’. What will that world look like?
Carr is no cyber-utopian. His 2008 article in the Atlantic, Is Google Making us Stupid? put him on the grumpier side of the cyber divide. Carr doesn’t believe we can control technology. We can’t control the way we pursue and embrace technological innovation because the economic imperative simply doesn’t allow us to do otherwise. This is how Carr explains it and positions himself in the technological determinism debate:
Technology shapes economics and economics shapes society. It’s a messy process – when you combine technology, economics and human nature, you get a lot of variables – but it has an inexorable logic, even if we can trace it only in retrospect. As individuals we may question the technological imperative and even withstand it, but such acts will always be lonely and in the end futile.
This ‘cyber-existentialism’ shapes Carr’s detailed examination of the implications of the internet-as-utility model in Part 2 of the Big Switch. And as we live more of our lives in the ‘computing cloud’ it’s not all good news. Here’s a summary of his observations:
1. As the market economy is rapidly subsuming the gift economy, user-generated content is devastating information sectors such as newspapers, film and music companies, and photography where thousands are losing their livelihoods.
2. Wealth is being concentrated not in the hands of a small number of companies but in a small number of individuals – YouTube was initially owned and run by two people, Flickr was sold when it had 10 employees. Both companies amassed billion dollar value on the back of very large and active user communities. It’s this new phenomenon of crowdsourcing that generated such wealth:
By putting the means of production into the hands of the masses, but witholding from those masses any ownership over the products of their communal work, the World Wide Computer provides an incredibly efficient mechanism for harvesting the economic value of the labor provided by the very many and concentratin it in the hands of the very few. (142)
And people still claim that the Web is still in search of a business model!
3. Culturally, the personalisation of content afforded by the the technology is creating polarised, homogeneous communities where our experience of ‘otherness’ (in people and information) is automatically filtered out to flatter, passify and encourage our digital selves to, well, shop more and protest less.
As the tools and algorithms [of filtering technologies] become more sophisticated and our online profiles more refined, the Internet will act increasingly as an incredibly sensitive feedback loop, constantly playing back to us, in an amplified form, our existing preferences.
4. As more and more information data is outsourced by companies and governments (and it will be simply because it will be cheaper to do so) there will be increasing concern about where such data ‘is’ and how secure it is. Some of the questions may be answered peaceably in discussions about how the trans-continental computing grid should work but it’s not difficult to see very serious conflicts emerge over who owns the cloud(s).
5. Computer systems are technologies of control (not of emancipation) designed to influence and monitor human behaviour. Governments use them to spin their messages, identify and contain dissident voices and extend the focus group to the networked group. Companies use them to influence the lives and thoughts of their employees as well as extend the working day and the monitoring of that working day. Your boss gives you Blackberry – hurrah! – you’re always at work. Companies have even convinced customers to become ‘friends’ through social networks and products actually contribute texts to micro-blogging sites like Twitter. All in the service of selling more.
6. The development of the artificial mind promised by the inventors of Google is imminent. Collective intelligence is it’s current incarnation where every time we click a link we’re feeding our intelligence into Google’s system. Slowly, but inexorably, we are transfering our intelligence into the machine which we then access to retrieve what we forgot we had. Ultimately, according to Carr (and this is the frightening bit that I think will be expanded upon in his latest book The Shallows) the Internet Computer is changing our brains – as with all new tools, memory, perception and language begin to change. As we become more plugged in the more we’ll be shaped into hyper-efficient data processors at the behest of the cloud and who controls it. The more we are trained to think like computors the more our consciousness will thin out and flatten and our humanity become a distant memory.
I did say that Carr was far from being a cyber-optimist! He is convincing though extreme and rarely gives justice to opposing positions and counter-voices to his skepticism/pessimism. But his writing – ‘high journalism’ – is engaging and the book is a real page turner. So, I’ll certainly be ordering his new book – though I may wait until the summer is over and the encroaching darkness of Autumn makes for a more appropriate reading experience!