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The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

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The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google

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…and likewise all parts of the system must be constructed with reference to all other parts, since, in one sense, all the parts form one machine. —Thomas Edison

But a visitor to the Burden Iron Works in the early years of the twentieth century would have come upon a surprising sight. The great waterwheel stood idle in the field, overgrown with weeds and quietly rusting away. After turning nonstop for fifty years, it had been abandoned. Manufacturers didn’t have to be in the power-generation business anymore. They could run their machines with electric current generated in distant power plants by big utilities and fed to their factories over a network of wires. With remarkable speed, the new utilities took over the supply of industrial power. Burden’s wheel and thousands of other private waterwheels, steam engines, and electric generators were rendered obsolete.

By supplying electricity to many buyers from central generating stations, the utilities achieved economies of scale in power production that no individual factory could match.

Private computer systems, built and operated by individual companies, are being supplanted by services provided over a common grid—the Internet—by centralized data-processing plants. Computing is turning into a utility, and once again the economic equations that determine the way we work and live are being rewritten.

But electricity and computing share a special trait that makes them unique even among the relatively small set of general purpose technologies: they can both be delivered efficiently from a great distance over a network.

Our PCs are turning into terminals that draw most of their power and usefulness not from what’s inside them but from the network they’re hooked up to—and, in particular, from the other computers that are hooked up to that network.

LEWIS MUMFORD, IN his 1970 book The Pentagon of Power, the second volume of his great critique of technology The Myth of the Machine, made an eloquent case against the idea that technological progress determines the course of history.

the path of technological progress and its human consequences are determined not simply by advances in science and engineering but also, and more decisively, by the influence of technology on the costs of producing and consuming goods and services. A competitive marketplace guarantees that more efficient modes of production and consumption will win out over less efficient ones.

In a society governed by economic trade-offs, the technological imperative is precisely that: an imperative. Personal choice has little to do with it.

A hundred years ago, we arrived at such a moment with the technologies that extend man’s physical powers. We are at another such moment today with the technologies that extend our intellectual powers.

The rise of the middle class, the expansion of public education, the flowering of mass culture, the movement of the population to the suburbs, the shift from an industrial to a service economy—none of these would have happened without the cheap current generated by utilities.

We may soon come to discover that what we assume to be the enduring foundations of our society are in fact only temporary structures, as easily abandoned as Henry Burden’s wheel.

“but the lamps must be adapted to the current of the dynamos, and the dynamos must be constructed to give the character of current required by the lamps, and likewise all parts of the system must be constructed with reference to all other parts, since, in one sense, all the parts form one machine.”

He had to pioneer a way to produce electricity efficiently in large quantities, a way to transmit the current safely to homes and offices, a way to measure each customer’s use of the current, and, finally, a way to turn the current into controllable, reliable light suitable for normal living spaces. And he had to make sure that he could sell electric light at the same price as gaslight and still turn a profit.

What the fiber-optic Internet does for computing is exactly what the alternating-current network did for electricity: it makes the location of the equipment unimportant to the user.

But pioneering a new business while continuing to harvest profits from an old one is one of the toughest challenges a company can face.

Here was the first, but by no means the last, irony of electrification: even as factory jobs came to require less skill, they began to pay higher wages. And that helped set in motion one of the most important social developments of the century: the creation of a vast, prosperous American middle class.

As the price of computing and bandwidth has plunged, it has become economical to transform more and more physical objects into purely digital goods, processing them with computers and transporting and trading them over networks.

We accept greater control in return for greater convenience. The spider’s web is made to measure, and we’re not unhappy inside it.

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