The Big Switch Review

So with the holidays upon us I've finally managed enough free time to dig in and finish Nick Carr's newest book, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google."

As often is the case with Nick's work I am at once impressed with the vision and perception and perplexed at the blind spots and unanswered questions; it may be that these are part and parcel and the latter arise from my own incapacity to appreciate the fullness of the former, but "The Big Switch" has left me dissatisfied.

Speaking of his blog, Rough Type, if you have been following it for the past couple of years then you already have a pretty fair picture of the theme of the book: computing is moving toward a network-based, utility-like model, where the hardware and software resources are concentrated in massive corporate powerhouses, and the intellectual capital is provided increasingly by us, the users. Even if you have been following the blog, however, picking "The Big Switch" up is worth your while if this idea intrigues you--Nick ties together many of the arguments and themes that Rough Type has introduced and fleshes them out into a coherent whole.

As usual, Nick does an impressive job of presenting his argument in layman's terms ("Edison to Google" indeed) and he introduces the basic concept with a brief history of the origin and evolution of electrical power, from a widely varied patchwork of independently operated generation systems, usually on the premises of the user, to a massive, standardized, centrally managed and provisioned utility service which most of us take for granted today.

The parallels to the evolution of computing are well drawn and Nick's assertion that the computer industry is heading in the same direction will find no argument from me. While many people in powerful positions will no doubt publicly dispute it (as they did with the article that originally brought him fame, "IT Doesn't Matter") for the most part it is in their interests that he be wrong. Those interests cloud their judgment as much as Edison's investment in DC electrical systems and his vision of their development clouded his perception of AC and its eventual ascendancy.

For my part, there is a quote from Steve Jobs about his first glimpse of the Graphical User Interface and object-oriented programming environment that fits perfectly:

It was one of those sort of apocalyptic moments. I remember within ten minutes of seeing the graphical user interface stuff, just knowing that every computer would work this way some day; it was so obvious once you saw it. It didn't require tremendous intellect. It was so clear. The minute you understand objects, it's all exactly the same. All software will be written using object oriented technology some day. You can argue about how long its going to take, who the winners and losers are going to be, but I don't think a rational person will debate its significance.

I'm not claiming any tremendous intellect, but it seems just as clear to me that the movement toward centralized, utility computing models is all but a foregone conclusion, and all that remains is fighting the battles over who will provide the utilities and what the standards will look like.

If it seems as though I am pretty much on the same page as Nick, I am, so far as the general sweep of the future of computing is concerned. Where I take issue--and lack satisfaction with the explanations--is with some of more specific consequences of the movement that he envisions, the downsides of which he covers in the second half of the book.

One of the trends that he draws on for painting his picture of our future is that of Web 2.0; user-driven information systems relying on amateur production and development, typified by YouTube, blogs, and so-called "social networking" sites such as MySpace. Nick see the relatively low staffing requirements of these businesses as driving many professionals out of business. While this is a widely understood economic consequence presented by many new technologies, Nick believes that unlike other technological revolutions, this one will not provide another set of well-paying positions to replace (in whole, at least, if not on a one for one basis) the jobs lost to it.

I'm not an economist and he may be right about this, but it's frustrating that he doesn't follow the thread to the inevitable end: if these technologies are to force their users out of jobs, then how is it that anyone will pay to use them, and if no one is left to pay for them, how is it that the technologies will continue to thrive and drive people out of jobs? Anyone can understand the theme of the corporate colossus benefiting at the expense of unwitting and ill-used workers, but the reality has always been a balancing act, with mechanisms such as unions and governmental regulation to prevent the inevitable meltdown. It seems like some other adjustment will necessarily occur at some point to accommodate this contradiction, but Nick leaves it as an exercise to the reader to solve... one which this reader, at least, isn't quite up to the task of solving.

Similarly, I don't feel that he fully supports the assertion that amateur effort is truly undermining professional positions. Nick cites a number of examples of this, the most familiar being the disruption of traditional print media--newspapers--by Internet news sources. While it's clear that newspapers are disappearing and that news is increasingly forced to a profit-driven, entertainment based model by the lack of subsidy afforded by print ad revenue, this trend wasn't initiated by the Internet: it began as far back as the 1940s, probably driven by the rise in television viewership. Only recent declines in population growth have revealed in full the declining percentage of newspaper readership and the most dramatic decline started in the early 1980s, long before the Internet was widely available.

It seems to me that it could be that newspapers aren't disappearing because their products are being "unbundled" into discrete, desirable, ad-supported packages, but rather that the "professionals" actually do a pretty poor job of collecting and accurately reporting news. I know that on the occasions when I have been close enough to major news stories to know the facts of them, they have frequently been mis-reported--sometimes badly--in the papers (and don't even get me started on TV news). The blogs I track which follow news, on the other hand, tend to be far more detailed and, in aggregate, more accurate. It's not a financial question at all--it's that much better information is available, from people who are interested and personally invested in providing it.

I fail to see how this is different from any product or service being supplanted by a superior one which does a better job for less money... the fact, in some cases, that the producer is not being paid, seems irrelevant as long as they are being paid for something, somehow.

And it's not clear that people won't ultimately pay for content they truly want, either. I think it's too early to say that we have seen the only working payment model on the Internet. If people are offering "free labor" now, it's because they see some value in it--but you can be just as sure that if they start seeing massive corporations growing wealthy from their individual work, they'll begin to demand compensation for it. You can see this already in sites such as Flixya and in the growth of blogging conglomerates like Creative Weblogging.

Further, my own experiences coordinating volunteer labor on large software projects have not been as universally rosy as the examples that Nick provides. While it's true that certain tasks such as "tagging" are simplistic enough that almost anyone can do them successfully, and others like video production will attract budding auteurs in sufficient numbers to provide for a community, there are still a lot of things that can't be sufficiently automated with volunteer labor, even with an impressive back-end computing environment.

Nick also addresses some of the potentially disturbing social aspects of utility computing. He cites studies on the polarization of opinion by people who surround themselves with others of similar opinions; yet this seems to run counter to the problem of "unbundling" that he cites as leading to the destruction of the newspaper. He discusses, ominously, the idea that utility computing may be driven in fact by governments and corporations, to retain the sort of power the the personal computer had previously distributed to the masses, but this seems to contradict his earlier assertions that the entire movement was driven by innate and hidden forces that none of us--business, governments, or individuals--have control over. And he fails entirely to address the proliferation of botnets, BitTorrent, viruses, and spam, which have grown alongside and even with the unwitting support of utility computing, and what their implications for the conception of centralized control and monitoring may be.

It may be that this wasn't his intent and that I am looking for the wrong things out of the book, or perhaps I am disappointed because I have seen many of these issues raised already on his blog and was hoping for other insights on them out of the book (ha! maybe Nick is right, after all, about electronic media driving marginalizing print) but either way I leave "The Big Switch" with more questions than answers. I don't hesitate to recommend it as a fine read and a good description of the most significant trend gripping the computer industry right now, but I see it as more the start of a conversation than the answer to any significant questions we may have about the process.