Review: The Big Switch

Nicholas Carr's The Big Switch has been on my beside table for months, and since I had long plane flights last week I decided to take it along with me and read it. Which I have. This had been presented to me by many as a must read if you're interested about the potential wider impacts of broadband and next generation access even though these are not explicitely delt with in the book.

The Big Switch is subtitled Rewiring the world, from Edison to Google and sets itself out to do a parallel examination of how electricity became a utility and how computing is similarly becoming a utility. In actual fact, it feels to me that The Big Switch is actually two, largely unrelated books, one covering the above and one a vitriolic pamphlet against internet development. But more on that below.

First of all, in terms of writing, The Big Switch strikes the right balance between being understandable to laymen and nonetheless being concise and incisive. There's something about the way business books are written these days that makes this balance hard to fine. To me,Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat was really "globalisation for dummies", a demonstration by anecdote that I found infinitely boring and repetitive (even if the core point was interesting, it was just drowned in boring fluff). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Carlota Perez' Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital: The Dynamics of Bubbles and Golden Ages is a very serious read, requiring huge concentration and as such, not for the casual reader. Carr's writing is somewhere in the middle. You can read it casually and understand it but it doesn't take you for an airhead.

The first half of the book is a parallel description of how electricty production began (giant watermills and steam engines) and how gradually innovation allowed the centralisation of production and the distribution through a grid. This created considerable economies of scale, prompting factories to stop producing their own electricity to benefit from cheaper rates. This in turn allowed the price to go down so much that consumers could afford electricity, which prompted the lighting of cities, the birth of many appliances and radical changes in the nature of employment (mechanisation, service jobs, etc.)

Carr then explains how the advances in industrial production overtook the capacity to handle information flows to structure production and how the card-punch readers were the first ancestors of computers, allowing yet another shift in the workforce. He then shows the parallel (though later) path of IT which has reached a similar potential for centralisation with the birth of Internet.

The point may not be entirely knew to those who have looked into developments like cloud computing, but the very interesting approach in this book is the systemic scale of the evolution, for which indeed the comparison with electricty is very apt. Are there issues with centralising computerisation? Sure, but the economic benefits will drive the trend probably no matter what...

After a very interesting first part, Carr then begins what felt to me like another book, much more opinionated, about the evils of Internet. Sure, there's a tie between the two since Internet was the enabler of computing centralisation. But really, in this section he's not examining the business and societal impacts of centralised computing (which would have been interesting, but maybe was already explored in Does IT Matter?, which I haven't read.)

What he's doing is painting a very grim picture of an internet society where we are nothing but consumers, where user generated content destroys existing paying jobs, where there's no right to privacy as businesses and governments monitor our every move either directly or by deduction of our data trail, etc. And I don't disagree that there is a little bit of all of that in Internet, but not only does this feel out of place, it furthermore makes Carr come accross as a bit of a luddite (which, as a prominent blogger himself, is quite paradoxical).

As he himself shows in the first part of his book, many such dire warnings were made about electrification in the late 19th and early 20th century. And did society change asa consequence of the electrical commodity? Sure, it changed immensely. But that change didn't happen overnight and while the negative consequences were easy to foresee the positive changes were only evident in hindsight. So it's a little bit surprising that he would not think that a similar hindsight might be necessary to have a more balanced view of the Internet society.

Still, it's a good read and a good book, and even if I disagree with the negative tone of the last section, it's a least thought provoking. And certainly for those who, like me, have to write and do presentations about cloud computing, it's a treasure trove of figures, anecdotes and parallels to make the point more compelling.

Also posted on www.fiberevolution.com