I return to the pages of Salon tonight with a full review of Nick Carr’s new book, “The Big Switch”:
“The Big Switch” falls neatly into two halves. The first, which I can enthusiastically recommend, draws an elegant and illuminating parallel between the late-19th-century electrification of America and today’s computing world. In the less persuasive latter section, Carr surveys the Internet’s transformations of our world, and questions whether we should welcome them. His questions are good ones; indeed, any treatment of this subject that failed to explore them couldn’t be taken seriously. But in his eagerness to discredit “techno-utopian dreamers” and expound a theory of the Internet as a technology of control, Carr fast-forwards to dour conclusions that his slender argument can’t possibly support.
I had a variety of quarrels with Carr’s book (here’s the official site), but it’s most certainly an important contribution to today’s debate about the Web’s cultural sway. I remain more of an optimist than the author, but he presents the darker view with more heft, more care and more credibility than many others attempting to make this case (like Andrew Keen and Lee Siegel).
One of the points I didn’t cover in my Salon piece was the great comparison Carr makes between the “millwork” of Victorian-era factories and the complex custom software products today’s developers build for contemporary information factories. Millwork meant elaborate, Rube-Goldberg-like devices, unique to each location, designed to transfer the power from some source like a water-wheel to the factory’s machinery. Once electricity came along things got simpler, but each factory still ran its own plant — until the electrical grid rendered that whole approach obsolete.
In one of the best parts of his book, Carr argues, pretty definitively, that today’s custom software work is destined to disappear, as the old millwork did, once the Web-based software-as-service grid really takes off. I think Carr may discount a little too readily the difficulty of building effective and reliable Web-based services; even after you outsource your infrastructure and “mash up” your tools and so on, this stuff doesn’t happen by itself — somebody’s got to write the code to put it all together, and somebody’s got to fix it when it stops working. But Carr is plainly right that much of what we’ve taken for granted as the stuff of corporate information management is about to go up in smoke.
In an amusing coincidence, I was listening today to the first of Mitch Kapor’s lectures about “disruptive innovation” — the one in which he talks about the early days of the PC and his role as one of its most spectacularly successful software entrepreneurs. Kapor tells a hilarious tale (if you get the audio file, it starts around the 59:00 mark) of being summoned in 1983 to visit the office of Ken Olsen, founder of the Digital Equipment Corporation. Kapor’s company, Lotus, and the new IBM PC its products run on, are beginning to worry the minicomputer industry establishment. So Olsen sends a helicopter out to whisk the young upstart to Digital’s HQ. Olsen proceeds to deliver a mad rant to Kapor. What is he so miffed about? The flimsy construction of the IBM PC’s case!
It’s a curious instance of fiddling in the face of an inferno. But the detail that stuck with me was Kapor’s mention that Digital’s headquarters, in Maynard, Massachusetts, occupied a grand old mill building.
[tags]nicholas carr, big switch, mitch kapor, technology history[/tags]
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