Trapped in the grid

Like electricity, the Web is everywhere and changes everything, says Nicholas Carr. But the one thing it can't deliver is freedom.

By Scott Rosenberg

Read more: Books, Internet, Technology & Business, Scott Rosenberg, History, Computers, Economy, Reviews, Book reviews

Illustration by Val Mina

Jan. 24, 2008 | I greeted the millennium as a new parent with a decidedly 21st-century problem. My household had two working parents and a serious need for childcare help, which, thankfully, we could afford. I had barely adjusted to my new identity as a sleep-deprived father of twins, but now the state of California was casting me in an even more surreal role: I'd become a domestic employer, which meant I had to master a thick book of tax regulations, withhold taxes, and file them with the state -- no picnic, even for the well-rested.

As I hunted for help online, I stumbled on a Web site that offered a one-stop shop for people in my quandary. You paid a small fee and entered a little data and they did the rest: Payroll. Tax calculations. Government forms.

That site saved my sanity. And when my kids graduated to preschool and I gratefully retired my domestic-employer status, I wasn't left with a useless investment in an accounting software package; I just canceled.

My experience in 2000 gave me a glimpse of the sea change that was about to engulf the software industry. This change -- from personally or institutionally owned and operated software packages to software services delivered over the Web -- has begun to roll through every manifestation of software in our lives, from keeping a calendar and address book to storing research to enjoying music and movies and TV shows to running small and large businesses. One name for this trend, which encompasses everything from my nanny-tax accountant to Salesforce.com to Google, is "software as a service." Another is "utility computing."

As Monopoly players know, "utility" is one of the unsexiest words in the English language. When something becomes a utility, we mean that it's been demoted from an exciting innovation to a boring piece of forgettable infrastructure.

That is exactly what technology pundit Nicholas Carr told the grandees of Silicon Valley had happened to them in the article that made his name, a 2003 bombshell in the Harvard Business Review titled "IT Doesn't Matter." The computer industry's products, Carr said, had lost the ability to provide companies with a strategic advantage; they had become a mere cost of doing business. Far from being "revolutionary" or "world-changing," they were as dull and interchangeable as a utility. They just didn't matter.

Only now it seems they matter a whole lot again. In his magisterial but flawed new book, "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google," Carr predicts that "software as a service" is about to revolutionize the technology industry. Forget Microsoft (and, for that matter, the Mac); the personal-computing era is over. And the transformation of computing into a utility is not merely the next wrinkle in the continuing metamorphic story of digital technology, Carr says, but rather its teleological culmination, its final destiny. (The book's original subtitle was "Our New Digital Destiny," but wiser heads prevailed.) The Internet, having wired the world's machines together into one great "World Wide Computer," will turn computing into a utility grid as ubiquitous as the universal electrical service that arrived a century ago. And we shall be changed.

"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.

Just as today's corporations run their own data plants, companies in the early years of electricity typically operated their own power plants. Thomas Edison -- like a Bill Gates of the electrical revolution -- raked in profits by supplying parts and licenses. It took a business genius named Samuel Insull to figure out how to deliver electricity in a standardized way over long distances, thereby shaping the electrical system that we now take for granted. Zap! The grid fell into place fast, and hasn't changed that much since. (The wiring in my 1920s home still works fine -- an example of standards longevity that today's digital technologists can only envy.)

The early years of electrification, it turns out, featured a visionary euphoria whose overheated language uncannily resembles the over-the-top fantasies of some of the Web's early theorists. Carr's portrait of electricity's triumph is enthralling; my only regret is that he does not explore in more depth how it was that the single most formative technology of 20th-century America, the automobile, ended up running on what today we'd call an entirely different platform. How did we end up pumping gas instead of recharging batteries -- and might that suggest a more heterogeneous path forward for computing than Carr allows?

In the second half of his book, Carr pulls a big switch himself. Having persuasively sketched the shift to a software-as-a-service world, he trades in his business-historian top hat for a culture critic's beret. As we move to a Web-based system, Carr argues, the transformations will go beyond the financial press's win-loss columns; they will extend to our civic lives, our popular diversions and artistic endeavors, our private engagements and emotions, and even our inner experience of ourselves.

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