Dwapara Yuga - The Big Switch

The recent book The Big Switch compares the advent of electric utilities such as Edison's a hundred years ago to the advent of compute utilities like Google in today's computer market and holds many Dwapara Yuga overtones.

The electric utilities moved from a world where a local DC generator was needed for every factory and neighborhood, to centralized generation and transmission by AC over power grids.

The showcase for the utilities was the 1893 Chicago World Fair, it's brilliant lighting inspiring the idea of the "Emerald City" in the "Wizard of Oz", and introducing the world's first "Ferris Wheel". As previously mentioned in this blog and also in the "Big Switch", this dawning of Dwapara Yuga event was in many ways the union of two great American themes (can do, practical attitude) utilitarianism and (the truths behind our material world) transcendentalism. The event physically brought together two of the founding fathers of Dwapara Yuga: Tesla and Vivekananda. It was the year of Yoganadaji's birth.

The modern parallel is the move from a PC in every home, and servers in every business, to centralized compute grids and transmission via fibre optic cables/the Internet with compute power being piped into homes and businesses just like electricity.

Both are examples of industrialization, standardization and centralization that drive benefits for billions, yet the model isn't necessarily completely positive or universally applicable.

Electrification lead to the deskilling of millions of jobs, the rise of the production line and a move from an economy of largely self employment to one of a handful of billionaire owners and masses of undifferentiated employees at the whim of the next reorganization or boss' bad day.

Utility computing similarly threatens to outsource work to the cheapest bidder worldwide and still further concentrate the IT industry into just one or two monster companies whose economies of scale allow them to dominate the market, just as for the original power company monopolies, phone monopolies and current PC monopolies. Most everyday people's interaction with the web is one of unpaid workers, their free writings, pictures, videos, reviews, comments and even their web search choices being aggregated by the 'net companies into profits.

To the Yogi, living simply, growing their own food, generating their own power and leveraging work via the Internet rather than being leveraged, down, or right-sized by it, the advantages of the societal changes coming can be reaped, side-stepping any potential downsides.

The author was present at the launch of HP's utility computing in the early 2000s and Amazon's Cloud in the mid 2000s so writes not from the perspective of a passive reader but an active participant, bringing a wider perspective to the theme of 'in the world but not of it'.

The potential for utility computing has existed in the mainframe world from the Univac in the early 1950s but lacked the dot com era fiber optic networks of the late 1990s to reach out beyond the corporate data center (glasshouse), much as Edison's initial DC efforts lacked Tesla's A/C transmission lines to reach out beyond urban areas like Manhattan Island, Valparaiso, or Paris.