That's Elec-tric-tric-tric
Let's get electrified, Let's get electrified
The past has gotta stop, the future's gotta rock
The world is on fire, can I take you hire
Z-U-L-U that's the way we spell ZULU
The NYT ran a big Tech propaganda piece the other day titled, “It’s the Age of Electricity and America isn’t Ready.” Boy, you read that banner and first say, that’s nothing but stupid. Then you think what would Edison say? After all, in 1882 he powered up the first steam generated, electric lighting system in NY. Ten years later, he founded that little company known across the 20th century as General Electric. Much less, you'd ask what would the Scot, James Clerk Maxwell say?
The piece is written by someone at some web entity called “Heatmap,” which fancies itself a Tech site interested in Climate. It has other articles titled, “At San Francisco Climate Week, Everyone Was Betting on Data Centers.” Lord help us, betting what? Their futures I suppose.
Actually, the WSJ had a much more hopeful headline this morning, “OpenAI Misses Key Revenue, User Targets in High-Stakes Sprint Toward IPO,” adding, “The company’s CFO and board have questioned the wisdom of massive data-center spending in the face of slowing growth.” Hope springs eternal.
Of course first and foremost the NYT piece is a call for more nukes, for a proliferation one might say. It seems the more nukes the better as America enters the Age of Electricity. It needs to be noted, nukes generate electricity the same way Edison’s coal fired generator did by boiling water, making steam, spinning magnets and coils of wire to create an electric current. As physicist friend and old energy colleague Dr. F. used to say about nuke generated electricity, “It’s a pretty complicated and expensive way to boil water.”
Worse, the piece advocates a god-awful restructuring of the grid,
“Lastly, the government should establish a new federal grid authority that can build a long-distance, high-voltage transmission grid across the country to move electricity to the places that need it from the places that produce it. This new institution should be empowered to overcome local and utility opposition to procure the cheapest power for the greatest number of Americans. This grid authority might already be possible to form through executive authority alone, although Congress could also authorize such an effort. It could also partly be funded by the new grid fund.”
Phew, so much wrong with this, first and foremost, at this point, what American can call on concentrating greater power in DC to “overcome local opposition.” Whatever happened to the anti-DC, military funded, libertarian Valley? I guess now, it’s just don’t worry, AI will save us all, in the name of the father, the son, and the holy transistor.
In writing opposition to nefarious Tech plans, you have to qualify you’re not anti-technology, an infidel, that we are just in desperate need of a politics of technology. It should be clear to all by now that without a politics of technology, we have no politics.
In 1997, I was contracted by the tech bible Wired magazine to write a piece focusing on California’s electricity restructuring and tech. Having found the idea of the internet facilitating a more democratic politics enticing, the piece centered on unleashing distributed generation, such as solar. The piece also proposed that information technologies might allow us to become much more energy efficient. The now disregarded first century of the Age of Electricity was extravagantly energy wasteful. For example, and this is only one, the incandescent bulb that lit the country wasted well over 90% of its energy throwing off heat, not light.
Right before Wired was going to publish, the Editor, John Battelle, sat on a plane next to some guy from Enron who convinced him the future of electricity was natural gas. So, they paid me and killed the piece. My first of many experiences revealing Tech knew nothing more about energy than the average American, and well, that ain't much.
My piece suggested another future. I wrote, remember this 1997,
"The architecture of industrial systems facilitated or necessitated centralized and hierarchical structures. The centralized electric generation facility promoted monopoly organization. The concentrated power of monopolies spawned a reaction for a balancing of power by creating mechanisms such as utility commissions and other regulatory bodies. Yet, these structures provided little real local or individual control, and instead served to enshrine certain technologies by instituting powerful established interests, whose only agenda was continuing the status quo."
I even quoted Brandeis, who now is all the more relevant in this Age of Tech Monopoly,
"The technology of the Industrial Age defined the structure of human society. Early this century, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis worried that our social thinking was not keeping pace with our technology. He stated, 'The reason why we have not made more progress in social matters is that these problems have not been tackled by the practical man of high ability, like those who have worked on industrial inventions and enterprises. We need social inventions, each of many able men adding his work until the invention is perfected.'”
Technology and its structures were essential parts of necessary “social inventions.” If you want democracy, you need a distributed architecture:
“In a distributed network, information must be shared amongst participants and there must be a greater ability for the nodes to have real-time communication between each other. The more the system’s architecture facilitates these processes, the less need for centralized control. The restructuring process is not simply throwing out old rules and institutions, but is showing the need for new rules and new institutions.”
I concluded,
“Now the technology of the Information Era is shaping the societal structures of the future. Information technology at a certain level fundamentally alters our societal architecture and necessitates the creation of new institutions. The Electric Grid is undergoing a transformation from a rigidly centralized architecture to a more distributed network system. We must experiment with what distributed architectures work best, create the laws and rules of the new system, and invent the new social institutions of networked society. As the Electric industry patterned much of the structure of industrial society, the evolution of the Grid will help define the society of the 21st Century.”
Well that was optimistic. We got no new social inventions. Over a century after their inception, the same monopoly utility structure controls and dominates the electric system. Instead of solar being a distributed source on every rooftop, allowing the creation of new, participatory, one could say democratic energy structures, solar's been overwhelmingly confined to massive “utility solar" installations, taking over vanishing farmland and open space. And while the Enron guy wasn’t wrong, the last 30 years saw natural gas double in usage far supplanting coal as the number one fuel for boiling water to turn magnets and coils of wire, but that wasn’t the right thing to do.
However, most endlessly disappointing since writing the Wired piece has been Tech. I was a too uncritical enthusiast. I use to cleverly say a byte was cheaper than a watt, thinking we could all use developing information technologies to become much more efficient energy users. But now, our Tech-Lords are the biggest energy pigs ever. They no longer even talk of bytes, expressing information power in terms of watts, gigawatts. It seems Norbert Wiener was wrong, information is energy. Thirty years ago, no one in electricity talked about gigawatts, it was always megawatts. Tech's race to centrally control the actions of every person will make a century of utility rule seem benevolent.
And then, what about Maxwell? In physics terms, it could be said the last four-hundred years was the Age of Newton, Einstein, and Maxwell. He was the first to understand the electromagnetic spectrum, deducing from its speed, light was electromagnetic radiation. At an address at Cambridge University, Einstein corrected the eminent professor who introduced him, saying he didn’t stand on the shoulders of Newton, but of Maxwell. We’re well into the second century of the human created artificial electromagnetic spectrum that now spans the planet. We have everything to learn from the first century.
