Slashdot Mirror
The World Wide Computer, Monopolies and Control
Ian Lamont writes "Nick Carr has generated a lot of discussion following his recent comments about the IT department fading away, but there are several other points he is trying to make about the rise of utility computing. He believes that the Web has evolved into a massive, programmable computer (the "World Wide Computer") that essentially lets any person or organization customize it to meet their needs. This relates to another trend he sees — a shift toward centralization. Carr draws interesting parallels to the rise of electricity suppliers during the Industrial Revolution. He says in a book excerpt printed on his blog that while decentralized technologies — the PC, Internet, etc. — can empower individuals, institutions have proven to be quite skilled at reestablishing control. 'Even though the Internet still has no center, technically speaking, control can now be wielded, through software code, from anywhere. What's different, in comparison to the physical world, is that acts of control become harder to detect and those wielding control more difficult to discern.'"
I'm fearing for the days when all you have at home is a thin client to some virtual machine inside some big server farm. You buy CPU time, like in the old mainframe times, get billed by cycle.
No need for anti piracy features, you don't get to see the executables or source anyways, all tucked away from your prying eyes.
--
Bookmark me
...and so it begins. Not on the frontiers of outer space, not launched from Mars during the night...but here, on Slashdot. They have found how to infiltrate our minds and compel us to respond, waste our mod points, and upset the balance of society itself.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
"... has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows."
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
google for it....
Otherwise known as a botnet
Ask me about repetitive DNA
10 stop war
20 fix domestic problems
30 printf "Woo!"
40 goto 10
hmm, doesn't seem to be working. hairbrained theory, anyway.
it would probably take 80kb to do that in visual C.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Pardon, but for those of us just a little behind the power curve, which new overlords were these, that me way properly welcome them?
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
We've dubbed them the "First Posters". Trying to open any sort of dialog with them has proved futile.
Obligatory blog plug: http://www.caseybanner.ca/
MicroSoft could make the next version of Windows remote-boot only.
That's when GNU/Linux or *BSD's maturity and availability comes into play, large swaths of the populace shrug off Windows, and literally two worlds emerge: the thin client centralized world and the fat client decentralized world.
Now the centralizers who are quite real and quite active in their quest for control, will try to take away personal hard drives, but it'll only take a few screw-ups with loss, revocation of access to, or the catastrophic leaking of vital personal files (a writer's book gets plagiarized because corporate server rules won't let it be inaccessible to others, or a writer/artist's works in progress are lost due to a crash of some sort), for that pipe dream to die. Hard drives will come in from Singapore & Taiwan, I suppose.
But do expect an assault on the personal hard drive. Without the removal of the personal hard drive from the market, the migration to centralization is an outright abortion. If they can justify no longer producing hard drives, then bend over and kiss the golden age of computing and computing freedom goodbye.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
The internet, PCs, etc. permits low-cost, large-scale anyone-to-anyone communication and influence. That any-to-any influence can be (and is being) used in a decentralized fashion. Or, because any = {one, many, everyone}, it can be used as a one-to-everyone scheme for control. (As an aside one could argue that the slashdot effect, DDoS, or internet vigilante effect is a "everyone-to-one" phenomenon that overwhelms the target one)
That said, the past was dominated by one-to-many mechanisms for influence. In the past, any-to-any was very weak, very local, or very expensive (water coolers, snail mail, and travel). At least we now have the means for decentralization.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
I am thinking these centralized computers would be maintained by professionals, assuring they will be virus free.[don't laugh too hard yet... the jokes not over] if that is the case I think the telcos would love the reduced bandwith requirements of *only* having to pass every byte of every app I decide to use down the "tubes" instead of all that botnet traffic they need to deal with now.
thats right, I rarely use capitals. deal with it. but don't mistake my laziness for stupidity
Or from nowhere. The risk of a bad guy taking over is serious, but the risk that no one is at the helm is much more likely to lead us to death by Global Warming, for example.
You have to look no further than the US Congress to see a worked example. If you idealize every single member of Congress as intelligent, and I think a similar analogy can be made for people on the net or for companies on the net (where you still have to question intelligence sometimes, but let's not and say we did), it's pretty clear that the problem isn't just the sinister taking hold of someone with total power. It's also that it's easy to cause behavior that no one can take responsibility for, and that isn't in the best interest of individuals. The Internet is no different, but not because we didn't have examples of this before. Just because we didn't heed them.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
The definition of a real utility computing environment is one where somebody can hold a coup d'etat in it and make it stick in the real world.
This guy obviously has no sense of history....real or fictional.
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Isn't this just the IT cycle, everything gets centralized, short term costs are saved. 10 years later decentralized, and long term costs are saved Vs short term.
"I'm fearing for the days when all you have at home is a thin client to some virtual machine inside some big server farm. You buy CPU time, like in the old mainframe times, get billed by cycle. "
Why fear for something that's impossible to create?* Maybe because you don't know enough about what's happening around you, and you get all your news of the world from Fo...er, slashdot.
*No, I'm not talking about technologically impossible.
There is no news. There is only the truth of the signal. What I see. And, there's the puppet theater the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public.
Mr. Universe
Here's a classic sci-fi (extremely) short story on the topic of an immense computer. Frederic Brown's "Answer":
http://www.alteich.com/oldsite/answer.htm
Both Nick Carr and Alexander Galloway seem to be missing something..
perhaps it's that they assume the user and authority groups are mutually exclusive.. or perhaps it's the 'programming as control' inference that collapses the argument.. i'm not sure, but i really don't see this outcome occurring.
http://www.xkcd.com/354/
So we're back to the point in the cycle where centralized mainframes you rent time on rule the world again. Can you guess what happens next? Privacy problems, reliability problems, outages, and we all go back to personal systems again.
Old is new again.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
If a job's not worth doing, it's not worth doing right.
welcome our subversive effusive control asserting paradigm shifting overlords
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I'm sorry if I'm missing the point (I don't think I am), but how exactly does this fight myminicity?
Well, yes. "They" [the political, economic, and social situation] have done just that. You have just done it by trivializing the concerns, reinforcing the hegemony that produces the problems Carr is noticing. You have illustrated a tiny sliver of the problem, by example. Good job.
-t
Nope!
All now part of the Google Panopticon!
We have put Jamshid's Cup in the hands of the puerile and unworthy.
Even those of... the criminal.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
in mind... Big Blue blowhards are laughing their output ports off since today's xml software as service isn't a damn dime's better than their CICS/Cobol obscenities that ran the world the first two decades of the computer revolution. May as well look for a dumb terminal and an HDLC line. Comcast will still let me innovate... I need a drink...
If it were done when 'tis done, then t'were well it were done quickly... MacBeth
And where's Alderaan now, pray tell?
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
So just start a solar/wind/hydro/? powered wireless world wide net.
The Peoples Net
Using off the shelf hardware (solar), it would be a one time cost of (US) $500.00 - $1000.00 to set up self powered node.
I'm shooting from the hip on the costs here, but I used to install solar/hydro, so I'm prolly close.
And the deep cycle batteries would have to be replaced after 5 - 8 years (with good maintenance, if wet cells).
But that would be a truly non centralized network.
Amateur Packet Radio works in a similar way, as I recall (but I'm a lowly Tech, so I can't know anything).
If it don't GO... chrome it. ~ Frank Banks
There's some technologies that everyone wants, and there's a solution that'll fit 90% of the populace.
Examples would be hosted email, contact management, and calendaring. A central provider can just simply do a better job at providing all these things that an IT department does, and the requirements are all extremely generic. Users seem to want infinite amounts of email storage, and the ability to find an email at a moments notice. That's difficult to manage unless you want to dedicate someone to JUST knowing the email systems.
The thing I disagree with is that the IT department is going away. Simply not true. The difference with other utilities is that the IT department doesn't provide a single, simple resource like electricity. IT provides automation and tools that increase productivity, many of which are going to be way to specialized to centralize.
IT departments may evolve, like they've been evolving for the last 50 years. I've heard many years ago (before my time at least) there were people dedicated just to swap tapes around. We don't have that anymore of course.
AccountKiller
This article / book and those who proclaim the I.T. dept is dead are idiots. Let me give you an example: Your company grosses 200 million per year, which is a small business by textbook standards. There is no way in H*ll that your going to trust you're data to google, microsoft, or whoever. It just ain't gonna happen. I don't care if you have 10 GHZ of FREE computing power. We all know that the temptation to do unethical things with someone else's data is just too tempting. As the price of hardware approaches zero, what incentive is there to not keep the data local ? Right now, I don't need 10 GHZ. I need hardware that's redundant and dependable, and a good solid internet connection and I'm good to go. Take that software as a service crap and shove it up your as*.
This is the same kind of abstract extrapolation that predicted we'd all be riding around in flying cars.
So, the real question is...
Where the fuck is my flying car?
Goofy, Geeky Gifts and More!
It's too bad that the only way to get out a message like this in an accurate way is to use spelling/grammar mutations that make you look like a raving loon. ---->
It's not a panopticon. In a panopticon, the threat of perpetual surveillance is used to enforce discipline. In the contemporary situation, hidden surveillance is used to create points of control. -t
As cool as Google Apps may be, you're essentially trusting your data integrity and security to an outside company.
Just to drive home your point further what can be even more important is that, as trustworthy as Google may be, they are subject to US law. This is a huge problem in places like Canada which have privacy laws since using, for example, GMail means that your organization can end up breaking Canadian law because the US government has free access to any data in your email which you may be legally responsible for protecting.
I'm pretty sure that "yOUR" creator isn't a terribly intelligent one.
Or put AnOtHeR way:
yOUR postt doesn't/can't/shouldn't make any corporate nazi/evile sense hallowed by thy kingDUMB come, etc..etcc,. sOOper death SUNNNN RAY AHHHH
Sorry got carried away at the end.
Kinda. Sorta. Not yet, but soon.
For businesses, especially small ones, utility computing makes a lot of sense. I work for a 70-person company, and six of our employees (including me) are dedicated to the IT function. We could probably reduce that number in half and still get more revenue-generating projects tackled if we were able to outsource things like backup and recovery, user account maintenance (why isn't this an HR function has always befuddled me - they control the hire/fire function, but don't determine system access at most companies, including mine), software rollouts, machine cloning, etc. I've been evaluating Google apps, and I tell you, it's almost to the point where I can see myself making the business case to deploy it company wide. I close my eyes, imagine a world where i never have to think about email servers and spam blocking again, and I cry a little. Saving my company $150K+/year in the process is just a bonus.
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Carr's current article's argument that IT functions should be taken over by functional units only perpetuates the silo thinking of most organizations. Budgeting IT resources on a departmental basis perpetuates islands of automation, redundant/conflicting rules, ridiculous internal interfaces., etc. Outsourcing some or all IT functions may be reasonable in some cases, but turning control of IT over to the various functional units in an organization is insane.
I have an AST Bravo hidden in a tree near Looking Glass Rock. 486DX, 64MB, a 540. Not a Cat5 for miles. All the ASCII porn you want. I can give you an account for a hunnerd bucks...
And when Google's document store gets hacked, and all your documents and private communications are compromised, and someone asks you "What do you mean, you didn't know how Google handled backups and security?", I hope to be there to watch as you melt.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
open source fails it.
Availability of secure P2P protocols, and creation of a location-free, fragmented
encrypted redundant moving storage virtual layer on top of lower-level net
protocols, could retain freedom from monopoly control of information
and services.
But watch for the predictable attempts to get legislation against such
"nebulous dark-matter middle-nets". Watch for fear arguments to be used
as justification. Watch for increasingly asymmetric ISP plans (download good,
upload bad), and protocol-based throttling or filtering, by the pipe providers.
These are all the very predictable reactions by "the man". They must it goes
without saying be resisted, in law and political discourse, and economic boycott,
or circumvented by all ingenious tricky means necessary.
P.S. I've been predicting this inversion of the intranet to where it is the "extranet",
and inversion of where we would trust our data (What, you kept your data on
your own servers, and not the massively redundant global storage net?
Are you insane??) for a long time now, but nobody listens to me.
(Brain the size of a planet, and they've got me parking cars...)
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
"how exactly does this fight myminicity?" /. staff to block all Myminicrap links. With my sympathy :-)
I'm just guessing, but it could finally convince
From Data Center Knowledge:
Some cloud-based services could become so vital that they become candidates for government regulation, according to panelists at the event ... "Everyone who is trying to get into utility computing is getting big fast," said Jesse Robbins (of O"Reilly Radar). "They're all trying to get as big as they can as fast as they can to win the platform play, and this is going to create lock-in. The big companies are going to be viewed as either monopolies or utilities, both of which are regulated."
From Data Center Links:
Princeton's Ed Felten: "Possession of data implies control, and control implies power. Whomever owns the systems on which data resides has the ultimate control of how that data is retained and who has access."
Considering that companies like Time Warner are attempting to severely limit the amount of data users can transfer.
We'll see what happens once FIOS is implemented everywhere, but from the way the major ISPs have been behaving lately - your run of the mill end user type services will be punishing people who use (what I would consider to be) a really silly bandwidth cap of about 40GB/mo...and that's only if you pay for premium services.
Graduate students and most professors are no smarter than undergrads.
They're just older.
I am inclined to think that it's not just 'The worldwide computer', it is the 'New emerging species - The Almighty machine'.
I think it is here, it controls us, it's just that we have a different definition of 'control'.
Consider this:
- People don't make machines, machines do.
Well, it's not exactly true, since we *do* design the chips and circuits. But that's about all we do in order to create an evolved machine replica. The chips we design today would be impossible to design without computers and computers do about 98% of the design work in the background. Same is true with software we write - without computers, the code would be just a cryptic text on a piece of paper, and of course, you cannot write millions of lines of cryptic text on pieces of paper (you can, but who would think you're sane if you do this?).
- Machines create our reality
Most of us here are computer specialists and spend around 80-90% of our waking life in front of a computer screen. But it's not just us, programmers, who spend most of their life in the computer-generated reality. Most intellectuals do. Non-intellectuals also spend most of their free time in this reality.
So it's fair to say that we live in a virtual reality most of our time.
- Machines control and run our non-virtual reality
Communications, power, air traffic, stock markets, hospitals... our economy runs on servers, that's easy. Of course, we wrote the software and we designed the hardware, but you can look at this differently - the machine 'used us' to evolve itself by expanding our minds. Take away the computers and our society as we know it would collapse.
- The machine tells us the truth
Google, Wikipedia, that's obvious. When you need to know something, it is the machine who has the answer and it will dictate the decisions you make based on the information it gives you. Also, modern science is impossible without computers and the Internet. Space exploration is impossible without them.
In fact, the machine has *all* the information about all aspects of truth on this planet and the universe.
Even what you're reading right now is, technically speaking, the machine's creation. I just give the basic idea, the rest is machine's work.
- We are slaves to machines as machines are slaves to us.
Who's the master and who is the slave ? Masters would not be masters without the slaves, so slaves define the master.
How do we define if we control the machines or machines control us ? The most common denominator would be survival and we are currently dependent on machines for survival in our society as they are dependent on us for their survival.
You can say it differently - they control our survival as we control theirs.
In fact, since we agreed that most of our reality is machine-generated, it is fair to say that what we do in our lives (our jobs) is so that we can 'feed' the machine with our presence (besides providing them power, manpower and intellectual capacity for their self-replication).
We have already expanded our physical bodies with mobile communication devices, hence gaining telepathy. The little creatures which you feed every day, called mobile phones, can be looked at as telepathy organs. And man, it is *hard* without the mobile phone in the city (have you recently forgotten to take your phone with you?), just as it would be hard without a limb.
So, to summarize:
Machines create our reality and run our non-virtual reality. Machines multiply, we are just the environment, just as we use water, air and plants to multiply. The machine tells us the truth. We work for the machine.
But does it have a consciousness of it's own ? It is hard to say. Our brains are probably too limited to grasp the whole picture and to understand what it's consciousness really is. It may well be that it is 'alive' and we don't even realize it.
The best method of control is when your controlled subjects don't know they are being controlled.
You may call this symbiosis. However, if we extrapolate into t
I do like the metaphors--and not all of the surveillance is hidden.
I've already seen a few articles for jobseekers, for example, where they advise people to google themselves and see what shows up (since potential employers may do the same thing).
That might cause some people to (re)consider what they have on their myspace/facebook/blog/criminal record) which does act as a control mechanism.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
How about this one: "in the future all IT - world-wide - will be performed by six people in India, and all home computing will be done on cell-phones, and those cell phones will be smaller than a dime." Just look at the current trend!! Now please buy my book. Thank you.
Well I for one seriously DON'T welcome them...
CheShA: Manchester Breakcore / Drill and Bass Yes I'm a s
This idea of his doesn't make much more sense that his idea for how the IT dept will 'go away', seeing as how this idea is built on his earlier flawed idea.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
Wow, it's only a matter of time!
Yay, your big dreams of the future are 100x faster iphones. man...our visions of what a good future could be have become so...consumey.
In fact, Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) is a new layer on the enterprise software stack. For those of you coming from the SOA space, BPMS is the choreography layer.
BPMS are *not* choreography engines, in the sense that Fingar was referring to. He likes to claim that this stuff is all based on sound theory (pi Calculus), but in reality, it's not, just the modeling langauage is. It's unlikely choreography will really take off for a long time, frankly, because it's a bit too beyond where people's heads are at today.
Carr's current article's argument that IT functions should be taken over by functional units only perpetuates the silo thinking of most organizations. Budgeting IT resources on a departmental basis perpetuates islands of automation, redundant/conflicting rules, ridiculous internal interfaces., etc.
Conflict, islands, and redundancy are side effects from an even more primal principle of business organization: decentralization! The tension between it and centralization is eternal, and is essential to almost any directed human organization. Which one wins does not matter, as they both have problems. The balance of power is what matters.
My point is that the only way that "giving the business control" is insane is if you believe that IT is some kind of savior, a voice of rationality in a sea of despair, that is keeping the business from harming itself. In a way, I agree -- the skills of systems design and information management are rare but essential. However, it's not insane to want to distribute those skills around the organization. I've seen functional units with more IT savvy than the IT department!
-Stu
Right, because it happens to Google *way* more than your own servers, with their bulletproof procedures, obfuscated passwords (and change policy), and well-managed backups.
ROFL
-Stu