My interview with Nick Carr is now online: "The grid wins."

The focus of our conversation is business computing, but we ventured a bit further afield, too:

Whenever you change the supply model for a resource, a product or a service that is crucial to society, you change a lot of the trade-offs that determine how people work, live and entertain themselves and shop and connect with other people.

We're going to see that, just as the electric grid dramatically expanded the availability and reduced the cost of mechanical power, and that led to all sorts of knock-on effects: the way society is organized, the way we think about education, the way we think about consumerism. We'll see similar effects as we're all essentially hooked up to this one huge worldwide computer, this Internet-based supercomputer that all of us share.

Excerpts from The Big Switch can be found here; Carr addresses some reactions here.

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[Fec]

My regular readers are sick of reading about it, but regarding Cold War 2.O, Ron Suskind relates in The One Percent Doctrine how the CIA tapped into First Data and Western Union to read financial transactions in real-time. Centralizing the data and the standards only makes such ops easier.