We speak about networks however we’re hardly ever clear about what we imply.
A selected kind of community is the grid, and even that concept is difficult by two competing meanings.
There’s the benign and highly effective grid of peer-to-peer connection. Tradition is constructed on this grid. That is mates, neighbors, co-workers and individuals who discover and have interaction with one another with out a government. Some individuals are nearer to you in your grid, whereas others have interaction over there.
Cities work as a result of they amplify the ability of the connections our grid offers. They permit extra collisions and make these collisions extra prone to be productive.
You possibly can turn into a hermit by strolling away from these peer-to-peer connections, nevertheless it’s seemingly your peace of thoughts and productiveness will decline.
However once we speak about going “off the grid”, we normally imply one thing very totally different. That is the grid that’s centrally managed. If the ability firm or the water firm or the social media firm decides to boost its charges or reduce us off, there’s not so much we are able to do about it.
Solar energy is a philosophical affront to energy firms. It delivers the very factor they’re constructed round, however and not using a centralized grid to revenue from.
Peer to see laptop networks, constructed on adversarial interoperability, resilience and extensibility have lengthy been competing with the AT&T/IBM mannequin of centralized engineering, management and pricing.
Invoice McKibben’s new guide on photo voltaic is thrilling. It’s full of excellent news about dramatic leaps in effectivity, cost-effectiveness and battery expertise. Photo voltaic represents a system change in how folks (notably billions who at present don’t have any electrical energy in any respect) will reside. Acumen’s been doing groundbreaking work on this for greater than a decade, and it really works, regardless of the dearth of curiosity from most huge vitality firms and from authorities officers that would favor centralized authority.
Tim Wu wrote concerning the telephone firm’s need for a chokepoint years in the past, and Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow replace this with their sensible new guide on chokepoints.
Which results in Cory’s newest, out quickly. When firms run out of inspiration, creativity and innovation, they revert to in search of monopoly. Creating chokepoints and providing much less and fewer worth is a lazy solution to make the inventory worth go up. No marvel it’s endemic. Enshittification is actual, and if we care, we are able to make it go away.
We are able to get off the grid that maintains a sclerotic establishment and get to work at constructing one thing higher. One thing that depends on the opposite grid, the peer-to-peer grid we advanced to be a part of.
