We talk about networks but we are rarely clear about what we mean.
A specific sort of network is the grid, and even that idea is complicated by two competing meanings.
There’s the benign and powerful grid of peer-to-peer connection. Culture is built on this grid. This is friends, neighbors, co-workers and people who find and engage with each other without a central authority. Some people are closer to you on your grid, while others engage over there.
Cities work because they amplify the power of the connections our grid provides. They enable more collisions and make those collisions more likely to be productive.
You can become a hermit by walking away from these peer-to-peer connections, but it’s likely your peace of mind and productivity will decline.
But when we talk about going “off the grid”, we usually mean something very different. This is the grid that is centrally controlled. If the power company or the water company or the social media company decides to raise its rates or cut us off, there’s not a lot we can do about it.
Solar power is a philosophical affront to power companies. It delivers the very thing they are built around, but without a centralized grid to profit from.
Peer to peer computer networks, built on adversarial interoperability, resilience and extensibility have long been competing with the AT&T/IBM model of centralized engineering, control and pricing.
Bill McKibben’s new book on solar is thrilling. It’s filled with good news about dramatic leaps in efficiency, cost-effectiveness and battery technology. Solar represents a system change in how people (particularly billions who currently have no electricity at all) will live. Acumen’s been doing groundbreaking work on this for more than a decade, and it works, despite the lack of interest from most big energy companies and from government officials that would prefer centralized authority.
Tim Wu wrote about the phone company’s desire for a chokepoint years ago, and Rebecca Giblin & Cory Doctorow update this with their brilliant new book on chokepoints.
Which leads to Cory’s latest, out soon. When companies run out of inspiration, creativity and innovation, they revert to seeking monopoly. Creating chokepoints and offering less and less value is a lazy way to make the stock price go up. No wonder it’s endemic. Enshittification is real, and if we care, we can make it go away.
We can get off the grid that maintains a sclerotic status quo and get to work at building something better. Something that relies on the other grid, the peer-to-peer grid we evolved to be part of.