just a few little satanic mills

many an epsilon makes a delta

Friday posts are meant to be a little more light and discursive – I originally thought I was going to be able to turn this into a proper article with a conclusion, but I find I am unable to do that, but also unable to just let it go.

It was just a thought which crossed my mind and refused to leave – what happened to the weightless economy? I mean that figuratively rather than literally; all the things that Danny Quah was talking about in the article of that title (intellectual property, professional services, brands) are still here and still important. But I was around when the concept was first being talked about, and I seem to remember that there were other things that were considered to be weightless but which have turned out not to be.

Specifically, the internet was meant to be weightless. Things were going to grow exponentially with network economics, but this was OK. To the extent that there was any physical constraint, it would only be processing power, and that would be OK too because of Moore’s Law.

And here we are today, with urgent planning problems of the location of datacentres and occasional shortages of the water needed to cool them. And someone telling us that before we can get to the bright singularity in which we all live forever as beings of pure energy online, they might need us to build just a leetle nuclear power plant, just for them. Well maybe not such a little plant. And maybe not just the one …

When I asked about this on social media, I found out all sorts of interesting things about chip design, transistor density and Moore’s Law etc, but I think my original idea was sort of at ninety degrees to the practical problem. It seems to me that today’s problems were written into the original declaration of weightlessness – precisely because, for the longest time, the online economy seemed to have marginal costs as close to zero as made no odds, it expanded until the constraints became impossible to ignore.

I guess it must have been similar in the Industrial Revolution (or for that matter, the early days of slate quarrying in Blaenau Ffestiniog).When it starts out, the factory is a miracle, the technological frontier is wide open and a little bit of smoke and steam is easy to ignore. So you build a few more, and prosperity results … and then one day you notice that the whole region is now nicknamed “The Black Country” and someone’s writing political tracts about the condition of your workers.