This was originally written in
response to a post made by Sharon Astyk in her blog on the 30th
July -
http://sharonastyk.com/2009/07/30/will-the-internet-still-be-here-in-tough-times/
I’ve re-worked it a bit to make it
a stand alone article – please come and comment if you have any thoughts on
the matter…
Will be be able to log on to the
internet after oil has peaked?
Beware… you are about the enter
the mind of an optimistic pragmatist! It would be easy to project
that with oil and material prices rising that the internet will
disappear or become so expensive to access that it is only available
to those who can afford it. Yes, planned obsolescence is both a
racket and a reality – yes, server farms are consuming vast amounts
of electricity every day, and yes Rupert Murdoch is planning to
charge us to read the news soon because he’s finally realising that
interruption advertising doesn’t pay. But, consider this – the
internet is basically a hyper advanced version of two cups connected
together by a bit of string, and on this we have quite a few options
left to keep it going (just so long as we can still get to the bits
of string and can keep make sure the cups don’t break beyond
repair!).
There is a very common misconception that we must
rely on centralised web services like Yahoo!, Twitter and Facebook
(and all the other web platforms) to share our data. I was talking
with a “non-techie-but-pretty-aware” friend the other day and
they said “the internet all comes from America, doesn’t it?”
and I suddenly realised how common this perception is. The idea that
there is a font of all knowledge somewhere – probably in
Yellowstone Park, a geyser that all cables lead to. It really
isn’t like that though. The Internet is a network of lots of
internets (note the capital “I”) – and servers, in particular,
are just computers too. The PC you are reading this on can be a
server – it can send and receive information and it can store
information for others to access if you let them. When five
computers are connected together in a “network” we have
made an internet or mini-web. When we plug that “network”
in to another “network” we have made the web bigger.
We are still “internetting” even if we do not dial in to a
server over the pond.
I read somewhere – and have no idea if
it is true or not – that the internet was created by a guy who
plugged his laptop in to the mains in a college somewhere and
realised by some fluke that his computer was, via the mains (yes,
internet can flow through the electric rings in your house) to a
vending machine in the corridor. He could see the CPU in the
vending machine, affect it and make it spit out a bar of chocolate
when people walked by it. Thus – one computer was connected to
another and the internet was born.
Whilst the hardware that
has got smarter and smarter, smaller and smaller, and faster and
faster so too has the software that makes use of the hardware.
Software kind of strives in the opposite direction to hardware -
always seeking to need less and less of the available hardware
capability. The lighter and simpler the software the better in
many respects. Well… that’s the theory anyway. Cause
the other place we are operating under an illusion (like the one that
says we need centralised hardware) is in Windows.
Microsoft
was born out of Unix like code – Unix being an opensource project
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_source-
and Gates capitalised it and protected the IP. So, it had to be
developed in house, protected and hidden from anyone who wanted to
develop the code themselves. Building in all this protection
and tomfoolery makes the programs very heavy – conveniently justifies
the need to buy a new computer with the next multiple of 10Gb hard
drive. Planned obsolence at work without any failing hardware!
There are many loads of other operating systems that are far far
lighter weight and come with no trademark restrictions born of the
Open Source movement and based on the original Unix ideas – Linux
being a major development that has achieved great things – indeed,
there is even a superb opensource version of Microsoft office (Word,
Excel etc) called OpenOffice (http://www.openoffice.org/
- if you don’t already use it I recommend it). This movement is
diametrically opposed to the Gates/Microsoft model of protecting the
code and IP… rather freeing up everything to whoever is
interested and allowing the community itself to develop software.
For Gates the need to protect the software and collude with the
manufacturers of the hardware has resulted in a intellectually false
demand bubble for consumer access to both hardware and software.
Its a bit like average Joe needing a car and buying a Lotus Elise
cause that’s what he is told he needs when a second hand Golf would
do just fine. Well… thinking about it, maybe exactly the same
thing has happened in the car market. People really don’t need
4×4’s to drive down the Kings Road… but that’s a different
topic.
So, for the things that we really need computers for -
emails and sharing text (I know pics are fun too, but entertain me) -
there really isn’t a need for all the hype. Computers that were
being built as long ago as 10 years, if installed with the right
software (of course that’s another thing – you struggle to get old
versions of Windows to run on old machines – “just buy a new one
- its a lot easier”… never mind the environmental costs of
that new one!), can do all the things we want them to do. And
there are MILLIONS of these old machines kicking about – check out
www.jamies.org.uk
- go there… see the mountain of dead computers…
So if we
use the right software and we can use all the trillions of bits of
hardware that we have already made – that means we don’t have to
produce more chips and PC’s (sounds more like the car market as I go
along) – and software being made freely and openly available by the
opensource community. Indeed, it is on these machines with
hyperlight operating systems that computers are being sent to places
like Africa to get them online…
That starts to
address the cups in my analogy. Hacking back to my earlier
point about my computer connecting to another computer and making a
web is where we can find the next piece of the puzzle. Do you
remember Naptster? The illegal music sharing site?
Well… out of the black market emerges a white night. File
sharing. Or, as the process is now commonly known, BitTorrent.
Without accessing a single centralised server, individual PC’s can
share data with one another – in some cases massive files – by
storing little bits on lots of different machines – and then allowing
software to organise the recollection of those files assuming the
people with the information on their machines gives the individual
access. This is using the internet as the platform – as opposed
to what is happening at the moment where the platforms are bits of
software held centrally and individuals access the internet and use
them as instead of the net itself. Its because there are many
PC’s – and a lot of them are on – but with successful micro
generation, the internet could be a massive web of micro networks
that exists because they are all on – not because there is some
central source keeping the music playing. I am reminded of my
good friend Rob Weston’s theory of Organismics… it is the point
when the sum of the parts transcends and becomes a whole, and thus
doing so becomes greater than it was before. More info about
BitTorrent here – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BitTorrent_protocol
- (note – as of Feb 09 BitTorrent accounted for between 27-55% of all
internet traffic!!!!!!!!!!!)
Really I have to get on with some
work now… and I know I have not accounted for the string yet.
But, in short, we will have to have some form of energy to power all
that. Its not like there aren’t cables running in to my house
that I can trace all the way back to your house and so on and so on.
Thanks, BT (and the original electricity firms).
By way of
conclusion – I can’t see the internet getting stubbed out. It
will just change shape. It will be more like the tables at the
back of the FT – lots of less pretty pictures (equating a pretty
picture on the internet to a CO2 cost suddenly feels quite weird) and
lots more tables and more careful decisions about what you do and
don’t bother to access – the flippant web user will be forced to be
far more discerning, choosing carefully what they bother to access.
We will have lost nothing but the massive amount of pointless
activity that takes place on the web… some might say a
blessing in disguise.
Additional Reading – supplied kindly by Jamie Simpson of
Ecological Hosting Ltd (www.ecologicalhosting.com)
Microsoft founding history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft#1975.E2.80.931984:_Founding
Internet history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History
Start of the Internet as we know it:
http://www.w3.org/History.html
Interestingly linked to Apple via the
NeXT cube, which was used by Tim Berners-Lee as the first web server
at CERN. NeXT was a company started by Steve Jobs after Apple
ousted him and ultimately the company that Apple bought out that
brought Jobs back to Apple. The NeXTStep operating system
(which was brilliant – I used it years ago) eventually became Mac OS
X.
The Internet is a collection of
internets (notice the capital I on The Internet – much ignored by
many journalists). The protocol mainly (but not exclusively)
used on the Internet is TCP/IP, which was developed by DARPA – the
American defence research agency:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET
This is where the misconception that
the Internet is American comes from. The World Wide Web, which
is most peoples experience of an application on the Internet, (WWW is
not the Internet!) – was developed in Europe at CERN by Tim
Berners-Lee – an English engineer no less:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-Lee
Back to your use of cheap commodity
hardware:
If you want to see what massively scalable use of commodity hardware can do, look at the Google operating platform.
They use cheap PC hardware, loads of it and it’s like the Borg.
You pull one out, replace it and everything keeps running as
it’s scaled across the planet and each peace of information is held
in multiple places simultaneously.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRwPSFpLX8I
See
also Google File System and BigTable - links here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_platform#Software
Google are doing loads in terms of
trying to become more sustainable and using more renewable energy in
their data centres. It’s possible that if the Internet implodes
with some upcoming energy crisis, on a global scale, Google may be
one of the few of sufficient size who have made enough investment
into alternative power to keep something running.
And finally – here’s something I’ve
been banging on about for ages – using data centre heat to heat
homes:
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2009/06/ibm-supercomputer/
Signing up to take part in a charity challenge can boost your motivation to exercise, according to a new poll by marketing agency YouGov. In the poll – commissioned by Christian Aid and completed by more than 2,000 respondents from across the UK – 60 per cent of 18 to 34 year olds said they are more likely to stick to a regular exercise routine if they have signed up to a charity challenge such as the BUPA London 10,000.
Since
A Schumacher College course