“It has become almost impossible for us to imagine what life was like before electricity began to flow through the sockets in our walls.”
Have you ever stopped to think about how INSANE it is that you can pull a glowing rectangle out of your pocket and access the entire sum of human knowledge? We take it for granted. The same way we take electricity for granted — flip a switch, the lights come on. No thought required.
Nicholas Carr’s The Big Switch is about exactly that invisible transformation. It traces our technological progress from developing electricity into a utility, through developing computing into a utility, and into complete immersion with the internet and all of its knowledge.
And the parallels between these two revolutions are striking — almost eerie.
Edison, Tesla, and the Fight for Power
Carr teaches us about the social and economic driving forces brought about through introducing electricity. At first, manufacturers relied on their own electrical production using hydro, coal, or other measures. Every factory had its own generator, its own fuel supply, its own maintenance crew. The evolutionary process was to develop ever-larger and stronger production facilities for each manufacturer.
Edison and his colleagues had a monopoly on this forefront, emphasizing direct current, despite its limited distance in delivery. With the discovery and implementation of alternating current, Nikola Tesla was able to revolutionize the ease of providing everyone with electricity. With alternating current, we see the arrival of large power-generating stations, and with that, cheap readily available electricity for both residential and commercial uses.
This shift — from self-generated power to centralized utilities — didn’t just change how factories operated. It transformed ENTIRE societies. And if that sounds familiar, it should. Because Carr argues the exact same thing is happening right now with computing.
The Rapid Rise of Industry
The rapid development of electricity generation and distribution allowed westernized nations to progress very quickly — technologically, socially, and commercially. Carr quickly educates us on various innovations that progressed from the ’30s into the ’70s, such as nuclear power, communication technology, and most importantly, the introduction to computing.
What struck me is how fast the dominoes fell once electricity became cheap and universal. Remove a bottleneck — whether energy or computation — and human ingenuity just explodes. The pattern repeats throughout history, and Carr makes you see it clearly.
The Computing Revolution
The computing revolution is heavily influenced by the rapid, exponential production of information and the perpetual need for information processing. From processing large swaths of government census data to calculating scientific and business calculations.
Business development is an incredible driving force. For example, various airlines implemented large computers to increase ticket processing, thus reducing costs for travelers and increasing revenues for the companies. Financial institutions implemented large risk-management portfolios for their various investments, while manufacturers required better, faster, stronger processes — all through calculations.
Thanks to businesses investing in computation, the costs quickly decreased, and we were introduced to personal computing, i.e., Apple and Microsoft.
Think about how similar this is to electricity. First, only massive institutions could afford generators. Then the cost dropped, and every household had power. Same with computers — first they filled entire rooms at IBM, then they sat on every desk in America. The parallels are almost copy-paste.
From Consumers to Producers
Personal computing allowed individuals to develop their own software and take control away from corporate monopolies on computing innovation. But while personal computing was influential in giving power to consumers, it was the internet that allowed consumers to become producers.
As is widely known, CERN developed the internet, initially for military use, but the internet eventually became a consumer product.
Thanks to the development of internet browsers, websites were invented, and thus the rapid surge in the sharing of information, knowledge, opinions, and everything humanly in between. But the excess information required meaningfulness, and Google’s PageRank algorithm came about in the mid-’90s to early 2000s. The algorithm allows search engines to know what a website is about, based on the links pointing to it. This revolutionary idea took Google from a simple idea into the world’s most powerful organizer of information.
As someone who has built businesses through search engines and online marketing, this chapter hit home. Google didn’t just organize the web — it became the GATEWAY to the web. And whoever controls the gateway controls the economy built on top of it. That’s a level of power Edison could only dream of.
Computing as a Utility
Another important revolution involves computing as a utility. We are no longer bound to purchasing expensive, physical hardware. Instead, we can upload our information into the cloud and have it stay there perpetually — albeit perhaps forever.
This freedom from hardware allows us to produce information from anywhere on the planet, at any time, and it is available to absolutely anyone. This infrastructure, freedom, and ability is now always there, just as electricity has become.
As electricity has become a utility, so has the internet and search engines such as Google. We expect it to be there; it is an invisible force that drives our motivations, expectations, and experiences.
Ultimately, Nicholas Carr expands on a revolutionary idea where humans will be completely plugged into this utility, and ironically, we become part of it as perpetual producers.
This is where the book gets unsettling. Because once you’re plugged into a utility, you become DEPENDENT on it. And dependency means control. The companies that run these utilities — Google, Amazon, Microsoft — become the new power companies. The new Edisons. Except their reach extends into your thoughts, habits, and daily decisions.
Final Thoughts
Carr wrote this in 2008, and reading it now feels prophetic. Cloud computing, AI, centralized data — everything he predicted has come to pass. If anything, the book undersells how dominant these utility providers have become.
The writing is clear and well-researched, though the middle chapters drag slightly when Carr gets deep into electrical grid history. But the payoff in the later chapters — where he ties it all together and asks what this means for human autonomy — makes it worth pushing through.
Read for its history, economic, technological, and social value. If you’re interested in understanding WHY the internet economy looks the way it does today, this book gives you the blueprint.
3.5/5 — solid and thought-provoking, but not quite as gripping as some of the best tech history books out there.
Thanks for reading.
— Leonidas
