Charles Cooke gives details of just how much of our modern, convenient lives depend upon data centers. A slice:
Certainly, we wildly underestimate the extent to which we rely on data centers. Take my actions today. This morning, I sat down with my coffee and looked through National Review’s website. To get there, I typed “nationalreview.com” into my browser, and before I’d even hit “Enter,” my computer used a data center to look up where that site was located on the web. Once that location had been discovered, my browser then contacted the website via its primary IP address — which, in the case of a popular site such as National Review, meant a digital “visit” to whichever one of the many “proxy” data centers happened to be geographically closest to me. After a secure connection to that data center had been established, my browser then started assembling the text, images, videos, podcasts, fonts, scripts, advertisements, and other elements that made up the page I hoped to see. Because this involved all manner of different content types — some cached, some dynamic, some streaming — and required the use of application servers, database servers, and distributed content-delivery networks, it invariably required trips to multiple data centers, all playing different roles. Thus, before I had read a single word, my computer had been served 150 web requests, across 34 domains, having contacted roughly ten data centers spread across networks operated by nine different companies. Because everything worked as it should have, this process was invisible. But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t happening. Without seeing it, I had taken a remarkable journey around the world.
And that’s just for a visit to the homepage of a website. Presumably, like me, you have a smartphone. Have you ever thought about how it works? At the same time that I was visiting nationalreview.com today, my phone was relentlessly pinging data centers across the globe. An email arrived, a message appeared in the family group chat, a video from yesterday finished uploading to the cloud: those actions were the result of data centers, data centers, and — yep — data centers. When my weather widget refreshed its forecast, my calendar picked up a change to an appointment, one of my apps downloaded an update, and my stock ticker moved: data centers did that. Each one of the little conveniences that I have slowly stacked over time involved computers in one or more data centers doing work on my behalf. Magic? Not on your life.
Having had my coffee, I ran some errands in my car, and as usual, I used Waze to avoid the traffic. In so doing, I blithely connected to an unfathomably impressive piece of infrastructure — all of which remained out of sight. My phone accurately calculated its position on Earth by listening to a series of precisely timed signals sent from a bunch of satellites up in space and comparing the data issued by each to determine where I was. At the same time, its internet connection linked it to a host of servers that, among other things, supplied the requisite maps, calculated optimal directions, and processed real-time traffic information that had been collected from other drivers. To obtain even the simplest of instructions — “turn left” — I was the beneficiary of signals from space, mathematics in my pocket, and information that had been processed by distant computers in data centers across the world. While driving, I turned on Apple Music, and thanks to a data center nearby, I had at my disposal virtually all of the music that has ever been recorded. On my way home, I made a phone call to my wife and thereby relied on a data center in my carrier’s network to connect us and route my conversation to the right place. Had I driven through a toll, a data center would have matched my transponder to my billing record. If I’d stopped for gas or lunch and paid by card, the payment would have been authorized by my bank’s data centers. All this, for a simple trip to the barber!
We take all this for granted. Once, we had to go to the bank to cash a check, wait on the phone to buy a plane ticket, take a trip to a shop to buy a light bulb, drive to a video store to rent a movie, call theaters for showtimes, and consult encyclopedias to find the most elementary of facts. We don’t now — because of data centers. On Sundays, during NFL season, I watch the games over the internet on my TV, which requires a lot of data centers; I participate in two fantasy football leagues and one pick ’em league, all of which are hosted in data centers; and, like many others, I text my friends during the games — via a data center, naturally. So reflexive is this behavior that we have forgotten how it works. But we’d notice if it went away. If, during the next Super Bowl, even 10 percent of the nation’s data centers were to be summarily switched off, the people of the United States would be on the verge of revolution.
The term we have chosen to describe the technology I have discussed here is “the cloud.” But, of course, there is no such thing. There are just data centers and the computers that run inside them. Conceptually, “the cloud” is a useful abstraction. But if taken too literally, it blinds us to an important reality: Each one of the 5,427 data centers in the United States is a real place, full of rows of real machines, that run on real electricity, and that are maintained by real people. Your data — by which I mean your emails, your bank account, your business files, your photographs of your kids — are sitting somewhere on a real hard disk. If I drove to where that hard disk is and smashed it up with a pickaxe, it would break, and the only reason that you probably would not permanently lose the data that it once held is that the data also exist in some other real location, on another real disk, in another data center, that is maintained by another real person. Bluntly put: The integrity of your data — and of your ability to access it whenever you want — is the result of your having cheap access to lots of different data centers, in lots of different places, so that if something bad happens to one of them, your stuff is backed up elsewhere.
Paul Schwennesen isn’t impressed with the new book by Eric Beinhocker and Nick Hanauer. A slice:
Hanauer and Beinhocker describe “Market Humanism” as a new paradigm “grounded in twenty-first century thinking.” What that means isn’t clear, but they argue that the “old paradigm” — economics as the study of how society manages its scarce resources — has “constrained economic thinking for the past 150 years.” They propose instead an economics centered on human flourishing, in which “markets are servants, not masters,” and argue that the real genius of markets lies less in their efficiency at allocating existing resources, but rather in their ability to generate innovation. Erm… paging Dr. Schumpeter to address the blindingly obvious. He wrote, way back in 1942, of the “perennial gale of creative destruction” that allows continuous innovation across the entire economy.
There is, moreover, an odd tension at play. Hanauer himself readily acknowledges that market capitalism has been astonishingly successful. “No social technology,” he writes, “has done more to create prosperity and raise living standards” than market capitalism. Human beings, he notes, are now leading substantially longer, healthier, more comfortable, more fulfilling lives than at any other time in history.
So what, exactly, is the old paradigm failing to explain?
Despite the window dressing, I suspect Hanauer’s answer is that it fails to justify the political case for greater taxation of the uber-rich. The simplest way to summarize Hanauer and Beinhocker’s “very different model,” then, might be “market capitalism with socialist characteristics.” And maybe they have a point — if the basic problem with traditional market capitalism is that it has been too successful, and that the risk of toppling our social edifice at the altar of envy is acute, then maybe we should take the argument seriously.
Tad DeHaven and Chad Smitson report on the increasing number of private companies with shares now owned by the U.S. government.
Reem Ibrahim is right that “Rand Paul was right to block the Senate’s attempt to censor the internet.”
The Endangered Species Act hinders the building of housing.
Jonathan Allen tweets: (HT Scott Lincicome)
I am sorry to learn that North Carolina-based women’s budget fashion retailer Cato Fashions is closing 120 stores because of tariffs, rising fuel prices, and weakening family budgets.
But unlike the French revolution or the Bolshevik revolution, for example, the American revolution and its resulting constitution did not center on a change in the cast of characters in high places or on a change in their political language or immediate policy agenda. Its central concern was in establishing new processes by which whoever occupied the places of power could be restrained and replaced. In short, it did not pretend to have a doctrinal truth but instead implied a deep skepticism that anyone had either a monopoly on doctrinal truth or such moral or intellectual rectitude as to be exempt from constraints, condemnations, or dismissals from office by their fellow men.
The act of situating the case for markets within a wider argument about civilization reminds us, moreover, that much more is involved in the defense of market economies than emphasizing their ability to create wealth. Distinctly nonmaterial goods like liberty and justice are equally at stake.
A tariff does not leave consumers free to select which imports they can best do without. It makes the selection for them, or, at least, strongly influences their choice. This may be thought wise. We think it a loss. Nor is a tariff as flexible an instrument as a free exchange-rate. It creates vested interests and can only be readily altered in an upward direction. Further, by reducing imports it tends to make the rate of exchange higher than it would otherwise be. This places export industries at a disadvantage, even if wages and other internal costs do not rise.
