google/ge decision making

I read about a week or so ago about how Google is embarking on a smart grid development plan in partnership with GE. Their plan is to restructure the nation’s electrical grids and access “real-time information about home energy use” in order to make energy consumption more efficient. This endeavor is relevant to aspects of both the Lyotard and the Licklider readings this week.

With respect to the Licklider, the smart grid would be an example of man-computer symbiosis on a massive scale. One of the key elements that was not sufficiently advanced in 1960 to develop a system of man-computer symbiosis was real-time cooperation and information exchange between human and machine. The smart grid would use real time information about energy consumption to increase efficiency of the input/output matrix of (electrical) power.

To be enacted, the smart grid first of all requires a lobbying effort on the part of Google/GE. Such an effort, if successful, would be an example of the process by which multi-national corporations use their privileged access to information to make decisions that broker power in arenas that were formerly the purview of government. Lyotard indicates that this process of "economic redeployment" based on the commodification of information "goes hand in hand with a change in the function of the State" (14).

Google's official blog mentions that currently "we all receive an electricity bill once a month that encourages little except prompt payment," implying that with the smart grid information will also be flowing with this electricity. But the fact that the information will flow about home energy back to the grid recalls Lyotard's imaginary "flows of knowledge traveling along identical channels of identical nature, some of which would be reserved for the "decision makers," while the others would be used to repay each person's perpetual debt with respect to the social bond" (6).

The smart grid, which is not a vision or goal exclusive to Google, seems to me to be an extreme example of the computerized routinization of such clerical and mechanical tasks as Licklider complained took up so much of his time (5), which Lyotard calls "the functions of regulation [... being] further withdrawn from administrators and entrusted to machines" (14).

The Google smart grid appears not only to be an attempt to monopolize access to information about energy use by homes on the grid, but to monopolize the supply of the electricity that powers the computer age, whose information is increasingly filtered through Google's search engines, and now its browser.