One day, all our computational abilities will flow, as electricity does, into every home, carrying with it the full force of the entire orchestra of functionality on the Internet — it will cease to be the Internet and become the Grid.

A prediction inspired by this...

The Big Internet in the Sky

Imagine a digital Cloud; a precursor to global grid computing where every computer can almost act as one thing. Just think about the Internet as if it were only the many wires driving signals into everyone’s houses. That is exactly like the global electricity grid operates today.  Nick Carr discusses this exact potential progression in his book The Big Switch: From Edison to Google.

As Carr describes in his book, and all of us already knew: Electricity was not always provided this way.  The electric grid started out as simple pockets of infrastructure surrounded by the likes of candle lit farm houses — these pockets of power were like oasis in deserts — like the Internet exists today segregated into domains with functionality. Eventually, these pockets grew, and without any uniform direction, until they became so nebulous, expensive to operate, and potentially problematic, it was concluded they be consolidated into such a thing as a grid.  For a lot of the same reasons, the Internet ought to evolve similarly — at its most fundamental the Internet is just “specially organized” electricity on very similar lines. This new grid of the Internet may end up not needing wires at all though.

Before we get to the Grid, you can imagine this step just before the Grid as we did with the pockets of regional electricity companies (electric companies are to the Grid what ISPs are to the Internet). In other words, you can imagine it as a nebulous Cloud — something gaining more and more tangibility.

Today, this Cloud is the next big move on the agenda of companies such as Microsoft, Google & (surprise-surprise) Amazon. The Cloud is a necessary starting point toward the eventual future of the Grid.

Present-2020: The Cloud

In 2020 the Internet is dramatically different, its gone through a few face-lifts and paradigm shifts.

Sites no longer exist; certainly not  under feebly defined, freely roaming domains that anyone can create, because that is unnecessary. Broadband comes with local space within the Cloud and that is because traffic must follow much more orderly pathing in this much more organized structure. The Internet you and I know, has been reduced to a much less interesting facade-like layer of the Cloud that is propped upon the now more crucial and relevant, deep tangle of interacting segments — like TV replaced radio as signals laid on signals, becoming networks of channels. The Cloud is where all the technological excitement and interest has moved. The Internet would be transformed to a whole other beast, one ravaged into a canvas for the worlds of art, business and commerce, where only the occasional personalized, human voice could be found; a world engulfed by a myriad of commercialization, high-end media advertisements, and interactive product placement software. Nonsense fictions rule the entertainment world prescribing themselves as “reality entertainment.” Actual reality-entertainment doesn’t exist because the meaning of the word “reality” has been altered by years of TV-based reality-entertainment. Not to be outdone, the competition, a wide-range of classics, have begun a resurgence in the last decade, starting in the media revolution of 2011, when Google’s Video search becomes the latest fad. Society is adrift between two worlds — the old and the new.

By 2012, the music industry, full almost exclusively by commercialized product-artists, is completely flattened by file sharing. The “garage band” becomes an endangered species that will not resurface for generations. The kind of objective journalism of the 50s, 60s and 70s have been entirely replaced with this deeper movement into the Cloud, as had begun with a movement to the Web, of bloggers of all kinds. News organizations, as a result, have turned into the much more dynamic news-entertainment organizations. Journalism in the form we know it, dies right along side Music in the form we know. Not so soon after, Movies move dramatically forward, transforming into a new form of interactive entertainment that closely resemble video games. And by 2015 “the album” is a thing of the past; shows are few and almost all music as it exists is purchased on-line in the form of single data elements from some Cloud-based service. Media converges; the average person has to use at least 3 or 4 news sources to be sure about any one news item, as spin is now the language of the norm; with everything so connected, even economically, and in one form or another inter-dependent, someone’s always covering someone else. All these technologies entirely kill the need for media devices like the television which provide only rather primitive, one-way communication.

Ultra-mobile PCs (Handhelds) take over instead, replacing even laptops, all other personal entertainment devices, along with personal communication devices, and the more minor control devices too, like the old TV remote.  You can do it all from a thin, flexible, pocket-sized sheet of some composite film about as thick, wide, and long as a credit card by 2020. Of course desktop computing still exists, but the “desktop PC” is little more than a multi-touch screen made to do the same stuff as your handheld, letting you interface with Cloud Services you’ve purchased — this would remind you of how a TV coupled with a cable box opens up a network of selectable channels you’ve purchased, only if you could take your TV with you in your pocket, it could also get on the Internet, and stored all your personal and financial information.

The Cloud segments that communicate — lets call them fronts like we would call groups of storm clouds — are themselves the key segments of a more massive retail grid computing platform — like Amazon’s S3 — which exists even today as a seed of the future.  Except in 2020, these fronts are much more mature than their Internet counterparts. They rely on a further advanced, future relative of today’s Web Service technologies; a single, standardized way to communicate. This has only become possible as recently as 2017 though. And, its as a result of Cisco, in a partnership with Clearwire Communications and the open source community, developing and introducing a revolutionary SOAP/REST-like protocol cross-bred with a hybrid of every low-level networking protocol, which they named CHAT, for, Complete Homogeneous Asynchronous Telecommunication protocol. Segments of the Cloud — the private and public mini-grids that make up the Cloud — all gossip (not so differently than S3 components do today on Amazon’s cloud) using CHAT at specially designed peer points. They share client information and functionality; pulling, pushing, and mashing data from all the different services, relying on all the various available computational frameworks  — the same sort of way the browser today uses HTTP to let users interact with varieties of functionality on the Web (CSS, JS, HTML, XML, or server-side languages like PHP, Perl, C) at different points we used to call “sites”.

The social explosion that began with the Web 2.0 movement, of course, continues, and by 2018 has continued to evolve, taking the IT community’s security sensibilities back nearly to pre-1990s Information Security standards.  That is because now, for generations, people have openly offered up crucial pieces of their lives and identities to services living once on the Internet, but now more available in the Cloud.

Another Hacker Crackdown marks the Birth of the Grid

Then, just like that, not so different from the reaction that followed the social boom of the Internet, during the 1990s again in the mid 2020s, a technological security revolution takes place.

Anxiety over the loss of the free and easy digital sociality, and a specific turmoil in the world hacker community over the loss of freedom on the Internet, both build. These two different cultural manifestations eventually converge to become a single force, acting as both initial catalyst and a continual motivation for an information security revolution. Openness closes. Sociality of data — the reign of free for all data at least — and an appreciation for the wisdom of crowds seems to end, exploration moves forward in the study of the ignorance of crowds — but this is only temporary and only in certain specific social demographics. At the same time other groups ramp up levels of interactivity and the robustness of that interaction. This leads to one of the largest information security crisis ever. The discovery of the ability of any computer or set of computers to consolidate for the purpose of corrupting communication across the Cloud.

Its starts with pockets of hackers beginning to develop tools to subvert Cloud behavior. This lets them, and then others, take control of even more parts of the Cloud. Not unlike today’s recent discovery of a DNS protocol bug (Security Focus Coverage and the CERT)  this Gloom 1.0 — the tool constructed to exploit this new vulnerability in CHAT– gives everyone the chance to crash the Cloud. Later, this CHAT protocol subversion  re-introduces a whole new vista of perspectives on Identity Theft, since things are now so much more tightly bound, but users are not as completely identified. As the cultural manifestations motivate, OS patches are released across the industry device-wide, and eagerly accepted by users. The patches allow at the hardware level, kind monitoring, to assist with deterrence of Cloud protocol tainting, but offer a new bi-directional layer. This connection sparks the needed relationship between clients and services, that finally, the nebulousness they share begins to vaporize and the gaps are replaced by true inter-connectivity. The patch for Gloom 1.0 lands, creating additional communicativity that amounts to architectural solidity, and finally we define the once-Internet as the Grid.