Hardware Matters

11 July 2012 at 10:45 am Peter G. Klein Leave a comment

| Peter Klein |

Joe Salerno’s post at Circle Bastiat, “There’s No Such Thing as a Free Cloud,” could have been an entry in our nothing new under the sun series. Joe highlights a recent HBR blog piece on the physical footprint and energy requirements of server farms, showing that success in the digital age depends, for some players, on access to tangible capital assets and energy. There are important implications:

The notion of a world without scarcity is thus usually propagated by leftist social theorists–but not always. There were some libertarian futurists around in the early 1970s. But lately many libertarians are among the vanguard of those who, dazzled by the marvels of the Digital Age, argue that many goods have become costlessly and, therefore, infinitely producible. Without government interference, they contend, humankind will be able to satisfy more and more of their wants using the resources freely available inside the Cloud.

Our Post-Scarcity libertarians should tell this to the owners of the 500,000 data centers, which contain the hundreds of millions of servers worldwide that constitute the real and indispensable infrastructure of the Cloud.

There are also the wires, cables, switches, cell towers, and client machines (PCs, smartphones, tablets, etc., not to mention smart refrigerators, cars with OnStar, thermostats, and more) that give us access to the cloud. To be sure, Moore’s law allows us to consume this hardware as never before. But software without hardware is like, hmmmm, peanut butter without jelly, Sonny without Cher, a Tim Burton movie without Johnny Depp. Notes Joe: “Once again, common sense observation of the real world reveals the ceaseless struggle of human actors to economize on the use of resources and vindicates the old and true economics of scarcity.”