Dec 09
12
Digital Law Review
As we build greater ability to access information, day by day, so too do we find ourselves in the precarious position of too many people having access to too much misinformation.
Worse still, it is often the people who have the loudest voices that are broadcasting and passing on the greatest amount of misinformation.
The noise of this disinformation can be deafening at times.
We have debated this considerably here at Perceptric with respect to P2P and the economic drive that it represents to actual sales. The music industry has been so aggressive in poisoning the concept of P2P that even smart people just assume P2P is a bad thing. As a result they keep pushing for technological advancements that ironically push file sharing underground, with hard encryption etc, all of which virtually guarantees that there will be continuing copyright theft on a grand scale.
However, not only does it lead to their industry becoming unsustainable, it also leads to those same technologies being deployed in other areas – ironically sometime to great benefit.
One area that is looking like it will be disrupted is the power industry.
Now this is a sector where there is a lot of disinformation that people who don't know much speak about with great authority. The other day someone was pontificating to me about the need for more coal fired power stations in order to maintain base load requirements and how solar was a non-event.
I asked him how much he knew about power generation. He said “not a lot”. I told him that the whole concept of base load was something that was a furphy and that you need base load because you have centralized generation and so need to be able to get the power out to the edge. If you generate power at the edge you don't need to push the base load proposition. Certainly, that is my understanding anyway, from the discussion I have had. But if someone has better knowledge than me please correct me.
A company in Melbourne by the name of Ceramic Fuel Cells (in which I have no shares by the way) is in the process of launching a domestic fuel cell product that uses methane as its fuel source and generates electricity. It is pioneering what is essentially a P2P concept of generating power at the edge of the network, feeding it into the network, and powering the home. The technology came out of CSIRO in the 90's.
This seems like a really interesting area of activity to me, and it apparently is to others too, because the company has some of the biggest energy companies in Europe on its share register currently. You have to figure that these companies are not going to invest in something like this just for fun – they know that they have to have a bet on anything serious that is out there.
But this company and its technology will actually be hugely disruptive to the legacy power industry if they are successful. So we don't need to worry about base load (or at least not unless we are electrical engineers specializing in energy distribution). People who talk knowledgeably about power generation when they don't know much about it are as dangerous as people who talk about climate science and don't know anything about it.
The danger of the internet is that we are becoming vulnerable to he who shouts loudest. And the people who shout loudest sometimes don't actually know what is happening. The fundamental issues are these – that regardless of what people may say, the digital train has left the station. The impact of digital technology concepts – specifically P2P and its application in every field of endeavour has only just started. Where it will go next is anyone's guess. But it will impact all of us, and if we give it a change, may very well be the thing that saves the planet.
However, to embrace P2P, we need to understand that we are going to go through an evolutionary bump that is more akin to revolution than evolution. There will be a tipping point. It is happening to climate whether we like it or not. It is happening in the world of politics with organizations such as Get Up having real influence on how people think, and it is happening with the email campaigns by the climate change deniers to give people like Tony Abbott more support… So it has positive and negative impact. But it is going to see a huge amount of law that has been in existence for hundreds of years needing to be reviewed and changed….
Moving to that beginning – a digital law review – will be a big step forward to a stable new world society.