Of Course ERCOT uses AWS…

Among the many things I’ve shaved off my resume is a brief stint some years ago with a small Texas utility company. They needed help with a reporting tool that fed data to the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), and I needed work. Even then, ERCOT was pretty widely known as one of the most flagrantly misnamed institutions in history – but at least they hadn’t killed anyone yet (that would come later).

Amazon Web Services (AWS) also hasn’t killed anyone… yet. But given ERCOT’s increasing willingness to form partnerships with both AWS and Microsoft (who managed to have a sweeping cloud service interruption of their own, a week after AWS), it seems only a matter of time.

As more and more essential services are shifted from directly controlled digital infrastructure to effectively unregulated cloud platforms, the likelihood of these services failing, in unexpected and unaccountable ways... expands.

The state of Texas has hardly any more business operating its own electrical grid than Big Tech has running the global digital infrastructure of the planet as a jointly-held private fiefdom. But at least ERCOT is an agency of the Texas state government and at least theoretically accountable to that state’s voters and citizens.

No such accountability extends to the management of Amazon, Microsoft, or Google.

Given that it took decades for the United States to establish any federal regulatory oversight over electrical utilities in the first place, it should come as no surprise that similar oversight over the internet has only reached the white paper stage, and can only be described as ‘challenging’.

But it is a challenge that is likely unavoidable.

From a system design standpoint, the logic of cloud computing services is unassailable. Being able to dynamically and rapidly scale resources to match shifts in demand is a capability no enterprise can afford to ignore. But the more these services become critical infrastructure, the less it makes sense for them to operate under nineteenth century rules of Laissez-faire capitalism. We can either have democratic societies that protect the public good, or we can have techno-feudalism… we can’t have both.

Meanwhile, the providers of cloud computing services are aggressively moving forward toward providing more than mere ‘computing capacity’ as a scalable resource. The current round of layoffs at Amazon, disproportionately targeting software engineers, clearly indicate that skills and knowledge are the next scalable resource they plan on offering.

The logic of AI-based virtual workforces is probably as unassailable as the logic of cloud services, once notions of inherent value of human labor are set aside. But that logic begins to unravel, once you consider the very real possibility of those virtual workforces evaporating the next time either Amazon or Microsoft has a significant network outage.

That such an outage could occur in conjunction with a major weather event or other natural disaster is not at all unlikely. If ERCOT or other public utility management entities decided to follow Amazon’s lead and replace real engineers with well-trained chatbots, the potential human cost could make ERCOT and AWS’s combined previous failures look trivial. The possibility of such a failure cascading across multiple industries and services is even less unlikely.

Equally likely: The possibility of such a failure being a deliberate act of sabotage. Even before last year’s political failure put the U.S. at risk of devolving into authoritarianism, many organizations and governments beyond the U.S. had already come to question their dependence on U.S. based tech monopolies and their services. Communities within the U.S. already under attack by their own government have every reason to ask the same questions, consider the same alternatives – and alternatives do exist, at least as work in progress, thanks to groups like Co-op Cloud and Cooperative AI.

There is even an applicable model for deploying and developing such services. In the United States, cooperatively owned electrical utility services provide power to over 42 million people. Some of these co-ops already offer internet connectivity services (for example Hood River Co-op). Extending this model to include community/federated cloud services is both logical and doable – particularly in Oregon, where co-ops like Hood River already deliver roughly 10% of consumer power.

Granted, these efforts would be widely attacked and condemned as ‘socialism’ by a handful of the wealthiest men on the planet – but let’s not assume these oligarch bastards always get their way. A fair number of them just spent more money than most of us will ever see trying to elect one of their own to run one of the largest cities in the world. Yet, despite their efforts, Zohran Mamdani is now the mayor-elect of NYC.

Monopolistic control of the internet may not have the gut urgency of the out of control costs that animated Mamdani’s coalition, but it’s not much less of an existential threat. People die when mismanaged electrical grids fail. People are going to die, at some point, when mismanaged cloud and AI services fail to deliver when they are needed the most.

While it is entirely too soon to draw broad conclusions from the success of the Mamdani coalition, it is not at all premature to draw inspiration from that success – or to see a way forward past corporatist oligarchy, based on community organizing and community self-reliance.