ABSTRACT
Electricity was organized into a ‘big grid’: a grid that operates through the transformation of citizens into consumers and the concentration of wealth at the hands of a few producers. In many ways, the big grid was a precursor of what scholars have called the age of ‘big data’ – the age in which gathering and deploying massive amounts of information has become key to the work of scientists, engineers and activists. The post-war years saw intense government investment in computers and the work of dedicated mathematicians to free ‘communication engineering’ from the confines of grid studies – within a couple of decades, digital computing had become the premise of a separate field: computer science. The smart grid is often touted as the welcoming of the digital age into the study of the electric grid – ironically so, since the electric grid inspired the lines of research that ushered in the digital age.
