Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 111

generates revenue precisely by scooping up and analyzing personal infor-
mation. It is certainly not the security problems of storing data in nations
that will not protect it, but, instead, will use it to meet their own needs.
Given Huawei's own security problems, one should not ind it surprising
that no mention is made of the problems posed by storing data beyond
a nation's borders. Nor is it the massive changes in the global division
of labor resulting from transferring the IT departments of the world's
organizations to the cloud. Rather, the primary issue of signiicance to the
cloud-computing industry is determining the best way to create a global
system of uniform standards that will guarantee the smooth performance
of a cloud-based global grid. Given the heavy telecommunications-industry
involvement in the report's creation, including sponsorship by the world's
leading electronics-equipment company, it is not a great surprise that the
document would concentrate on technical standards. Indeed the chapters
that focus most heavily on technical convergence are the ones written by
Huawei and representatives from the International Telecommunications
Union. Moreover, it is an issue that the telecommunications industry has
worried about and worked on for generations and one that private research
organizations insist needs careful attention in order to properly maintain
cloud-computing networks (Bernnat et al. 2012). But there is more to
this than promoting a major issue for the industry.
The report represents the technicism that is common in most promo-
tional documents. It is constructed to represent the general public inter-
est, but is written from a particular industry interest. To avoid tensions
between the public interest and the needs of business, promotional reports
avoid social and political issues and focus instead on technical problems
like standards and convergence that are both real and unlikely to threaten
the goal of equating a speciic industry interest with the general public
interest. For the report's writers, there is no questioning the general value
and legitimacy of information technology and the cloud. Any thought of
restricting their development, for example, to protect the environment,
secure privacy, or save jobs, is foolish and irrational because it means giving
up the beneits. It is, however, legitimate to raise technical issues that stand
in the way of their full development. Technicism , a focus not just on how
technology determines things but on how it becomes the singular source
of solutions to problems, is a major means of uniting the speciic interest
of the industry and the general interest of the world's IT and cloud users.