The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 2

Gates (1995) as “friction-free capitalism.” Companies that once housed
an information-technology department with its craft tradition can now
move most of its work to the cloud, where IT functions and its labor are
centralized in an industrial mode of production, processing, storage, and
distribution. Furthermore, the cloud takes the next step in a long process
of creating a global culture of knowing, captured in the term big data , or
what might better be called digital positivism . Here information produc-
tion accelerates in networks that link data centers, devices, organizations,
and individuals appearing to create, in the words of one guru, “a global
superintelligence” (Wolf 2010). The cloud and big data are engines that
power informational capitalism even as they enable an increasingly domi-
nant way of knowing. These interlinked processes and the challenges to
them comprise the major themes of To the Cloud .
I have been thinking about cloud computing since 2010, when it began
to enter public consciousness, particularly after a couple of splashy Super
Bowl ads aired during the 2011 game. Then Apple got into the act when
it urged users to move their photos, music, mail, and iles to its iCloud.
Not wanting to give up control over my stash of family photos and wor-
ried about the security of my mail, I resisted doing anything more than
uploading a few incidentals (although for some reason I did not mind
sending my photos into the cloud known as Flickr). Like many people, I
was aware that some of my things were inding their way from my com-
puter to remote servers, but this left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. Stories
about cloud security breaches, disappearing data, and environmental risks
at cloud data centers were making people feel that not all clouds were
bright and only a few were green. But the migration of organizational
and personal data continued, as did the marketing.
I decided to take a closer look when references to clouds of all sorts
began to appear, partly prompted by the arrival of cloud computing and
partly owing to my growing cloud-consciousness. First it was media atten-
tion to an obscure medieval treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing , that led
me to wonder about the philosophical assumptions embedded in cloud
computing. Then there was David Mitchell's strangely titled novel Cloud
Atlas and the announcement of a blockbuster ilm based on the topic's
mystical account of souls migrating like clouds across time and space. I
began collecting images of cloud data centers as they continued to spring
up around the world, and was struck by the clash between the banality of