Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 136

in data dressed as pixels.
A billion roaming photojournalists . . .
Uploading the human experience.
And it is spectacular.
So why would you cap that?
My iPhone 5 can see every point of view . . .
Every panorama. The entire gallery of humanity.
I need to upload all of me.
I need, no, I have the right to be unlimited.
Only Sprint offers Truly Unlimited data
for iPhone 5. (Sprint 2013)
“I need to upload all of me.” Why not? Since most people believe that
digital bits are different from atoms, this is a consequence-free choice.
However they might have been burnt, or at least jaded a bit, by the dot-
com bust of the early 2000s, many remain with former director of MIT's
Media Lab Nicholas Negroponte (1995) and former editor of Wired
magazine Kevin Kelly (2010), as well as countless other myth makers, who
insisted that the digital world not only differed from the world of material
atoms; it represented another order of reality. Being digital, as Negroponte
insisted, meant living in a world of limitless possibilities unbounded by
the physical, material, and environmental limits that constrain the world
of atoms. As powerful as this vision has been for drawing a world into the
ether of cyberspace and now the cloud, it is fundamentally lawed. The
resource and environmental problems of the digital world demonstrate
that the digital and the material are inextricably bound. 3 Negroponte and
those who followed in his path were wrong. The world of atoms is not
ending; it weighs upon us ever more powerfully, with every additional
petabyte, in the digital world's seemingly relentless growth. Cloud com-
panies like Google argue that the centralization and rationalization of
power use that a shift to the cloud enables will diminish overall business
power consumption. But a model based on research funded by Google
that appears to demonstrate this has met with skepticism (Bourne 2013).
Moreover, reports funded by Greenpeace International (2010, 2011, and
2012) and by the U.S. coal industry (Mills 2013), typically adversaries,
conclude that overall business energy consumption will instead grow
substantially.