The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 5

save capitalism by powering it to renewed heights of productivity, or the
opposite expectation that it will open the door to carefully planned hacker
attacks that will disrupt the world economy. Are China and Iran trying to
bring America's inancial system to the digital brink? Or, as China claims,
is the United States becoming a major “hacking empire”?
Since exaggerated promises typically accompany the rise of new tech-
nical systems, it is easy to dismiss today's hype about cloud computing,
but that would be wrong. This is not because the stories about a cloud-
computing and big-data revolution, with their visions of boundless eco-
nomic prosperity, are any more accurate than promises of world peace in
the age of radio. Rather, the marketing hype supports myths that are taken
seriously as storylines for our time. If successful, they become common
sense, the bedrock of seemingly unchallengeable beliefs that inluence
not only how we think about cloud computing, but about technology
in general and our relationship to it. The decision to give up your own
or your organization's data to a cloud company is a signiicant one and
companies promoting the technology would understandably have us focus
on its beneits. Moreover, it is important to take the hype seriously as the
mythic embodiment of what, in an earlier topic, I called the digital sub-
lime, the tendency of technology, in this case computer communication,
to take on a transcendent role in the world beyond the banality of its role
in everyday life (Mosco 2004). It is time to give cloud computing its due
by starting a conversation about its place in society and culture.
Cloud computing is a signiicant development in its own right and a
prism through which to view problems facing societies confronting the
turbulent world of information technology. The cloud has deep historical
roots and it is important to consider them, but it also has new features
that require a close look at what makes cloud systems quantitatively and
qualitatively different. Moreover, cloud computing serves as a prism that
relects and refracts every major issue in the ield of information technology
and society, including the fragile environment, ownership and control,
security and privacy, work and labor, the struggles among nations for
dominance in the global political economy, and how we make sense of
this world in discourse and in cultural expression.
Chapter 2 tells the story of cloud computing, from its origins in the
1950s concept of the computer utility to the present-day giant data centers
that ill vast open spaces everywhere in the world. Back in the 1950s, as