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manufacturers produce the hardware that ills data centers, ofices, and
homes. This sector has experienced remarkable growth as production has
shifted from the West to China, but it is now undergoing an upheaval
with signiicant implications for every company in the cloud. As a result,
it is important to consider the dialectical relationship between chains of
accumulation and chains of resistance.
The second major development is the reorganization of information
technology labor. A main reason why companies move to the cloud is
to save on IT labor by outsourcing work to the cloud. While the head
of Amazon Web Services sees this as a two-decade-long project, he is
conident enough to conclude that the cloud “is replacing the corporate
data center” (Miller and Hardy 2013). The centralization and resulting
industrialization of professional craft IT work are one of the primary means
of saving costs in the cloud. But it is important to understand that “IT”
now includes a much wider range of specialties than it once did. It now
encompasses not only those who work in IT departments but also those
tech-savvy people whose expertise also lies in a substantive profession like
education, journalism, or law. In other words, there is an increasingly
signiicant category of workers whose work in a professional ield requires
considerable expertise in the use of information technology. As a result,
the threat the cloud poses to information technology professionals by
virtue of its capacity to absorb the IT functions of individual businesses
extends to a growing number of workers.
The employment issue has been debated throughout the history of
computing. In fact, it arose as early as the 1940s when the celebrated
cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener (1948, 1950) speculated that com-
puters would lead to massive workplace automation. The issues he raised
continue to provide the foundation for a more general debate about the
role of technology in structural unemployment (Krugman 2013; Sachs
2013). Once again, the problem of the quantity and quality of jobs is not
new to computers and communication, but the cloud adds signiicant
elements to the debate. The complexity of managing the global supply
chains that the cloud requires demands a degree of labor stability that may
not be possible. Moreover, cloud computing promotes the elimination of
skilled jobs through centralization and automation.
It sometimes appears that the global supply chain is anything but
unstable. Has not most every material thing been produced in China
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