Dark Clouds - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 163

walling them into industrial fortresses to support manufacturing, especially
electronics production, for export. But it did not take long for these former
peasants to doubt the wisdom of the system and to start turning the chain
of accumulation that their work sustains into a chain of resistance. At the
very least, they succeeded in forcing Foxconn to move production to new
centers and to provide for some form of worker representation. 6 Neverthe-
less, given the country's one-child policy, it is becoming increasingly dif-
icult for the electronics manufacturer to replace workers who decide that
the global assembly line is not for them or whose rebellion leads to their
dismissal. This raises questions about the long-term viability of China's
export-led growth policy and the political consequences of shifting to a
model that concentrates on China's consumers.
Just as it is easy to expect that the massive control China has maintained
over the world's industrial economy, especially in electronics, is here to
stay, it is also tempting to overstate contemporary signs that it is eroding.
Given the coercive power of the state in China, it is always possible for a
crackdown to restore some degree of order, however imperfect. Neverthe-
less, the instability at the base of the computer supply chain should be a
source of serious concern for the cloud-computing industry. Neither the
stable low of material products essential to the cloud industry nor the low
prices made possible by oppressively low wages and horrendous working
conditions can be guaranteed for much longer.
There is also instability at the top of the cloud-computing supply chain.
As one analyst after another has concluded, the primary value of cloud
computing—what really compensates for all of the risks involved in yield-
ing control over data and information services to another company—is
the savings in IT labor. Some companies can eliminate their IT depart-
ments altogether, and others are able to cut them substantially. For IT
consultant Dan Kusnetzky, “Cloud computing is nothing more than the
next step in outsourcing your IT operations” (McKendrick 2013c). Put
another way, cloud computing advances the industrialization of skilled
knowledge labor by centralizing and concentrating it in cloud compa-
nies. According to this view, the enterprise can run more eficiently and
leave most of the IT work to others. As another IT labor market expert
concluded, “Automation has massive implications, especially for the jobs
market. It will not only affect manufacturing but also knowledge workers
in the service sector” (Solman 2013).