Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 175

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C hapTer 5
B ig d aTa and C loud C ulTure

This is a world where massive amounts of data and applied
mathematics replace every other tool that might be brought to
bear. Out with every theory of human behavior, from linguistics
to sociology. Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who
knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and
we can track and measure it with unprecedented idelity. With
enough data, the numbers speak for themselves. (Anderson 2008)

A long time ago (and, of course, in many parts of society today),
people had another name for massive information dumps that
occurred spontaneously without any query having been made.
They called it God. It was God, or the gods, who spoke out of
the burning bush to tell you what you didn't even know you
needed to ask. Before Oracle, Inc., in other words, there were
oracles. (Alan Liu in Franklin 2012, 445)

The growth of cloud computing continues a process of building a global
informational capitalism by concentrating production, processing, storage,
distribution, and electronic services in a handful of companies, and, in
some cases, governments, that manage labor and consumption through the
systems that the cloud enables. This is undoubtedly a contested process as

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