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expansion. To put it bluntly, the cloud addresses most of the world as
consumers and subjects, not as active citizens, and this tendency has
signiicant consequences. It is more important than ever to resist sin-
gularities, expand what it means to know, and make the cloud more
than merely the instrument to build and manage markets for products,
services, workers, and consumers. To address these points, we need to
understand the particularity of the cloud's way of knowing. What are its
strengths and limitations? What are the alternatives and how are these
constrained by the culture of the cloud?
A Cloud of Big Data
It is useful to start by examining the relationship between the cloud and
what is called “big data.” The latter refers to the movement to analyze the
increasingly vast amounts of information stored in multiple locations, but
mainly online and primarily in the cloud. We cannot reduce one to the
other because the cloud encompasses more than big data. The analysis of
big data, sometimes referred to as analytics, is one (admittedly important)
service provided by cloud companies. Furthermore, big-data analysis
can take place outside of a cloud setting, as companies and government
agencies often make use of data held on their own computers. However,
since the store of material used in big-data analysis is growing in size and
complexity, it is increasingly a feature of cloud computing, beneitting
from the promotional pitch that cloud companies make to customers.
For example, Amazon Web Services (AWS) has grown since its success in
supplying the Obama campaign with big-data analysis that most experts
agree provided signiicant help in the successful 2012 campaign, and this
success gave AWS a major boost in a battle with IBM to win a $600 million
contract with the CIA. It also helped AWS expand its consumer service
to challenge that of Dropbox and Google (Barr 2013). The expansion of
cloud computing alone advances the interest in big data because, as one
analyst said, the cloud “has made it viable to perform sophisticated ana-
lytics over huge volumes of data that were never even thinkable before”
(Wainewright 2013). The cloud is not alone in giving impetus to big
data. The proliferation of smart devices has brought about the massive
growth in cloud-based information, including the locational data stored
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