The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 10

emanating from within and outside the borders of companies offering
cloud services. Cyber-attacks have become an instrument of government
policy. Furthermore, privacy and security are challenged by the nature
of what I call surveillance capitalism . A signiicant source of revenue in
the cloud and big data is the opportunity to market information about
subscribers and customers to advertisers. For example, Facebook could
not survive as a commercial enterprise without the ability to exercise
close surveillance on its 1.3 billion users. Alongside surveillance capital-
ism is the surveillance state , which, as the revelations about the National
Security Agency revealed, has almost complete access to data stored in
the cloud and delivered over the Internet and other electronic networks.
It is no wonder that institutions of all sorts, as well as individual consum-
ers, are increasingly worried about the security implications of moving
to the cloud, whether the data centers are located in China, Europe, or
the United States.
One of the primary reasons for moving to the cloud is to streamline,
if not entirely eliminate, an organization's IT department, amounting to
an emerging dark cloud for professional labor. But the issue is not limited
to IT. Specialized cloud companies like Salesforce can take over the man-
agement of customer relations, thereby freeing irms to cut back on their
in-house sales and marketing activities. Moreover, since the preponderance
of knowledge labor increasingly involves IT work, whether in education,
journalism, or health care, this dark cloud now hovers over a large seg-
ment of the occupational world. Chapter 4 documents these developments
and situates them within a dynamic international division of labor in the
information-technology industries where chains of accumulation meet
chains of resistance, from Foxconn in Shenzhen to Apple in Cupertino.
As more organizations and individuals decide to enter the cloud, will the
global system that supports it remain intact? What happens if it ruptures?
Chapter 5 concludes the topic by shifting to the cultural signiicance of
cloud computing. It is guided by the view that culture resists essentialisms
of all types, including the tendency in the digital world, now embodied
in cloud computing, to reduce the cloud to an information repository and
the foundation for the digital positivism of big-data analysis. It starts to
pursue this theme by considering what we can learn from the movement
to use the cloud for large-scale data analysis—what has been called big
data. The chapter assesses the assumptions and components of big data,