Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 207

and signs, known as nephelococcygia , is an ancient art. Clouds are also
richly evocative because they take on an almost ininite variety of designs,
providing, for many, an early introduction to form and to what it means
to transform one shape into another. The altocumulus ills the sky with
giant cotton balls, the cirrocumulus with patches of rice, and the undula-
tus with celestial ripples of sand. These benign images disappear when an
arcus formation signals the leading edge of an oncoming storm or when
a tuba shoots out of dark clouds to create a water spout over a body of
water (Pretor-Pinney 2011). Clouds are more than cultural evocations
because they replenish the resource that is absolutely essential to sustain
life, leading sorcerers and scientists over the millennia to apply their par-
ticular talents to conjure rain-bearing clouds. In this respect, the cloud is
transcendent because it knows all time and all space, and oversees every
form of organic life.
It is no wonder that clouds have a rich history in practically all cul-
tures, and the West is certainly no exception. It is the perfect metaphor
for today's computing, whose global network of 24/7 data centers linked
to telecommunications systems and smart devices also transcends space
and time and, just as real clouds produce rain, showers a resource that
many consider absolutely essential for today's world: knowledge. Cer-
tainly a literalist might point to the vapor in the sky and the giant cement
warehouses on earth and declare no connection between the two. 6 But
that would miss the rich metaphorical links that give both a touch of
the divine. We marvel at clouds in the sky because they are ever present
and yet ininitely diverse. They are associated with sublime beneicence
for the rain they bring and with sublime terror when they withhold it or
bring destruction in the form of lightning, tornados, and loods. Their
technological counterparts, the vast data factories in the ields, provide a
cloud of knowing, a system of ubiquitous, ininite information that was
once reserved for the divine and, since humankind's banishment from
paradise, has been denied to all.
Even in their literal differences, the image of the cloud provides a gloss
on computing. First, the clouds of vapor in the sky soften the hard-edged
data center by giving cloud computing an ethereal quality. The cloud is
the place of no place; the home of data stored and processed everywhere
and nowhere. Moreover, the image of the cloud naturalizes computing,
covering it with the aura of an organic process that transcends, to a degree,