The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 11

including a reliance on quantitative, correlational analysis, free from theo-
retical considerations and aiming to predict events. Many of big data's
proponents fervently believe that the data will speak for itself, enabling
researchers to eschew qualitative data (or try to render it in quantities)
and end reliance on causality, theory, and history, the traditional bedrock
of social scientiic analysis. Concluding that a technical critique, however
useful, is insuficient to address the philosophical grounding of what is
primarily a digital positivism, the chapter draws from the culture of clouds
to take up the speciic way of knowing that underlies big-data analysis.
This matters because every technology contains an aesthetic, a way of
seeing and feeling, that is drawn from the machine's design—as well as
from its discursive associations. Cloud computing is no exception. The
simple schematic diagram of a network of clouds that gave rise to the term
presents a well-ordered, natural, and benign way to think about it that
is challenged by the culture of clouds, a subterranean stream of thought
that provides a powerful counterweight to digital positivism.
From the early days of the Internet, supporters were not shy about
dressing it up in the language of philosophy and even mysticism. For
example, many big names, including such luminaries as Al Gore and Tom
Wolfe, praised the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (who was also
a philosopher, paleontologist, and poet) as a cyberspace visionary. He
never used a computer and died in 1955, but Wired magazine exclaimed,
“Teilhard saw the Net coming more than half a century before it arrived”
(Kreisberg 1995). Although he predicted nothing about computers and
wrote in the impenetrable language of a mystic, the Jesuit priest appealed
to cyber-gurus and others because he saw information as the leading force
in cosmic evolution. For Teilhard, the growth of information literally
produced an atmosphere of thought, what he called the noosphere , which
encircled the globe, putting increasing pressure on the planet. Eventu-
ally, the pressure of information would create a massive explosion, taking
humankind into the next phase of cosmic evolution. However bizarre the
image and however it clashes with everything we know about physics, there
are few more dramatic ways to mythologize the burgeoning digital world
than with a cloud of knowing pointing the way to progress.
However, other voices in the culture of clouds answer, “not so fast.”
There is more to the metaphor of the cloud than capturing the sublimity
of cloud computing. In its rich history, that metaphor contains a critique