Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 209

a nod to the Prince of Darkness. The award-winning writer Annie Proulx
titled her 2011 evocative “memoir of place” Bird Cloud because, on her
irst visit to the vast Wyoming wetland and prairie that would become her
home, a bird-shaped cloud greeted her in the sky at dusk. For the writer,
it was a sign to settle there and an intimation of the rich and seemingly
ever-present bird life in the area. There are many other potential examples,
and some will make a brief appearance, but the three I have chosen enjoy
the advantage of covering a signiicant swathe of Western history, represent
three different forms of the written word, and, more importantly, speak
evocatively, if metaphorically, about the deeper signiicance and threats
represented by cloud computing and big data. Others more expert than
I can surely think of examples from music and the arts, and from outside
the world of the Western humanities. 7
The Wisdom of the Clouds
Even though it was panned by critics and forced into rewrites when
irst performed in 423 BC, it is hard to overestimate the importance of
A ristophanes's The Clouds for literature, for the history of ideas, and for
today's debates about what knowledge means in an information society.
After 2,500 years, it remains a model for what Eve Smith calls “comedy
as social conscience” (Smith 2013). Remarkably, the play accomplishes
all of this through a satire that lampoons Socrates, one of the most ven-
erated thinkers in the history of the world and, in the minds of some, a
martyr to his beliefs. The plot centers on Strepsiades, a once-prosperous
man now saddled with debts, who plans to get out from under them by
sending his slacker son Pheidippides to the Thinkery, the ictitious school
established by Socrates that teaches how to win an argument no matter
how weak your position. Or as Strepsiades describes it to his son, “There
they prove that we are coals enclosed on all sides under a vast snuffer,
which is the sky. If well paid, these men also teach one how to gain law-
suits, whether they be just or not.” The play turns the great philosopher
into a Dale Carnegie, whose classic book on public relations, How to Win
Friends and Inluence People , became a marketing bible on publication
in 1936. The Clouds is the name for the play's chorus, which rises out
of the oceans to live in the heavens, surveying the world with a panoptic