Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 211

Ordered to a couch and covered in a blanket to encourage self-relection,
the bored old man instead decides to masturbate. Having failed to learn
from Socrates, Strepsiades returns to his son, who, perhaps too young to
care about whether he is offered wisdom or trivia, knowledge or rhetoric,
agrees this time to be a model student. Socrates steps aside and instruction
is taken over by two igures: one who stresses creating arguments based
on knowledge, the other on manipulating people with rhetoric. The lat-
ter wins and, armed with the skills of a sharp talker, Pheidippides saves
the day for his father by dismissing with his now-dazzling rhetoric those
to whom his dad owes money. Unfortunately for Strepsiades, Socratic
education makes his son arrogant to the point of beating his father and
threatening his mother. He even manages to mount a convincing defense
of his violence, what for Aristophanes is the true test of his successful
transformation under the great philosopher. This leaves Dad to moan,
“Oh! what madness! I had lost my reason when I threw over the gods
through Socrates' seductive phrases.” The Cloud chorus has little sympa-
thy for Strepsiades: “Here is a perverse old man, who wants to cheat his
creditors; but some mishap, which will speedily punish this rogue for his
shameful schemings, cannot fail to overtake him from today. For a long
time he has been burning to have his son know how to ight against all
justice and right and to gain even the most iniquitous causes against his
adversaries every one. I think this wish is going to be fulilled. But mayhap,
mayhap, will he soon wish his son were dumb rather!” The play ends with
the old man climbing to the roof of the Thinkery to rip it apart and burn
it down, getting in one last jab at the great philosopher. When someone
demands to know what Strepsiades is up to, he answers, Socratically, “I
am entering on a subtle argument with the beams of the house.”
The Clouds is nearly 2,500 years old yet remains both hilarious and
remarkably modern. When the Cloud chorus steps out of its role as a
celestial source of wisdom to plead with the audience to “like” this new
version of a play that irst opened to weak reviews and then returns to
character, one cannot help but think of the narrators in Thornton Wilder's
O ur To wn and The Skin of Our Teeth , who move effortlessly through
dramatic time and space. But for our purposes The Clouds speaks most
powerfully across two and a half millennia to a world of new clouds that
would also revise the meaning of knowledge. Consider their irst words
in response to Socrates's summons: “Eternal Clouds, let us appear; let us