Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 212

arise from the roaring depths of Ocean, our father; let us ly towards the
lofty mountains, spread our damp wings over their forest-laden summits,
whence we will dominate the distant valleys, the harvest fed by the sacred
earth, the murmur of the divine streams and the resounding waves of the
sea, which the unwearying orb lights up with its glittering beams. But let
us shake off the rainy fogs, which hide our immortal beauty and sweep
the earth from afar with our gaze.” Aristophanes's metaphor of the chorus
rising out of the oceans to become cloud-illed sky is appropriate to the
modern cloud because it offers a way of envisioning through discourse the
panoptic knowledge that is both information and means of surveillance
looking out on the world and intervening to modify thought and behavior.
Aristophanes sends a warning lare across the bow of cloud computing.
There is no separating knowledge from power, ubiquitous information
from ubiquitous surveillance.
For The Clouds , the key ontological tension is not between knowledge
and data, but rather between reason and rhetoric. They are viewed as dif-
ferent because reason, what Aristophanes calls in the play “just discourse,”
advances, as its character states, “by presenting what is true.” Rhetoric,
on the other hand, described without subtlety as “unjust discourse,” is
a spin doctor, twisting the truth with skillfully constructed fabrications
that carry the day. The Cloud chorus, it turns out, is of two minds, at irst
appearing to approve of the outcome, but later admitting that rhetoric was
only permitted to win in order to teach Strepsiades a lesson: those seek-
ing a shortcut to success will themselves be cut short. Here Aristophanes
warns against the seductive power of dazzling language masquerading as
the wisdom of the clouds. There is a ine line between reason and rhetoric,
truth and spin, knowledge and publicity. The way of knowing established
2,500 years ago comes not in the form of the philosopher king—such a
igure was just a Platonic aspiration. Rather it is the philosopher-trickster,
the intellectual-spin doctor who dominates with knowledge and rhetoric
both mutually constituting and mutually contaminating. In the Western
way of knowing, there is no pure truth stored and processed in the cloud;
there is just the ongoing struggle between reason and rhetoric, something
that the contemporary philosopher-trickster Bruno Latour recognizes
in his restaging of the debates between Socrates and the Sophists in the
masterful Pandora's Hope (1999).
Before leaving the world of Aristophanes's Athens for a medieval mon-
astery and The Cloud of Unknowing , it is worth noting two additional