Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 213

telling points of recognition. Today there is a great deal of attention paid
to the myth of youth and new technology, which is made to mock and
shame older men and women who are caricatured as laughably unskilled
in the world of information technology. Instead, it is the young, unbur-
dened by the weight of years, who are naturally adept at mastering smart
devices and, unlike their elders, appreciate the wisdom of the cloud. I have
elsewhere described this worship of youth in the history of technology,
from stories of heroic young telegraph key operators through tales of the
amateur radio boys whose bravery saved the day for sailors at sea and oth-
ers in distress, to the garage-shop wizards of cyberspace who make their
irst billion before thirty and, as in the ilm War Games , save the world
from nuclear holocaust (Mosco 2004). For those who buy into all or part
of this myth, Aristophanes has a different tale to tell. Although no one is
spared his satirical darts, the playwright saves some of his sharpest barbs
for the young Pheidippides, who is transformed from a slacker, too lazy
to help his family by attending the Thinkery, to a button-downed geek
and slippery con artist. Sure, his father is no prize either, but at least Dad
comes around to understand just how foolish he was. Armed with his new
powers, Pheidippides is ready to take on the world to the point of justify-
ing assaults on his parents: “How pleasant it is to know these clever new
inventions and to be able to defy the established laws! When I thought
only about horses, I was not able to string three words together without
a mistake, but now that the master has altered and improved me and that
I live in this world of subtle thought, of reasoning and of meditation, I
count on being able to prove satisfactorily that I have done well to thrash
my father.” Perhaps, the play suggests, wisdom is wasted on the young.
Finally, there is the Thinkery, a misnomer if there ever was one, a place
of rank positivism (what is the relationship between the length of a lea's
leg and its capacity to jump?) and rhetorical gobbledygook. Just because
an institution bears the name of thought does not guarantee the delivery
of wisdom. Two and a half millennia later, it is worth reminding ourselves
that neither does the terabyte capacity of a data center.
Clouds Get in Our Way
Fourteenth-century residents of the British Isles lived in fear of the black
shilling. This is a reference to the dark circular swelling that appeared in