Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 217

computing. To my knowledge no one has addressed The Cloud of Unknow-
ing through the lens of information technology. That is understandable
because, unlike the clouds of Teilhard's noosphere or Kurzweil's singular-
ity, those featured by the anonymous author of The Cloud of Unknowing ,
although substantially the same in content, are anything but the sublime
gateway to cosmic evolution or the key to the age of spiritual machines.
The cloud of that anonymous writing is associated with the data, facts,
information, and details that comprise life's discursive banalities, what
we might call big data stored in the cloud or the haystacks that surround
the prized needles that data scientists discover. But for the fourteenth-
century teacher, the clouds of information, so attractive today, only get
in the way of life's purpose. For that work's author, life's purpose was to
discover true knowledge of God; for a secular world it signiies how clouds
of information get in the way of truth. For Teilhard, Kurzweil, and any
defender of cloud computing and big data, the path to knowledge, if not
to wisdom and the singularity, is to create more data, analyze it, and draw
conclusions and predictions. For them more data and information lead to
more knowledge, better predictions, and a better world.
For our fourteenth-century writer, pursuing the cloud is not the key to
wisdom; it gets in the way of wisdom. Instead, he concludes, it is essential
to systematically purge the banalities of life, including the many bits of
data, information, and knowledge (“all created things, material and spiri-
tual,” 19) that literally cloud the truth. Given how dificult it is, even for
people of the fourteenth century, to carry out this project, he describes
the practices of contemplation and meditation that make it possible to
overcome the cloud of unknowing: “Secular or religious, if your mind is
inlated by pride or seduced by worldly pleasures, positions, and honors,
or if you crave wealth, status, and the lattery of others, our God-given
ability to reason is serving evil” (27). To know requires acts of unknow-
ing. It is dificult for the modern mind, which is trained to view more
as better, to grasp this perspective. For the secular-minded, the bigger
the cloud (the data set or the haystack), the more likely we will solve the
world's problems. For those who give support to what Noble (1997) called
“the religion of technology,” whether this means Kelly seeing God in the
machine, Teilhard envisioning a noosphere, or Kurzweil anticipating an
age of spiritual machines, the growth of the cloud is an essential part of
human destiny, a step in the process of evolution. Given these views and