The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 12

that challenges utopian visions inding transcendence, if not the divine,
in new technology. Considering its ubiquitous presence and persistence
throughout time, it is no surprise to ind the cloud in many expressions
of the human imagination. The written word, music, and the visual arts
would be much poorer without the metaphorical cloud. From the broad
sweep of the cloud in culture, I have chosen three exemplars from vastly
different periods in Western society to document contrasts between the
metaphor and the information technology that would adopt it.
It begins with The Clouds , a comedy written by Aristophanes that
satirized intellectual life in ifth-century-BC Greece. It raises a clear, and
humorous, challenge to the adamantly rational model of thought that
the cloud and big data embody, and questions the inherent superiority
of the seemingly apolitical philosopher-technician. Its chorus of clouds
reminds audiences to this day that even the most seemingly objective of
intellectuals, in this case the great philosopher Socrates, is embedded
in a political world where practical experience often trumps technical
knowledge. For the Greek playwright, the way of knowing established
2,500 years ago comes not in the form of the intellectual living a life of
contemplation in the clouds of abstraction. That was little more than a
Platonic aspiration. Rather it is the philosopher-trickster, the intellectual
spin doctor, who dominates with rhetoric and propaganda seasoned with
just enough information. In the Western way of knowing, there is no
pure truth stored and processed in the cloud—just the ongoing struggle
between reason and rhetoric. It is a message that today's philosopher
kings, the computer gurus and data scientists that live in our new cloud,
would beneit from hearing.
Next, we move ahead to the last half of the fourteenth century AD
and The Cloud of Unknowing , the work of an English monk who advises
a young monk on how to live a good, moral life. Although written in the
Middle English of the time, it is not an obscure work today. There are
numerous contemporary translations and it has received attention from
such literary giants as Don DeLillo, who uses it in his magisterial novel
Underworld . What makes this topic most interesting is its use of the cloud
as a symbol of what gets in the way and blocks people from knowing
themselves and realizing their destiny. As one would expect, The Cloud
of Unknowing is written in a religious idiom. For the unknown writer of
this spiritual guide, the goal is to come as close as possible to god. But