The Cloud Ate My Homework - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 13

just as one does not have to accept Teilhard's god, the god of perfect
information, we do not have to believe in the monk's god in order to
appreciate the point that the cloud of information that increasingly satu-
rates our world can get in the way of fulillment, spiritual or otherwise.
Writing in strong yet conversational language, the elder monk advises the
neophyte to empty himself of information in order to grow as a person.
The cloud that appears so attractive is actually a deterrent to wisdom, a
cloud of unknowing.
The Cloud of Unknowing bears the imprint of Eastern philosophy, mak-
ing it all the more remarkable that it comes from the work of a medieval
English monk whose world had been shaken by the Black Plague. The
view that we need to empty ourselves of what passes for knowledge in
order to achieve true wisdom and fulillment is increasingly popular in
the West, where people appear to be overwhelmed by data, even as they
work to igure out the latest device that promises instant connection to
the digital world. My reason for analyzing it in the inal section of this
topic is to address the conlicted nature of our thinking and feeling about
the cloud. Cloud culture is a contested terrain featuring different views
about epistemology (what it means to know), metaphysics (what it means
to be), and moral philosophy (what it means to live ethically).
One of the most interesting cultural expressions of uncertainty is con-
tained in David Mitchell's novel Cloud Atlas , which became a feature ilm
directed by the team responsible for the Matrix trilogy. The title itself
presents a jarring clash because the traditional atlas is meant to chart ixed
geographical forms such as oceans and landmasses, not the constantly
changing mists of water vapor. The cloud is anything but a ixed entity
and deies conventional mapping, something that is borne out in the plot
of Cloud Atlas as we follow the six separate stories that take both topic
and ilm over several centuries. For Mitchell and the ilm's trio of pro-
ducers, the cloud represents neither the certainty of information nor the
barrier to perfection, but the wispy and vaporous connections that link
people over generations. The variety of structured and random actions
that propel people through life touches those who come after them, so
here mapping the cloud becomes telling the stories of their connections
not in the network diagram of cloud computing, but in the much looser
but no-less-powerful image of the material cloud. This atlas of clouds
rethinks the conventional atlas by mapping connections in time and not