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big military budgets during the Cold War to help bring about time-sharing
and the Internet. Perhaps most importantly, unlike the Soviet military,
which was hostile to civilian-sector participation, DARPA worked with
corporations that developed business applications that eventually led to
cloud computing. DARPA continues to be very active in the development
of a military cloud.
Anatomy of the Cloud
Today's cloud computing deepens and extends key tendencies established
by these and other predecessors. The rise of data centers controlled by a
handful of companies continues a process of creating global networks of
informational capitalism (Schiller 2014). Companies that once contained
an IT department, with its craft tradition, can now move to the cloud,
where IT and its labor are centralized and streamlined in an industrial
mode of production, processing, distribution, and storage. Furthermore,
the cloud takes one more step in a long process of building a global cul-
ture of knowing in which information production accelerates through
networks that connect data centers, devices, organizations, and individuals.
The cloud makes up both a new industrial infrastructure and a culture of
knowing, based on digital positivism.
It is easy to lose sight of the signiicance of cloud computing for
informational capitalism and for building a culture of knowing because
time and time again in the early years of a technology, there is a tendency
to concentrate on those lashy utopian or dystopian visions that make
up what has been called the technological sublime (Nye 1994). This is
understandable. Just as it was hard to resist the feeling of magic the irst
time a web page scrolled down a home computer screen, so too was it
magical when, for the irst time, street lights brightened the night with
electricity's illumination and voices emanated from the musical box that
came to be called radio. Cloud computing currently resides in this magi-
cal sublime phase where transcendent visions of ending space, time, and
social divisions tend to dilute our appreciation of the more grounded,
long-term, but banal consequences of implementing cloud systems. The
experience with electricity is especially relevant because its early days
were focused on the capacity to bring light and power, an admittedly
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