Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 81

they are alive or dead in the popular imagination. They are the stories
we tell each other to help deal with life's unanswerable questions, and
when it comes to technology, they help raise our latest “next new thing”
to the realm of the transcendent. Myths provide ballast for the sublime
but leeting visions contained in the promise of universal knowledge,
virtual worlds, and unlimited communication that were once embodied
in religion and nature but are now more likely supported by digital tech-
nologies. The assertion that cloud computing enables a group to do the
impossible is similar to the claim that the telegraph would bring world
peace or that lighting up the streets with electricity would end crime (Nye
1994). It is not an exaggeration to suggest that we make myths whenever
we make new technologies, and furthermore that technology, especially
communication technology, has become, like religion and the natural
world before it, a source of the sublime. Today, many people have become
cloud worshipers (Lohr 2013c).
Speciically, technology becomes sublime when we attribute to it
superhuman powers, either heavenly or hellish, that were once reserved for
religion and the supernatural, or for treasured natural wonders. Prior to the
development of the technologies that propelled the modern age, such as
the railroad, the telegraph, and electriication, the sublime was associated
with images of transcendence located in religion and in nature. First, only
the gods or god could achieve the level of transcendence that transported
people beyond all language and certainly beyond the banality of every-
day life. The very name Yahweh, according to one commentator, “also
bespeaks the utter transcendence of God. In Himself, God is beyond all
'predications' or attributes of language: He is the Source and Foundation
of all possibility of utterance and thus is beyond all deinite descriptions”
(Parsons 2013). The “unutterable name” conjures both the rapturous
awe and the terrifying shock of the sublime. For many, the religious
sublime increasingly came to be met by the natural sublime as wonders
of nature like the Grand Canyon, natural eruptions like earthquakes and
volcanoes, or the celestial magic of a solar eclipse conjured some of the
same awe-inspiring and fearsome feelings. While certainly not eclipsing
the religious sublime, which remains a powerful force around the world,
the natural sublime has grown in signiicance and may continue to do
so as the terrifying results of climate change leave more and more people
speechless. But as Rebecca Solnit (2010) has described in her remarkable