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topic about how people respond to unspeakable disasters, there is consid-
erable evidence that, just as an extraordinarily resilient community arose
in the time of Yahweh, we observe sublime acts of community-building
in an age of natural disasters.
It is dificult to capture the sublime in words, so we refer to images
like the locomotive ripping through a prairie ield in the 1870s that ter-
riied onlookers into a sublime stupor, or the Grand Canyon resplendent
in the morning light that renders sublime its seemingly ininite layers
of contrasting color. Some of the great modernist writers could create a
sublime riff through a stream of consciousness such as the one described
by Virginia Woolf in the character of Clarissa Dalloway, who transcends
time and space in a morning walk through London. Indeed one of Mrs.
Dalloway 's most sublime scenes involves what has to be one of the irst
acts of cloud creation, as a sky-writing airplane lifts the eyes and then the
hearts of observers on the ground until the airplane reveals a commercial
purpose in a banal advertisement for candy. Echoes of this cloud return
in the work of photographer Sergio de la Torre, whose 2003 digitally
constructed skywriting cloud exclaims against an azure sky, “Thinking
About Expansion.” Today, great popular ilmmakers like Steven Spielberg
conjure the sublime in what has been described as his signature visual
technique, what the ilm writer Matt Patches dubs “the Spielberg face”
(think of the young Dakota Fanning gazing back through the rear window
of her dad's car as the carnage erupts in the ilm War of the Worlds ), and
is best described in a video essay by Kevin B. Lee: “Eyes open, staring
in wordless wonder in a moment where time stands still. But above all, a
childlike surrender in the act of watching” (Scott 2012).
Yes, doing the impossible is a marketing exaggeration—some would say
a marketing convention. But it is also the foundation for a myth that asserts
superhuman or sublime prowess. The historian of culture Leo Marx put
it best when he asserted that “the rhetoric of the technological sublime”
involves hymns to progress that rise “like froth on a tide of exuberant
self-regard sweeping over all misgivings, problems, and contradictions”
(1964, 207; see also Mosco 2004). No longer locked into what Edmund
Burke 250 years ago called the “stale, unaffecting familiarity” of the
banal (Burke 1998, 79), the sublime technology becomes transcendent.
The Salesforce ads had the widest reach of any cloud-computing spots,
but that company was not the only one to hitch its wagon to the National
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