Selling the Cloud Sublime - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 85

at all. Both concerns are captured in the comments of one apparent cloud
enthusiast: “Wrong, bad and misleading. This has nothing whatsoever to
do with Cloud Services. A touch screen PC and Windows 7 running Live
Essentials LOCALLY to mash up a family picture. Where's the 'Cloud'
in that? The only on-line experience is pushing the resulting piece of
fakery to Facebook. These adverts are the worst piece of Cloudwashing
around at the moment.” 3 It is hard to know what is more phony, Mom's
new Windows family or Microsoft's claim that she has taken to the cloud.
One might reasonably argue that the charge of cloudwashing, the term
applied to identifying as a cloud service what is really something else,
is a quibble. Mom appears to be going to a cloud service to ind more
appropriate portraits of her family. One might also make the case that the
cloud does expand Mom's options. She could use the “unruly” photo or
the one that the cloud makes possible. What makes this advertisement
particularly interesting is that it explicitly represents the triumph of the
technological over the natural sublime.
It would be easy to overinterpret this ad. After all, it's just a commercial
and, like so many that came before, it uses provocation, simpliication,
and exaggeration to send a message, keep it in the viewer's head, and sell
a product. But it is also safe to say that this particular spot is doing more
than just selling viewers on the beneits of cloud computing. It also relects
and advances a stream of thought generally described as post-humanism,
a philosophical perspective that questions the human-centered values that
emerged in the Renaissance and became foundational in Enlightenment
thought (Hayles 1999). The humanist would ind it beyond the pale for
anyone, let alone a mother, to replace a lesh-and-blood family with a
technological substitute. For the post-humanist, it is nothing more than
accepting the reality of our time and using it to human advantage. Rather
than feeling guilt for appearing antihuman, Mom is justiied in demon-
strating the pride of accomplishment for accepting what technology has to
offer. Post-humanist thought has helped to shape how many people, and
not just professional philosophers, think about technology, whether it has
to do with biological or informational systems. Some have taken serious
issue with the position, arguing that it is little more than surrendering
progressive values to a wealth machine masquerading as a new philoso-
phy of technology (Winner 2004). The debate around post-humanism
has illuminated many issues that are far more serious than the ethics of