A Prehistory of the Cloud
by Tung-Hui Hu
For me, it started with a sticker: “There is no cloud. It’s just someone else’s computer.”
That was the first time I was confronted with the concept of “the cloud” outside of hand-waving explanations of limitless file storage. I don’t know if the structures of centralized computing are well-known or even considered by the wide majority of gmailers and instagrammers, but it is crucial to recognize that uploading something to the cloud doesn’t make it costless. A computer that stores your emails and snapchats still has to exist somewhere. A Prehistory of the Cloud gives form to that intentionally vague concept:
An icon of a cloud, the reader will recall, originally stood for any unrepresentable network on network maps, such as the Internet; in today’s computer and mobile operating systems, this cloud icon now represents a reserve of seemingly unlimited computer power, or storage space; it has become, simply, a representation of the unknown.
If one lets the cloud worry about it, one needs not be concerned by the “200 terawatt hours [of electricity] per year—roughly the same amount as South Africa—much of which is generated by fossil fuels,” that data centers currently consume. Out of sight, out of mind. And the cloud is always out of sight, after all; it is just a metaphor.
But while the energy demands of a limitless finite network is a crisis of the present—“the cloud is a resource-intensive, extractive technology that converts water and electricity into computational power, leaving a sizable amount of environmental damage that it then displaces from sight”—and will likely impact the future in ways we cannot quite grasp at the moment, A Prehistory of the Cloud doesn’t directly confront the surreptitious environmental devastation. It is a comprehensive review of the cloud before it attained its current omnipresence, which is necessary to demystify and approach “the cloud” as an entity rather than an immutable aspect of reality.
How did computer culture shift from each person maintaining their own personal hard drive to user-authenticated access to centralized bunkers bursting with everyone’s commingled data?
Who controls those bunkers, and why do their hidden caretakers offer them up to us for free?
ten life hacks about made up stories that they don’t want you to know
There is an appealing but fictional story making the rounds on twitter right now about how the width of two horses’ asses directly influenced the dimensions of the space shuttle: the intervening steps mostly concern the U.S. standard railway track gauge. It is very adorable and extremely incorrect, but neither the person that tweeted it nor twitter themselves care very much about the lack of veracity. It made numbers.
It makes no difference if you’re there to debunk it, dunk on it, or spread its folksy charm; that tweet will make numbers off of your engagement. Clicks are agnostic. And astride the tumult sits twitter, providing—for free! —the space to make these viral posts.
Note the impressive rendering of a cloud in twitter’s iconography
Sure, you need to log in to twitter to like, or retweet, or respond. Once you do, you’re captured: as with any log-in, be it a grocery store loyalty program or an app blabbing to the in-store bluetooth-beacons how long you spent choosing your treat at Dunkin’ Donuts, you are now a collection of information points. This has deep roots in the history of computing; before computers were personal, prohibitively expensive mainframes had to be shared:
Because time-sharing equates a computer user with the amount of work done by the computer, the user is actually an assemblage of economic value—with the time spent using a computer a commodity to be tracked.
By offering up free email, or letting you tweet to your heart’s content, or giving discounts and tap-your-phone-to-pay convenience, that assemblage of data becomes more comprehensive and more complete.
I don’t necessarily think it is de facto sinister. Like the way google traffic reports a slowdown—which, truth be told, used to feel creepy but has quickly become a benign form of constant surveillance—I suppose I wouldn’t mind if Peet’s Coffee knew Thursday mornings tend to require more baristas. But focusing on what the data is doing smudges the larger issue; the data of me waiting in line for an extra four minutes is sitting somewhere. I don’t know where. You don’t know where. But it is in a physical location, because it has to be, because the cloud is just someone else’s computer.
Note how much the image of the cloud has changed in two years.
So yes, while those 15GB of online storage are free, the computers hosting your prom photos sure aren’t. The water to cool the server racks isn’t. The electricity, the security guards, the building itself; someone foots the bill for all of that. And they really don’t want you thinking about how very real virtual storage is. The rough draft of your Sociology 225 Global Migration and Transnationalism term paper must be pretty valuable if Google is willing to pay someone to guard it in a secured building they also pay to maintain. For free!
If that doesn’t make you ask, “Why do so many companies want to guard my stuff for me?” then I have a bridge to sell you. Don’t worry about it, it’s in the cloud. Controlling where the data is stored means you have access to the data. Think about what you freely leave on someone else’s computer: I’m not even touching on the horror stories of Alexa listening to you because you tell it to for some unknown insane reason. No, we’ll stick to the evidence that demographic data are being used to filter, oh, nothing big, just all women from even seeing some job postings. Does the number of episodes of One Piece I’ve streamed sit in these bunkers, waiting for savvy marketers to start throwing Crunchyroll ads at me? Or perhaps the whole thing ceaselessly burns fossil fuels so 1.9 million people can post pictures of the Manhattan Bridge all taken from the exact same spot in DUMBO?
Targeted marketing based on derived data might invoke a response akin to redlining. The carbon footprint created by networked excess might inspire Greta-style reductions. But it doesn’t, because we, the captured population, get all this convenience with none of the visible damage. For free!
What was that address again? 123 Fake Street? Got it, thanks!
A Prehistory of the Cloud prepares you to refigure the amorphism inherent to the cloud— “the logic of the cloud...in which everything is hopelessly complex but, with the right (data) tools, can be made deceptively simple and explainable: a master key or representation that explains everything” —by breaking apart and attaching concrete structures and comprehensible metaphors to what has been purposefully designed to obfuscate the simple fact that the cloud is a series of computers owned by massive transnational corporations.
...[T]o return to my comparison of water pipes with piping in computer power, water is still largely regarded as a public resource, while the cloud is almost entirely owned by private companies. When there is a drought, it does not seem unreasonable to invoke collective solutions, such as water conservation and water rationing; yet when digital culture runs into a snag—for example, over privacy—the default response in the United States is to appeal to Silicon Valley start-ups to build better apps. This is what happens when today’s dominant metaphor for digital space, “the cloud,” is actually a metaphor for private ownership.
Without knowing how we got to the cloud, there is no context with which to begin parsing what tech studies in the late twenty-tens should even look like. A Prehistory of the Cloud reminds the reader that for every software-as-solution, the hardware has to be somewhere. The only reason to give away this storage—shroud it with the cloud metaphor and make it appear limitless and eternal—is to incentivize each user to upload everything without thought. Remember: you are uploading to hardware that exists in real-life places that are completely unknown to you. I love the history of telecommunications, but we’re clearly past telecom: it’s an opt-in panopticon now, baby.
To recognize that each online action draws down our planetary stores of energy and to limit excessive uploads and downloads—like activists do for airfare, for red meat, for fresh water—would create less data to capture. Those that gain the most from “big data” research analytics need to push the idea that the cloud is limitless: “The term cloud refers to the same cultural fantasy of its analog namesake—what cultural historian Steven Connor calls the “belief in the air as the abode of the endless”: inexhaustible, limitless, invisible. Connor argues that this seeming inexhaustibility is what has allowed humans to treat the air as an infinite receptacle for pollution.” Incentivize everyone to always be online and connect more devices to the Internet of Things. If this burns more and more energy, so be it; it will produce more and more data to track, sort, optimize, and monetize.
A Prehistory of the Cloud gives you the tools to break the metaphor in which the cloud hides. First, see it for what it is—someone else’s computers. Only then can we begin to recognize that networked systems still have a real cost. Only then can we begin to treat them as part of our global ecosystem, rather than as ephemera floating beyond our mortal reach.