Oh, the cloud.

I’ve been attempting to wrap my head around cloud computing since I first heard the term a while back, and since reading Paul Stamatiou’s take on how to “live the cloud life.” It’s an intriguing article about moving your data online (including movies, music, photos, documents) and using online applications exclusively. The benefits: the ability to access all your data at any terminal that has a fast (we’re talking broadband or fiberoptics here) connection. The one immediate, huge downside is, of course, that the internet can be as fickle as a child when it comes to connections, and the type of broadband you would need for seriously using “the cloud” is by no means cheap (minimum of probably around $1000/year to fully use “the clouds” capabilities, not including any sort of access fee or monthly fee for services).

What particularly bothers me about the way “the cloud” is discussed, besides the enormously unacknowledged class/continental/educational barriers, is that it’s a term of obfuscation. A cloud (the sky kind) is vapid. It’s ethereal. It has no substance. But the underlying architecture of the cloud (the online kind) is very much grounded in material goods. And hell, a lot of it is underground. And because it’s grounded to actual, material goods, it implies a who mess of corporate and governmental entities enmeshed in the very foundations of the architecture.

Just because cloud computing allows users to access services without understanding the underlying architecture supporting that service doesn’t mean that it’s not there. It just means that we’re trying to purposefully simplify a complex, hugely connected system by turning it (more so) into a black box: a simple input/output device.

The danger in simplifying a new type of computing is exemplified by what’s lost in the process. Users, disconnected from the underlying hardware (and hardware limitations) become insulated to their own privilege. I’m betting it will also have an effect of limiting most people’s abilities to see other potentials for the architecture, unless you’re already familiar with the technology. This, like Herbert Marcuse says, limits our capacity to think critically and negatively about the current state of our material world.

Further, the amount of power that is handed over to the folks who run the hardware (and background architecture) is aggregated (aggravated?) by cloud computing. Think of China. How much easier would it be to control a population by having all of their files, all their computing, done among a mysterious cloud?

Further, this begs the question of what the cloud is supposed to accomplish. From most of the articles I’ve read, it appears that the cloud represents a great opportunity for businesses to make a buck. Liberation? Doubtful. Freedom from oppression? Doubtful. Happiness? Hardly.

Or have I missed something here?