To the Cloud

Big Data in a Turbulent World

Vincent Mosco

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781612056159
• eBook ISBN: 9781317250371
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Cloud computing and big data are arguably the most significant forces in information technology today. In the wake of revelations about National Security Agency (NSA) activities, many of which occur "in the cloud", this book offers both enlightenment and a critical view. Vincent Mosco explores where the cloud originated, what it means, and how important it is for business, government and citizens. He describes the intense competition among cloud companies like Amazon and Google, the spread of the cloud to government agencies like the controversial NSA, and the astounding growth of entire cloud cities in China. Is the cloud the long-promised information utility that will solve many of the world's economic and social problems? Or is it just marketing hype? To the Cloud provides the first thorough analysis of the potential and the problems of a technology that may very well disrupt the world.

CHAPTER 1

THE CLOUD ATE MY HOMEWORK

Like water or electricity, cloud computing should now be considered a key utility and therefore should be available to all.

(Groucutt 2013)

The Internet had been around for a while when on July 5, 1993, the New Yorker magazine featured a cartoon that, in the minds of some, marked its real arrival. “On the Internet,” says the dog at the computer screen to his canine friend, “nobody knows you’re a dog.” I knew it was time to write this book when I woke up one morning, downloaded my digital edition of the October 8, 2012, New Yorker, and came across a new version of a classic cartoon. A little boy looks up at his teacher and, with hope and trepidation, pleads his case: “The cloud ate my homework.” Okay, perhaps not everyone got the joke, but most readers would have some conception of the cloud as the place where data lives until it is called up on the computer, tablet, or smart phone—or, in the case of a malfunction, the place where data goes to die. This book explains what little Johnny is talking about and why it is important. For better or for worse, the cloud has arrived. The cloud that ate Johnny’s homework is a key force in the changing international political economy. The global expansion of networked data centers controlled by a handful of companies continues a process of building a global information economy, once characterized by Bill Gates (1995) as “friction-free capitalism.” Companies that once housed an information-technology department with its craft tradition can now move most of its work to the cloud, where IT functions and its labor are centralized in an industrial mode of production, processing, storage, and distribution. Furthermore, the cloud takes the next step in a long process of creating a global culture of knowing, captured in the term big data, or what might better be called digital positivism. Here information production accelerates in networks that link data centers, devices, organizations, and individuals appearing to create, in the words of one guru, “a global superintelligence” (Wolf 2010). The cloud and big data are engines that power informational capitalism even as they enable an increasingly dominant way of knowing. These interlinked processes and the challenges to them comprise the major themes of To the Cloud.

I have been thinking about cloud computing since 2010, when it began to enter public consciousness, particularly after a couple of splashy Super Bowl ads aired during the 2011 game. Then Apple got into the act when it urged users to move their photos, music, mail, and files to its iCloud. Not wanting to give up control over my stash of family photos and worried about the security of my mail, I resisted doing anything more than uploading a few incidentals (although for some reason I did not mind sending my photos into the cloud known as Flickr). Like many people, I was aware that some of my things were finding their way from my computer to remote servers, but this left me feeling a bit uncomfortable. Stories about cloud security breaches, disappearing data, and environmental risks at cloud data centers were making people feel that not all clouds were bright and only a few were green. But the migration of organizational and personal data continued, as did the marketing.

I decided to take a closer look when references to clouds of all sorts began to appear, partly prompted by the arrival of cloud computing and partly owing to my growing cloud-consciousness. First it was media attention to an obscure medieval treatise, The Cloud of Unknowing, that led me to wonder about the philosophical assumptions embedded in cloud computing. Then there was David Mitchell’s strangely titled novel Cloud Atlas and the announcement of a blockbuster film based on the book’s mystical account of souls migrating like clouds across time and space. I began collecting images of cloud data centers as they continued to spring up around the world, and was struck by the clash between the banality of their form—low-rise, endlessly bland warehouses—and the sublimity of real clouds. There is nothing ethereal about these buildings. Moreover, my reading and conversations pointed to growing tensions in the political, economic, social, and aesthetic dimensions of cloud computing. But at this early stage of its development, most extended treatments remained limited to technical descriptions.

Although cloud computing did not make an appearance on my personal radar screen until 2010, I have been researching, writing, and speaking about computer communication for forty years, including working on and around predecessors to cloud computing. In the early 1970s, as a graduate student in sociology at Harvard, I handed over my punch cards to the central computer facility and hoped to receive a paper printout of research results using my professor’s pioneering General Inquirer software that, remarkably for its time, analyzed the content of text. At that time, we were all in the cloud because the personal computer, with its built-in storage device, was years away. All that we could do was find time to enter data in a computer terminal, appropriately referred to as dumb, and wait for the mainframe to provide results. Ten years later I wrote about the cloud of its time, videotex, which promised, and in rudimentary ways delivered, text and images from central computers to enhanced screens (Mosco 1982). Moving to Canada in 1984, I tried out Telidon, which Canadian technologists and policy makers insisted was the most advanced of the new interactive telecommunications services. More importantly, I learned about the research of Canadian Douglas Parkhill, whose work, particularly The Challenge of the Computer Utility (1966), is widely recognized as a forerunner to cloud computing.

Over that time, in addition to addressing many of the issues that are now emerging in cloud computing, I began to understand the importance of recognizing problems that inevitably arise from new systems for storing, processing, and exchanging information. It is tempting to apply what appear to be the lessons of history to new technologies and, while it is certainly wise to situate new technologies in their historical context, it is also essential to recognize that changing technologies and a changing world also bring about disruptions, disjunctions, and, sometimes, revolutions in historical patterns.

There are now numerous technical guides and primers that offer useful overviews of the subject, and my book is certainly indebted to these (Erl, Puttini, and Mahmood 2013). But my purpose is to promote the discussion of cloud computing beyond what these texts have to say by taking up its political, economic, social, and cultural significance. In order to do this, the book draws from the transdisciplinary contributions to be found in technology studies, sociology, cultural studies, and political economy. My aim is to unsettle traditional ways of thinking with a critical interrogation. Sending data into the cloud is a decision to engage with one or another data center, say Amazon’s or Microsoft’s. But it is also a choice that has implications that are economic (who pays for it?), political (who controls it?), social (how private is it?), environmental (what is its impact on the land and on energy use?), and cultural (what values does it embody?). A key goal of the book is to advance a conversation between the professionals who work in the field, those responsible for promoting it, and the researchers, policy makers, and activists who study cloud computing and think about its impact, implications, and challenges.

Why is it necessary to place cloud computing in the bigger picture of political economy, society, and culture? Is it not sufficient to simply describe what cloud computing has to offer a business and weigh its costs and benefits? I take up some of the practical problems involved in adopting and implementing cloud systems in the next chapter. However, limiting discussion to this point alone does not give sufficient credit to the cloud computing movement as a force in society. Notwithstanding the hyperbole that accompanies new communication technologies and systems, from the telegraph that would bring together nations in peaceful harmony to the promise of mass education on television, cloud computing is having an enormous impact across societies. This extends from companies that are moving their data and business-process software to the cloud, to the military that plans and executes battle strategies in the cloud, to schools and universities that are using the cloud to transform education, and to individuals who are storing the traces of their identities in the cloud. It also encompasses what some consider bottom-up versions of cloud computing, such as community grid projects that harness the combined power of personal computers to carry out public-interest research. The cloud is credited with catapulting companies like Apple into the corporate stratosphere. Amazon’s cloud was one of the most important instruments behind Barack Obama’s 2012 victory. While these are important developments, they are benign compared to the claim that the cloud can save capitalism by powering it to renewed heights of productivity, or the opposite expectation that it will open the door to carefully planned hacker attacks that will disrupt the world economy. Are China and Iran trying to bring America’s financial system to the digital brink? Or, as China claims, is the United States becoming a major “hacking empire”?

Since exaggerated promises typically accompany the rise of new technical systems, it is easy to dismiss today’s hype about cloud computing, but that would be wrong. This is not because the stories about a cloud-computing and big-data revolution, with their visions of boundless economic prosperity, are any more accurate than promises of world peace in the age of radio. Rather, the marketing hype supports myths that are taken seriously as storylines for our time. If successful, they become common sense, the bedrock of seemingly unchallengeable beliefs that influence not only how we think about cloud computing, but about technology in general and our relationship to it. The decision to give up your own or your organization’s data to a cloud company is a significant one and companies promoting the technology would understandably have us focus on its benefits. Moreover, it is important to take the hype seriously as the mythic embodiment of what, in an earlier book, I called the digital sublime, the tendency of technology, in this case computer communication, to take on a transcendent role in the world beyond the banality of its role in everyday life (Mosco 2004). It is time to give cloud computing its due by starting a conversation about its place in society and culture.

Cloud computing is a significant development in its own right and a prism through which to view problems facing societies confronting the turbulent world of information technology. The cloud has deep historical roots and it is important to consider them, but it also has new features that require a close look at what makes cloud systems quantitatively and qualitatively different. Moreover, cloud computing serves as a prism that reflects and refracts every major issue in the field of information technology and society, including the fragile environment, ownership and control, security and privacy, work and labor, the struggles among nations for dominance in the global political economy, and how we make sense of this world in discourse and in cultural expression.

Chapter 2 tells the story of cloud computing, from its origins in the 1950s concept of the computer utility to the present-day giant data centers that fill vast open spaces everywhere in the world. Back in the 1950s, as even most casual histories of cloud computing describe, debates over the need for a “computer utility” anticipated today’s debates about the cloud. At that time, people who were familiar with utilities that provided roads, water, and electricity wondered whether there was need for a public or regulated utility for computer communication. Was not information as essential a resource as roads, water, and power? With widespread agreement that it was both a resource and essential, some concluded that a handful of centralized computer facilities strategically located around the world and connected by telecommunications networks to keyboards and screens would satisfy the world’s need for information. Today, there are far more than a handful of large data centers worldwide, but the principle of the utility is inscribed in cloud computing systems to the point that interest is returning to this venerable idea. Questions are also emerging about whether computer utilities should be government enterprises, or at least publicly regulated even if they remain commercial enterprises.

Chapter 2 examines a variety of the cloud’s predecessors from when the computer utility was young. The Soviet Union staked much of its economic strategy in the 1950s on the ability to build large-scale “cybernetic” systems to carry out the work of a planned economy. In the 1970s the Chilean government experimented on a democratic version of such a strategy, with workers on the ground contributing to the economic-planning process through computer systems. The 1980s saw the development of government and commercial systems for providing information on demand through what were called teletext and videotex systems. Their full potential was not realized until the Internet appeared on desktop computers and in New Yorker cartoons in the 1990s.

Chapter 2 proceeds to define cloud computing and take up its diverse forms and characteristics. Cloud computing has been defined in many ways, but most would agree that it is a powerful system for producing, storing, analyzing, and distributing data, information, applications, and services to organizations and individuals. If you communicate with Gmail, download music from iCloud, buy Kindle books from Amazon, or if your company uses Salesforce to manage its customer database, then you know about and use the cloud. Among its major characteristics, cloud computing enables on-demand self-service access to information and services delivered over global networks—including, but not limited to, the public networks of the Internet. Information and applications can be pooled to meet user needs, provided and withdrawn on demand, and paid through measured service billing. The chapter describes the range of cloud computing forms from the simple provision of an infrastructure, such as a data storage center, to services that include applications, software, and analytics that add value to data. It also considers types of cloud computing from public clouds that are available to all paying customers, a rather limited meaning of the term “public,” to private clouds that sell storage and services only to a select set of customers who prefer their data gated and secure, and hybrid clouds that offer combinations of the two.

The chapter examines the leading cloud companies, including the well-known firms that grew up in the Internet era, helped to create social media, and are now serving companies and individuals in the cloud. Amazon is arguably the leading cloud-computing provider, but the list of familiar names also includes Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook. In addition, legacy firms such as IBM, Oracle, and Cisco are trying to make the transition to the cloud after years of success servicing corporate and government IT departments. Then there are the companies born in cloud, such as Rackspace, Salesforce, and VMware, that provide general and specialized cloud-computing and big-data services. Chapter 2 covers the battles among key competitors and the growing concentration of power at the top of the industry. Private firms dominate the cloud, but the U.S. government is helping to shape its expansion primarily through partnerships with leading companies, mainly in the military and intelligence sectors but also in education, including the humanities. This is leading some to wonder about the rise of a military information complex that promotes the power of a handful of companies and the expansion of the surveillance state, best typified by the National Security Agency. The U.S. cloud industry is powerful, but it is increasingly challenged by foreign competitors—especially China, which is constructing entire cloud cities to close the gap with the United States.

There is a massive, worldwide movement to promote cloud computing, and Chapter 3 examines its many forms. The campaign includes advertising, blogs, the reports of corporate research and consulting firms, international economic-policy organizations, lobbying campaigns, conferences, and trade fairs. Having begun in the banality of a technical diagram and in the hazy visions of computer pioneers, the image of the cloud has taken on a richer aesthetic in the hands of today’s Mad Men, the advertising gurus marketing the next new thing. In this respect, the materiality of the cloud is not limited to buildings, computers, software, and data. It is also embodied in campaigns to remake the prosaic stuff of engineering into the compelling image of the cloud. There was no magic in how this happened. To bring the cloud into widespread awareness it took marketing campaigns that developed from Salesforce’s two very expensive advertisements featured in the 2011 Super Bowl game; they highlighted the singer Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas and the animated character Chatty “the magical cloud.” Laying the groundwork for this big splash was IBM’s foray into cloud marketing with its 2010 “smart cloud” campaign pitched to corporate decision makers, and Microsoft’s “To the Cloud” advertisements aimed at small business and consumers. Apple joined the chorus in a big way by changing the name of its online service, which began as “.mac,” shifted to the personal (and, some would say, self-absorbed) “.me,” and then settled on iCloud.

Commercial advertising is important to reach both institutional and individual customers. However, it is only one part of a circuit of promotion that also includes blogs, newsletters, and social-media sites that provide information about the industry with an emphasis on how to sell cloud computing by countering its critics and advancing its benefits. One of their most important functions is to serve as a transmission belt for the findings of more legitimate outlets like the reports of private research and consulting firms, including Gartner, McKinsey, Deloitte, and Forrester. Each of these leaders in the field has produced one or more reports on cloud computing and big data. With the exception of one, which appeared early (and was nullified by a later report by the same company), they are all massively optimistic in their forecasts about the cloud. The message is simple: move to the cloud. Although their reports are expensive, the essential findings and the enthusiasm, as Chapter 3 demonstrates, circulate through the hundreds of blogs and newsletters that share the enthusiasm. The circuit of promotion expands internationally with reports that bring together global players in business and government to promote the cloud. Chapter 3 concentrates on a report produced by the World Economic Forum, best known for the annual Davos conference, that documents the unassailable significance of information technology, cloud computing, and big-data analytics. With the stamp of global legitimacy and the blessing of national and international government agencies, as well as corporate participants, the World Economic Forum adds to the legitimacy of the cloud as the leading-edge force for the expansion ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1 The Cloud Ate My Homework
• Chapter 2 From the Computer Utility to Cloud Computing
• Chapter 3 Selling the Cloud Sublime
• Chapter 4 Dark Clouds
• Chapter 5 Big Data and Cloud Culture
• Notes
• References
• Index
• About the Author