Future-proofing with The Cloud

I have not used a diskette for ten years. However, it took me that long to gather the psychic energy to be able to rid myself of the hundreds I had in my possession. In the mean time, I have been lugging them around from share house to share house, promising myself that I would copy all their content to a portable hard drive before I threw them out. I didn’t even look at them – I could not justify spending the money on an external diskette drive, and would not have been neither surprised nor disappointed if most did not even work anymore.

Such experiences illustrate a strange contradiction in my being: I love tech, but I can also become attached to particular incarnations of it. I grew up with computers - my family owned a Macintosh when I was eight; I hacked into the school’s system administrator when I was 10; I helped design a Trojan horse when I was 15; I created my own websites when I was 18. Yet I am occasionally slow on the uptake: I only got a mobile phone when one was given to me when I was 23; I came over to mp3s when I was 25; I bought my first off-the-shelf computer when I was 28; and I switched to Gmail when I was 31. I have a propensity for hoarding obsolete mediums such as VHS, disks, books, and hard-copy financial records – all of which I simply end up dumping. Thus, I am eager to avoid repeating history and instead future proof my virtual and physical possessions.

In an attempt to identify the trend of storage, I look to music. External hard drives are my current medium of choice: several terabytes store more music, movies, television series, and images than I could ever possibly consume, and I keep adding to it. Yet we are already at the point where people are throwing away hundred-gigabyte hard drives, or letting them collect dust in some shed. We have since moved on possessing no music, just a license to play a song that is stored using the cloud.

Cloud computing is but the latest stage of the transcendence of music from the analogy to digital,[1] and more generally, of the transcendence of intellectual property from the physical to the immaterial. Once, when I bought music, I felt like I was buying something tangible, real, worthy of the cost – for instance, I felt like I owned a portion of the band because I possessed a shiny wafer of polycarbonate plastic protected by a jewel case. Now I strive to embrace the non-physicality of products, and believe that fetishizing of the material indicates a failure of imagination[2]: while music may originate from static objects, it is an art form “whose medium is sound and silence.”

Network computing is obviously efficient: it is far better to have information stored centrally, and people ‘borrowing’ or ‘checking out’ that information, than to have it randomly scattered, reproduced, and replicated (with potential errors) elsewhere. However, before embracing the cloud in its entirety, there are a few concerns I need to put to rest. One is simply the technical reliability of the cloud - as the following xkcd comic illustrates:

Another concern is the larger trend to divest ourselves of autonomy for the sake of (temporary) convenience. We are taking our outsourcing[3] of the storage of our music, email, and photographs to the same extreme as Nike with its shoe manufacturing. Even the mobile devices that play that music, such as our smart phones, often still belong to a corporation – and we simply rent them via some elaborate ‘plan’.

Finally, as Jaron Lanier highlights, cloud computing puts an unsettling amount of power into the hands of a very select few. The benefits of such technology rely on the Lords of the Cloud – the owners of the hardware – not behaving evilly. Unfortunately, there is not much stopping them from doing so.



Image by Gary Hayes

Endnotes

[1] Music started as vinyl records on tall shelves - which had finite life spans as they wore away with use. Radio - which is what wireless technology most resembles – probably belongs in this sequence somewhere, as well as cinema and player pianos. Cassettes, which were mobile, popped onto the scene. Music then moved onto CDs, which were poorer quality than vinyl, but more compact; then to mp3s on mobile devices or computers, which had poorer quality again, but were space-efficient.

Yet while the storage of music seems to have evolved, IT seems to have come full circle: from giant computers, to networked computers, to standalones, to online computers, and now to web-only computers. I imagine that all computers will become like Chromebooks - with wireless web access guaranteed like mobile reception, you never need to store stuff anymore. So soon, maybe five or ten year’s time, we will start piling up our $300 multi-TB hard drives in the hard-rubbish collections.

[2] This might help illuminate why so many people are still fixated on a gold standard rather than electronic currency.

[3] As a kid, (though this did not last long) we would get books, music and toys through the community library. Now Google, Amazon and Apple have become the new subscription libraries. These are not the only services that offer, deliberately or inadvertently, that use the cloud, however - I listen to quite a bit of music at work through YouTube, and occasionally blip.fm.