Project 1

We are the voluntary prisoners of the cloud; we are being watched over by governments we did not elect.

Wael Ghonim, Google's Egyptian executive, said: “If you want to liberate a society just give them the internet.”¹ But how does one liberate a society that already has the internet? In a society permanently connected through pervasive broadband networks, the shared internet is, bit by bit and piece by piece, overshadowed by the “cloud.”

The Coming of the Cloud

The cloud, as a planetary-scale infrastructure, was first made possible by an incremental rise in computing power, server space, and trans-continental fiber-optic connectivity. It is a by-product and parallel iteration of the global (information) economy, enabling a digital (social) marketplace on a worldwide scale. Many of the cloud’s most powerful companies no longer use the shared internet, but build their own dark fiber highways for convenience, resilience, and speed.² In the cloud’s architecture of power, the early internet is eclipsed.

A nondescript diagram in a 1996 MIT research paper titled “The Self-governing Internet: Coordination by Design,” showed a “cloud” of networks situated between routers linked up by Internet Protocol (IP).³ This was the first reported usage of the term “cloud” in relation to the internet. The paper talked about a “confederation” of networks governed by common protocol. A 2001 New York Times article reported that Microsoft’s .NET software programs did not reside on any one computer, “but instead exist in the ‘cloud’ of computers that make up the internet.”⁴ But it wasn’t until 2004 that the notion of “cloud computing” was defined by Google CEO Eric Schmidt:

I don’t think people have really understood how big this opportunity really is. It starts with the premise that the data services and architecture should be on servers. We call it cloud computing—they should be in a “cloud” somewhere. And that if you have the right kind of browser or the right kind of access, it doesn’t matter whether you have a PC or a Mac or a mobile phone or a BlackBerry or what have you—or new devices still to be developed—you can get access to the cloud. There are a number of companies that have benefited from that. Obviously, Google, Yahoo!, eBay, Amazon come to mind. The computation and the data and so forth are in the servers.⁵

The internet can be compared to a patchwork of city-states, or an archipelago of islands. User data and content materials are dispersed over different servers, domains, and jurisdictions (i.e., different sovereign countries). The cloud is more like Bismarck’s unification of Germany, sweeping up formerly distinct elements, bringing them under a central government. As with most technology, there is a sense of abstraction from prior experiences; in the cloud the user no longer needs to understand how a software program works or where his or her data really is. The important thing is that it works.