Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Rob Coley is currently a Doctoral candidate at the University of Lincoln, researching the power and politics of contemporary visuality. Dean Lockwood, awarded a PhD in Sociology at York in 1996, is a Senior Lecturer in Media Theory in the School of Media at the University of Lincoln.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Cloud Time

Zero Books

Contents

Inception......................................11. The World Rights Itself.....................92. Parasite Regime.............................353. Reverse Obsolescence........................73Coda...........................................99References.....................................105

Chapter One

[W]e need to think upside down once again. Charles Leadbeater

How is it that "the world turned upside-down" always manages to Right itself? Hakim Bey

Coding the World

The take-up of digital technologies is conditioned by existing rhetorics and practices. In particular, computing emerged out of the contexts and concerns of war and capitalism, the economic and military imperatives of the twentieth century. In the cybernetic cultural imaginary the rhetorics of technical rationality and order congeal and gather momentum even further. Cybernetics, as initially conceived, is a prophylactic dream of control, of the regulation of flows, a systems theory which is also a fiction predicated upon the evacuation of the evils of chaos, noise, dirt, viral poison.

Technology has been extremely effective at systematically ordering and opening up the world as resource. This is also a rendering of the world as calculable. The power of digitality in particular lies in its giving over of phenomena to numerical, statistical value, permitting the measure and modulation of any variation in their properties. The mediation of all things through binary code evacuates the content of the world, translating everything into homogeneous, replicable form, into information. In the Wordsworthian cliché, the digital 'murders to dissect'. It cuts into phenomena as it orders, disambiguating and freezing up dead moments in linearized fashion. Anything that can be formally represented is so ensnared. Anything that refuses to surrender its singularity, its complexity and power of difference needs must be discarded. Digitality constitutes a capture, an articulation of the world in terms of increasing resolution, ever tightened thresholds, but no matter the degree of resolution or the grip of thresholds, something about the world is lost, something that escapes. That is, the creative, unrepresentable power of virtuality, the singular not-yet that moves the actual and forces it to differ.

If first order cybernetics was dominated by an apotropaic mission, second order cybernetics embraced the productive potential of viral pathology, shifting its verdict on noise from unwanted anomaly to facilitator of flexibility and autopoiesis. Viral noise is 'folded in', transformed into 'constructive instability', excluded precisely via its inclusion and mobilisation.

Capitalism, like first order cybernetics, can be conceived as preoccupied with hygiene in that it wages war against the noisy, viral evil of singularity. It abstracts all phenomena, rendering in terms of exchange value. All things are equalized, prepared for commodity exchange. Of course, from Marx's perspective, it is a revolutionary and brutal stripping away of veils, knocking off of halos, a fundamental compulsive dislodging of things and agitation of the world. And, so, capital embraces 'revolution'. How hygienic can it ever really be? In fact, its hands are always dirty. Chaos and contagion is fundamental to capital. The Communist Manifesto treats the bourgeoisie as a contagion capable of passing through any imaginable prophylactic boundary: 'In one word, it creates a world after its own image'. Capitalism is itself viral. It is metamorphic, evolving, mutating through contagion. It 'codes the world according to its own image'. Digitally reconfiguring the world by means of networked power, it conquers through viral ontology.

Capital is complicit with second order cybernetic systems. What this book is about, at core, is capital's radical autopoietic strategy for harnessing digitality in order to breach the not-yet, capital's predaceous inclinations towards time-out-of-joint, to insert itself into the virtual and take the future in hand. We argue that the Cloud constitutes digital capital's best effort at the in(ter)ception of the future.

Cloud Enclosure

What would the CEOs of the IT industry, digitally turned-on politicians, media pundits and technology journalists, have us believe the Cloud is? The Cloud basically refers to the abstraction and 'virtualization' of computing. It is based upon an 'as-a-service' model, much like a utility on demand. The end user draws on whatever is needed (infrastructure, platform or software) precisely as it is needed, from whichever device they have in hand, rather than owning hardware or installing software in their machine. Cloud computing constitutes a shift from desktop computing on PCs to computing online via a multiplicity of hosts and platforms. The 'computer', increasingly likely to be a smartphone, tablet or similar device, will continue to run various apps or a web browser, but all computing processes and data storage will occur at remote, virtual servers. Minimal local storage, minimal local processing power. In the Cloud model, all the drudge and unpleasantness of dealing with computers – from the point of view of end users – will be outsourced.

Consumers already use the incipient Cloud, responding to the sheer proliferation of data by storing more and more online. Its primitive form has been familiar to us for some time: user-generated multimedia content and archives, communal 'knowledge', the exchanges of web-based email and blogs, social and communicational networks. But, to take us forward, to bring us the Good News, the technology giants have rolled out their big hitters. Steve Ballmer of Microsoft tells us it's all or nothing – he's 'bet the company' on the Cloud, while Steve Jobs of Apple promises new kinds of freedom, an 'automatic' and 'effortless' world. Of course, not all of the content in the Cloud is generated by users but it remains open to all, with clear encouragement towards 'creative' engagement. The power of these virtual software solutions – the 'Cloud Power' – is non-linear mass collaborative working, multiplicities of remote users working on the files simultaneously, sharing and developing the ideas together. No messy synchronization or management is required from the user, the Cloud seamlessly – naturally even – integrates disparate devices, users and systems. And the power here is unlimited: in the Cloud, things are only ever more 'flexible', 'scalable'.

So the Cloud responds to the call for collaborative culture already inspired by Web 2.0. It promises enormous potential for project collaboration in both business management and science. Companies are beginning to recognize its value in the context of the global economic recession. It will enable them to focus on their 'core mission', shed staff (namely those who serviced in-house computing), outsource most peripheral concerns and cut costs all round. The total connection of cloud computing, we are told, the state of being 'always on', will push far beyond what we currently understand as interaction. The Cloud, then, is potential.

The Cloud has also been understood in terms of the 'digital commons'. In facilitating the storage of our cultural heritage, rendering it increasingly accessible and interactive, it adds up to an 'exponential...