Ah yes, cloud computing. We’re almost there. The PC is, as they say, dead.
Now, all my data will be stored – safely and securely – behind the gateways of corporations who sole goal is to make money off of me. The internet as a place dissolves into the ether and what remains are billions of devices all connected to the master server, always sharing, always updating. It’s a world where data, public and private, is available all the time – anywhere – for the right price.
I know. Privacy is a myth. The very idea of privacy on the Internet is anathema to some. For others the cat is simply out of the bag. It’s too late to stop the speeding train and if we don’t get on, we’re liable to get squashed.
I worry sometimes that privacy becomes a red herring for greater concerns. I spend a lot of time talking about the evolution of literature and media. I argue strenuously for the evolution of digital literature and narratives that do more than simply try to replace products that already exist. Even with all my argument and belief in those mediums the truth is that the internet, and the cloud, is limited. It only knows what we feed it and most of us, in some way or another, feed it a steady diet of lies. Some lies are little, others gargantuan, but we all shape what we say about ourselves in some way or another. We are children of advertising. We know what sells.
My name, real or not, is a pseudonym. Who I am here is a creation, a myth generated by me and by those around me. I retain privacy not by refraining from using the products. Rather, I hold certain parts of me, and of my person, sacred. I do not post everything. I keep some data private and off the cloud. I do encrypt and I only trust products and hardware that I own not a service that I rent. I may use such services, but I accept that the data I place there could be gone tomorrow.
That is the key here. The cloud doesn’t have to be as negative as I fear it may end up being. Some things should be shared. Some things should be put out there for the world to play with and engage. In those ways the cloud will enhance and help but only if we as users and consumers understand that there is a strict delineation between what we own and what we share. We are not what we share, that is simply a narrative we write about a character named after ourselves. In that sense, some things can and should be available in the cloud, others are neither important enough nor sensitive enough to warrant strict management. The rest requires another way, a way that we understood not too long ago.
Those sad archaic PCs, relics of a lost yesterday, they already are our clouds and we seem to have forgotten that. I run a system that makes what I ran five years ago seem ancient. It and the other systems I manage inside my own home form my cloud. If you ask me that is what we should be doing. We should be doing what Opera and Tonido have been trying to do by making it easier to set up as our PCs as virtual clouds instead of fleeing our machines for the supposed benevolence of corporations who are rarely as benevolent as we would like. Power comes in being able to create and in owning the tools of creation and management. Owning an iPad or an Android phone only gives you the ability to consume someone else’s product. Even using the creative tools included in those platforms makes you little more than a consumer. That cool video has to be shared on some site and, if the current paradigm holds, it won’t be one you own.
That is the wonderful world of cloud computing as it is today: a world of clients all begging to connect to their master servers. It gives me the shivers just thinking about it.
Notes:
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1. Cloud Computing Will Surpass the Internet in Importance
2. Tonido – Run Your Own Personal Cloud
3. Opera Unite
4. Opera Unite Vision Video
