The cloud: infrastructure’s alibi

The metaphor of “cloud” computing is a multi-valent one that provides cover for the costly, energy-hungry infrastructures that support the digital media environment. Clouds connote simultaneously obscurity and the view from “on high.” They can only be seen from afar, remaining difficult to discern when we are engulfed in them. In practical terms the metaphor provides a convenient shorthand for computer storage and services. In political terms, it helps to obscure the failure of the public infrastructural imaginary which has allowed so much of the construction of our information and communication systems to be relegated to the private sector. The metaphoric untethering of computing from its material infrastructure enables it to float free from its commercial underpinnings and attach itself to the earlier, more idealistic models of computation-as-public-utility envisioned by some pioneers of cloud computing. In this respect, the metaphor gestures in the direction of computational utopia while providing cover for the online surveillance economy. One result is that the metaphor has become a target of perpetual debunking. We are repeatedly reminded that what passes for the cloud is much more down-to-earth - that there is no cloud, merely other people’s computers (and server farms). For reasons both practical and political, the metaphor nonetheless endures.