“The cloud” is out of reach, floating indifferently above the realm of human affairs.īut of course this isn’t true. If the cloud is really as natural as the fluffy wisps that drift across the sky on a pleasant afternoon, then it follows that its presence is similarly harmless-never mind the environmental burden all this data storage imposes. Media scholar Lisa Parks calls this “infrastructural concealment,” and for many modern apparatuses, environmental neologisms prove critical. Edwards sees this naturalization-technology becoming as ordinary “ as trees, daylight, and dirt”-as a defining characteristic of modern life, a process whereby a company’s tools self-camouflage.
As researchers have noted, the phrase “data mining” does not exactly clarify the privacy concerns at play when Meta sorts through your personal information. Sue Thomas-a writer and scholar of digital culture-argues that bringing nature into the lexicon lets technologists position their domain as “a real and integrated extension to human experience.” This framing brings a sense of comfort to complex innovations but encourages us to not think too deeply, either. These appropriations span the gamut: Firefox, Open Sea, On Star, Airbnb, Apple (Yosemite, Monterey, Big Sur), internet surfing, neural networks, mouses, viruses. The cloud is just one of many linguistic elisions between the artificial and natural worlds. Your information is not in a massive bank of servers in Nevada it is, as he put it, “in a ‘cloud’ somewhere.” Data as a nimbus floating above. Naming it “the cloud” made the change sound almost natural. In 2006, at an industry conference, then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt introduced a now ubiquitous term: “the cloud.” Here was a grand technological shift, Schmidt explained, that would let information exist simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.
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