Cloud Punk. Herlander Elias
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[14] of other times, they do not need to physically work as a team. Welcome to the Cloud Age. In these days of eternal futuristic “presentness” a single individual has the same power as a corporation, a legion or a country. And every time one communicates with a cloud, one is establishing communication with the world. Born to be wired? [15]
Kevin Kelly advances that
“In 2014 alone more than $ 2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology. Facebook, Google, and their Chinese equivalents, TenCent and Baidu, have recruited researchers to join their in-house [16] AI research teams. Yahoo!, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter have all purchased AI companies since 2014” (2016, LOC 475-5810).
There are some people who assume the AI is still a monster to be afraid of; however, when it comes to global corporations the cybernetic intelligence represents profit, creativity, anticipation, futurism and control. By following a certain prediction of Futurism, the major corporate global players are already aware that enabled digital-voices with synthetic personalities will be the new next search engines. Though, one notices that there is a lack of cloud supervised by human presence every time people need to find out something on the web through a link. Cloud punks know that it is possible to get a cloud-enabled social change [17].
If massification dominated the 20th century, then the 21st century will be dominated by datification. And it all connects back to AI. Kelly lets us know that “Part of the AI breakthrough lies in the incredible avalanche of collected data about our world” (2016, LOC 584-5810). The larger is the access to data, the bigger are control and power. Let’s imagine a world with a smart cloud, in which the more we learn from it, the more it learns from us. Let’s picture a world in which the cloud punks learn this procedure and foment useful and revolutionary artificial intelligences. What happens afterwards? Once the cloud is explained, it helps us to understand the problem:
“The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud. Software flows from the cloud to you as a stream of upgrades. The cloud is where your stream of texts goes before they arrive on your friend’s screen. The cloud is where the parade of movies under your account rests until you call for them. The cloud is the reservoir that songs escape from. The cloud is the seat where the intelligence of Siri sits, even as she speaks to you. The cloud is the new organizing metaphor for computers. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds” (Kelly, 2016, LOC 968-5810).
It is precisely this Third Regime that matters to explain better, since it is under this regime that everything is played out: the hunt for the rare book, the search for the lost document, the right news to declassify, among other aspects. In practice, the cloud punks are claiming back the cloud’s public space that was rendered private. The access to singularity, to information and knowledge adapted to ourselves means a revolution in the history of mankind. As a matter of fact, for such neo-mankind, cities, information, the knowledge and the cloud, are patrimony of all publics and all generations. As for enterprises this access is a financial asset, an interface of services.
We are missing the link to the “full book”. What the cloud punks are looking for is this complete book, the huge archive turned available. For them, each and every media product, among which books stand too, just makes sense if they log on the “major connection”. It has been a while since some authors spoke of the ur-text,[18] this founding text, the first and relevant one. With today’s “expanded texts” and with the way we access to the cloud nothing seems to have ever been disconnected once, not even from the past. The cloud punks are archivists and users, and surprisingly they face the past as those who have a glimpse of the future.
It is a fact that new texts are scattered all around the cloud. Visionary Kevin Kelly tells us that “eBooks [19] today lack the ‘fungibility’ of the ‘urtext’ of screening: Wikipedia” (2016, LOC 1361-5810). And, actually, the true “connected book” is Wikipedia. Besides, more than being a global book it is about being an international encyclopedia. But before the cloud, the Internet was mostly like this: people would share things with people. There were web sites and web pages on a massive scale entirely available.
From the moment that digital media brands took control of their hardware and software investments, the erstwhile network died. We have before ourselves a wireless network of brands, a strategic layout of platform brands. The information torrent is so much overwhelming that the new interface is time. Sometimes we rewind, while other times we move forward across the data that the platform brands allow us to use, yet in a pay per use fashion.
One of today’s cloud features is this format that allows us to“scroll back” (Kelly, 2016, LOC 3621-5810) or “scroll forward”, like our entire undeletable digital past, or our volatile present (Rushkoff, 2013), would be no more than a prototype of a future we cannot contemplate anymore. It is no longer perceptible. The cloud has become a torrent of data laid out in a multiplex form, and it reorganizes itself as a data organism according to our will and intent. “Searches” in search engines are something belonging to the past. It is information now that is assigned to find us. Users and consumers are configuring a universe of choices. From then on, the cloud researches with AI; it manages, selects and activates for us whatever fits our requirements best. Authors such as David Gelernter (2013) did know that the cloud would become more like a time-based Internet, a futuristic flow-archive. In practical terms, the cloud became a “history-medium”, [20] and inside the cloud more sub-media will keep showing itself.
Corporations and Patterns
The cloud punks are the protagonists getting the best information amidst this invisible connections labyrinth. And this trend, in fact, has begun a long time ago. Sherry Turkle is concerned with how the cloud has redefined the behavior of young people through smartphones, tablets and wearables [21]. In less than two decades the public of the digital has totally changed. Corporations are establishing communication with us by means of semiotic patterns and are dominating almost entirely the cloud’s history-medium. The danger, as alerted by Turkle, is that we start to think of ourselves as being a “One” individual-based tribe, faithful to our party alone (2015, 4). Because cloud punks stand simultaneously isolated as they are connected to the cloud-world at the same time, they get to be the new information managers. They are the future tribe that is “already here”. They master both technologies and academic knowledge, decoding marketing [22] campaigns and they know how to read the street culture’s signs. They represent the “nomad” that was capable to penetrate the “war machine”, the superior being of the information landscape.
As for Kelly, over the last 30 years the social economy relying on this kind of technology had its ups and downs, and saw its heroes arriving and vanishing, yet it is quite clear that there were massive scale trends mastering the course of things(2016, LOC 55-5810). If there is one thing that in the last years became more obvious it is the way the cloud positioned itself as a history-medium in the hands of corporations. Consistent with William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick and Bruce Sterling’s science fiction vision, corporations stand present as brands, civilizational reports, and they act like small countries or Asian-like rising city-states without parallel. The patterns that the cloud punks are detecting and decoding are something clear in both digital information and entertainment. Though what concerns them is the transmedial knowledge crossing the cloud in a pay per use [23] model. This model has obliterated completely the “free world” Internet, and what remains of it is the streamlined cloud, endowed with clean design, [24] in which one may know everything as long as one pays to have access granted to a certain service brand.
The cloud punks have peculiar characteristics. Just as Mason mentions, regarding his vision of the new characters, what is happening with the cloud punks is that these heroes also act and live in a networked way, whether it is at work, or in leisure periods; from relations to culture(2015, Part II, Chapter 5). If Kelly alerts us to the inevitable emerging patterns (2016, LOC 59-5810) just as William Gibson or Henry Jenkins, the underlying reason is attached to the fact that cloud punks contemporaneity is the moment when the dominating corporations communicate by viral patterns and transmedial signs with the masses. Nothing appears in the cloud by chance.
The major enterprises "digesting"