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Cloud Time

Zero Books

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 growth in mass cultural expression' which Charles Leadbeater calls 'Cloud Culture'. In the new decade, he trumpets, 'will come a vast cultural eruption – a mushroom cloud of culture' disrupting 'how culture is expressed and organised'. There's a lot of talk about the 'commons' these days. Not just the commons, in fact: commonism, communalism, new cooperativism, indeed, even communism is on the agenda. Some of this talk has, understandably, been from those eager (as it transpires, rather too eager) to write the obituary for neoliberalism in the wake of 2008's global financial collapse. But from wherever it manifests, it highlights the growing urgency for new ways of living on an ever more interconnected planet, where the 'crisis' of one country is increasingly the crisis of the world, where individual actions result in a multiplicity of reactions. Discussions around the digital commons have, perhaps inevitably, been seen in less significant terms, driven instead by debates over copyright, legality and access. However, the appearance of the Cloud, in socio-political terms, reveals a radical shift already underway in the way we live, a shift that has consequences beyond merely technological concerns.

In early 2010, Leadbeater produced two reports for British think-tanks. In the first of these, 'Cloud Culture: The Future of Global Cultural Relations', we are promised a future of 'mass self expression, ubiquitous participation and constant connection,' a world where our interaction will be driven by 'collaborative learning and improvement'. Leadbeater announces the birth of an exciting new world of invention, creation, innovation and experimentation. Cloud culture is defined by its heterogeneity and horizontal connectivity – our interaction with various technologies is presaged as accessible, open. Indeed, this is culture as network-of-networks, culture as 'commons'. Here lies the truly utopian essence of the Cloud – indeed, it's a utopia with echoes of Thomas More's original use of the term – no private ownership, no locks on doors (no passwords), an open and collaborative structure. With the common language of information, our communicative and social networks can bring about creativity through commonality. Crucially, then, cloud computing enables – requires – our contribution to a global archival system, to which we are correspondingly granted access. But we shouldn't get distracted by the specific technology involved in cloud computing - this can and will change rapidly. The key to cloud culture is fundamentally its integration and its state of 'always-on'. This integrated-commons forces together existing socio-political, cultural and aesthetic structures, and so has wide-reaching implications.

The nascent utopia Leadbeater presents is, unintentionally, as bizarre a satire as More's island state. And the reason for this must be put down to a central naivety. The only threat to the pending realization of this new creative order, Leadbeater suggests, is a 'cloud capitalism' that may seek to manage, manipulate and dominate our creativity; here he expresses concern over existing web-mammoths such as Facebook and Google, the very definition of informational capitalists in their monetization of interactivity, social networking and search, especially through highly targeted advertising. Yet, in reality, the dangerous possible future of a cloud-based capitalism has not only already become fact, but in this contemporary scenario where capital must be recognized as a force of rationalization and control, the Cloud should be understood precisely as both the force behind this new paradigm and its new configuration.

What Leadbeater refers to as the 'cloud culture equation' is actually a statement and plan of execution. Like capital itself, the Cloud is processual – in this case a process of integration and archivization. Cloud computing is undoubtedly a central factor, if not apotheosis, of the continuing acceleration of globalization, itself concerned with a 'totalizing' integration of cultural difference within an overall system of control. Yet we're not referring here to the 'single world' of globalization that renders the majority of people locked out from world markets and commodities. The Cloud seeks to align together a complex of worlds in which everything is seemingly open to everyone. This is globalization as cultural assemblage: heterogeneous, 'radically' democratic, yet disembedded, codified and archived in an ultimately homogenous fashion. Data begets data in a newly intensified state of interconnection. The creative explosion Leadbeater promises is beyond even Bill Gates's dreams of a 'friction free' capitalism; here individual meaning and truth are irrelevant outside of the overall assemblage, we become nodal connections, linked to endless alterities. It's for this reason that Leadbeater's insistence that we should 'seek the maximum possible diversity of clouds rather than thinking simply of the cloud' utterly overlooks the true extent of this new regime of power. Commercial clouds and social clouds necessarily operate as concrete assemblages piloted by a single 'diagram' or 'abstract machine', to borrow Deleuzian terminology.

We exist, then, in a permanent state of connection, an ontological integration with and through the cloud, brought about via a knowing or unknowing interaction with a multiplicity of devices, augmenting and drawing on the commons. More than this, we simultaneously become embedded within and a constituent part of the commons. This commons is an inconceivably vast and ever-expanding data archive but it's also the assemblage of those linked together and mediated by the Cloud. We should thus think of the commons as virtual, defined less by existing data and more by its potential to produce data through network communication. Consequently, cloud culture harnesses network labor-power, and in so doing dynamically mobilizes what Marx referred to as the 'general intellect': cognitive and social power is transformed into the principle productive force. The commons is certainly comprised of data, codes and information but it's also made up of ideas, notions and concepts, and further, of relationships, connections and affects, all of which exist in both actual and virtual states. Labor in this context is both dialogic and performative; sharing an idea doesn't delimit its value, in the process of its dissemination it is cultivated and enhanced. It goes without saying that the immaterial labor involved in social networking is driven by a chronic requirement for the new and the ceaseless bureaucracy of tagging, (re)categorizing and (re)sorting. A state of constant flux then, where all processes, all actions, are effectively beta-testing – in accessing data, we feed information back to its source where modifications and adjustments take place ahead of our next engagement.

The Patron Saint of cloud culture is Gerrard Winstanley, seventeenth-century founder of the Diggers, an English proto-communist revolutionary group. A resurgence of interest in Winstanley has been evident of late, suggested by a small flurry of reissued writings and several re-examinations by Tony Benn and others. Leadbeater's own assessment appeared little over a month after the publication of 'Cloud Culture', in the form of 'Digging for the Future', a second think-tank report (which he somewhat ambitiously describes as 'an English radical manifesto'). His report hinges upon an anamnesic strategy – we must 'look back to move forward'. The retrospective gaze singles out Winstanley's social radicals as the crucial lesson of the past. Winstanley demanded land be communally owned to foster greater local power. This decentralization and common ownership, he argued, would allow greater efficiency in the cultivation of the land in order to feed England's growing population, and, further, that in a national process of becoming 'commoners', the people would be levelled, bringing an end to the hegemonic power of priests and landowners. Crucially, common ownership would free up the power of invention as driving force for change: 'fear of want and care to pay rent to taskmasters hath hindered many rare inventions'. For Leadbeater, then, the power of Winstanley's ideal of a common land is translatable into a contemporary digital commons, an open network of communal power, a space where knowledge is freely shared for social good, beyond the concerns of capital.

Leadbeater's response to the end-time of the neoliberal project, juxtaposing the cloud commons with this eulogy to Winstanley, overlooks the fact that the digital commons is the new hunting ground for contemporary capital. Cloud culture is a product of post-9/11 'disaster capitalism'. Technological systems and ideas that were in their infancy prior to 9/11, merely 'lying around' without coherence, were swiftly joined up and rationalized in a way that previously had been politically untenable. 'Suddenly,' Naomi Klein comments, 'the fear of terror was greater than the fear of living in a surveillance society'. Global financial meltdown has only served to increase moves toward greater control through integration. The continuing propagation of the Cloud occurs in a state of permanent crisis and shock, of which a deepening sense of nihilism is symptomatic. Consequently, the state of the digital commons should be further considered in terms of Klein's reference to the ancient quasi-legal status of terra nullius: the declaration of land as empty or 'wasted' leading to its seizure. As a strategy of land-grabbing colonial powers, this seizure would often lead to the elimination of indigenous people 'without remorse', but in the contemporary case, elimination of invention-power would be counterproductive. The power of cloud capitalism seeks instead to put us to work – in this respect, the commons have become subject to enclosure.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Cloud Time by Rob Coley Dean Lockwood Copyright © 2011 by Rob Coley and Dean Lockwood . Excerpted by permission of Zero Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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