From old railway tracks repurposed as routes for fibre-optic cables to cold war bunkers retrofitted to store data,Hu shows that the intangible cloud has a solid infrastructureThe cloud is “a system of networks that pools computing power”. You may think of it as a mute and ethereal concept but for Tung-Hui Hu it is both an belief and a physical and fabric thing”. His slim yet wide-ranging study attempts to reify and historicise a concept that has “become a potent metaphor for the way modern society organizes and understands itself. The belief dates back to a 1922 design for predicting weather using a network of human “computers”, or mathematicians, and connected via telegraph. From the 19th-century train tracks repurposed as routes for fibre-optic cables and the cold war bunkers retrofitted to store data,Hu shows that the intangible cloud has a solid and polluting infrastructure. He also reveals the human costs, such as the poorly paid foreign workers screening content for Silicon Valley companies, and explores the monetisation of the user: “the cloud is a subtle weapon that translates the body into usable information.” Witty,sharp and theoretically aware, Hu deconstructs this much-discussed but poorly understood “cultural fantasy”.• A Prehistory of the Cloud is published by MITContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com