Words&Dirt

“A terabyte is how much data a typical analog television station broadcasts daily, and it was the size of the United States government’s database of patent and trademark records when it went online in 1998.  By 2010, one could buy a terabyte disc drive for a hundred dollars and hold it in the palm of one hand.  The books in the Library of Congress represent about 10 terabytes (as Shannon guessed), and the number is many times more when images and recording music are counted.  The library now archives web sites; by February 2010 it had collected 160 terabytes’ worth.

As the train hurtled onward, its passengers sometimes felt the pace foreshortening their sense of their own history.  Moore’s law had looked simple on paper, but its consequences left people struggling to find metaphors with which to understand their experience.  The computer scientist Jaron Lanier describes the feeling this way: ‘It’s as if you kneel to plant the seed of a tree and it grows so fast that it swallows your whole town before you can even rise to your feet.’

A more familiar metaphor is the cloud.  All that information––all that information capacity––looms over us, not quite visible, not quite tangible, but awfully real; amorphous, spectral; hovering nearby, yet not situated in any one place.  Heaven must once have felt this way to the faithful.  People talk about shifting their lives to the cloud––their informational lives, at least.  You may store photographs in the cloud; Google will manage your business in the cloud; Google is putting all the world’s books into the cloud; e-mail passes to and from the cloud and never really leaves the cloud.  All traditional ideas of privacy, based on doors and locks, physical remoteness and invisibility, are upended in the cloud.

Money lives in the cloud; the old forms are vestigial tokens of knowledge about who owns what, who owes what.  To the twenty-first century these will be seen as anachronisms, quaint or even absurd: bullion carried from shore to shore in fragile ships, subject to the tariffs of pirates and the god Poseidon; metal coins tossed from moving cars into baskets at highway tollgates and thereafter trucked about (now the history of your automobile is in the cloud); paper checks torn from pads and signed in ink; tickets for trains, performances, air travel, and anything at all, printed on weighty perforated paper with watermarks, holograms, or fluorescent fibers; and, soon enough, all forms of cash.  The economy of the world is transacted in the cloud.

Its physical aspect could not be less cloudlike.  Server farms proliferate in unmarked brick buildings and steel complexes with smoked windows or no windows, miles of hollow floors, diesel generators, cooling towers, seven-foot intake fans, and aluminum chimney stacks.  This hidden infrastructure grows in a symbiotic relationship with the electrical infrastructure it increasingly resembles.  There are information switchers, control centers, and substations.  They are clustered and distributed.  These are the wheel-works; the cloud is their avatar.

The information produced and consumed by humankind used to vanish––that was the norm, the default.  The sights, the sounds, the songs, the spoken word just melted away.  Marks on stone, parchment, and paper were the special case.  It did not occur to Sophocles’ audiences that it would be sad for his plays to be lost; they enjoyed the show.  Now expectations have inverted.  Everything may be recorded and preserved, at least potentially: every musical performance; every crime in a shop, elevator, or city street; every volcano or tsunami on the remotest shore; every card played or piece moved in an online game; every rugby scrum and cricket match.  Having a camera at hand is normal, not exceptional; something like 500 billion images were captured in 2010.  YouTube was streaming more than a billion videos a day.  Most of this is haphazard and unorganized, but there are extreme cases.  The computer pioneer Gordon Bell, at Microsoft Research in his seventies, began recording every moment of his day, every conversation, message, document, a megabyte per hour or a gigabyte per month, wearing around his neck what he called a ‘SenseCam’ to create what he called a ‘LifeLog.’  Where does it end?”

––The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood, by James Gleick, pg. 395-7

“The air was cold, but his cheeks were burning with angry shame.  Shame?  Why?  Was it because he had married a girl whom chance had made a mother?  Did he love her?  Was this miserable bohemian existence, then, his end and aim in life?  He turned his eyes upon the secrets of his heart, and read an evil story,––the story of the past, and he covered his face for shame, while, keeping time to the dull pain throbbing in his head, his heart beat out the story for the future.  Shame and disgrace.”

––The King in Yellow, by Robert W. Chambers, pg. 121