Fuck the Cloud (2009)
Salutations, ass-end of the Tech Elite.<p>As someone who has generated a pretty hefty sandbag of verbiage over my decades online, it&#x27;s always amusing to see what the Grand Eye of internet arbitration decides is an incredibly important and pertinent subject to discuss in my back catalog. Whether it&#x27;s my work in guiding volunteers for in-browser emulation (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;softwarelibrary" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.org&#x2F;details&#x2F;softwarelibrary</a>), my delightful coterie of 1980s BBS textfiles (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.textfiles.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.textfiles.com</a>) or perhaps my documentaries on BBS culture (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbsdocumentary.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bbsdocumentary.com</a>) Text Adventures (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getlamp.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.getlamp.com</a>) or the DEFCON Hacker Conference (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rVwaIe6CiHw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=rVwaIe6CiHw</a>) ... or, as it is today, one of my many long-form written-down thoughts on all manner of this silly medium many of us have chosen to live our lives.<p>Oh yes, also that my cat is on twitter and has a million followers. (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitter.com&#x2F;sockington" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.twitter.com&#x2F;sockington</a>) - Lots of people are loaded with knapsacks of opinion about that one as well.<p>I have found that Hacker News (which is, be clear, an unexpectedly lively extension of Y Combinator) is composed of several diverse groups, all with variant approaches to a linked subject. A linked subject which, as some have pointed out, I wrote 6 years ago, deep in the mists of time.<p>One group is literally in it for the Money, the gain, the ROI, the endless quest for the &quot;Unicorn&quot;, and all their commentary is pungent with the bias and filter of either finding the precious gold coin at the bottom of the shitpile, or are rife with attempts to promote or play up subjects and links of great interest to their financial agenda. Be assured that I could not care less about the current status of the beating of your heart.<p>Another group seems to be happy to drill down as deep as they can into the mathematics, algorithms, and code of a situation, thinking that if they napkin-blart out enough &quot;facts&quot;, they will win some sort of day. I find these people tend to be unhappy about flowery language or effusive phrasing, simply because they&#x27;ve left-brain-dominated themselves into deep pits of nut-sorting and bolt-counting. They use &quot;TL;DR&quot; a lot, as well as, I assume, Adderall. Their heartbeat status is of greater interest to me, if only because I think they are coming from a good place, even if that place smells of Cheetos and sweat.<p>And, of course, there are Opinion Tourists, my favorite, who might as well be equated with a loud and cantankerous pit of waving hands, waiting for the newly linked (if not newly written) event&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;image for their to raise in a mighty roar with a hastily cooked &quot;hot take&quot; on the item. Some of them even optimize the process to not even click on the provided link before the horn honking ensues.<p>So, &quot;Fuck the Cloud&quot; was written in the deep miasma of when everyone used the term &quot;Cloud&quot; interchangeably with &quot;Magic&quot;; that it was an approach and glory that would lead the experience of computing to a new shangrila. Like any old-timers rife with memories of how we got into that world (and of the echoes of cloud-dom going back 50 years), I decided to write out some of my own thoughts, especially on this attempt to dumb down the populace and separate them from not just responsibility, but control and agency with their data. I have been entirely correct in the general theme - there is a divide within the technical community, of people with admin access and the ability to control any aspect of their work, and then a very large, almost overwhelming set of users who are, essentially, meat stock. And in the same way that meat stock has no particular seat at the table when negotiations of an agricultural nature are conducted, so in the same way are the &quot;users&quot; left out in the cold as a whole range of abilities and ersatz &quot;rights&quot; are stripped away, under the guise of &quot;ease of use&quot; and &quot;leave it to us&quot;.<p>All of this was written without the revelations of the deep, intense surveillance apparatus that is now in place, ensuring that any of this data you control or thought was within your own private space is actually destined to meet you again in an investigation, a courtroom, a warrantless intrusion or a physical SWAT attack. That wasn&#x27;t even the point.<p>The point was that user data, treated as something to abuse, monetize, and ultimately discard as a whim, was a complete betrayal of the early promises and experimentation of the Internet. To counteract this trend, I co-founded Archive Team (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.archiveteam.org" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.archiveteam.org</a>) and our delightful success in many areas would warrant a completely different essay itself - and it has, along with myriad speeches and presentations in the years hence.<p>I&#x27;m sure it might be delightful entertainment for Hacker News to find this or that out on the net and go off, endlessly, in the loop of &quot;This Needs Me&quot; and &quot;Fuck You For Thinking That&quot;, but ultimately, these are ridiculous showboat-dances of &quot;what if&quot; and &quot;why not&quot;, and I&#x27;ve discovered in the years hence that truly, actions and achievement s speak louder, ever so louder, than words.<p>Enjoy your day.<p>And fuck &quot;The Cloud&quot;.