Tethered Cloud
This has been a scant week for news. I am not at all sure whether this is the result of everyone on Tellus wanting to avoid doing anything with the clumped holy days of whatever or some insidious conspiracy of media editors intent on lulling Tellus into thinking the previous, but the feeds have been shy of really intriguing information lately.
The week has also been hectic and stressful. At times like this it seems obvious that most organizations are dominated by extroverts and introverts who masquerade as extroverts to survive. The idea that the church instituted holy days as rest and recuperation seems difficult to grok given how traumatic they are. Reflection is more insidious however, indicating that holy days had the purpose of making the laity want to hasten back to work to get away from the ritual and stress and such like. Sometimes it seems the same today. At least no one can accuse the imperial church of not being paternalistic.
It was a short week at the gym as well, the place closed mid afternoon on christmas eve, which had scant effect on me since I did my deed there at 0400, and was closed on the day itself. The immediate thought is how discriminatory that is since they ignored all of the other holy days. This is obviously an artifact of christian guilt over two millennia of blaming their religion on the adherents of judaism. One more datum of evidence that mystic superstition and rationality are orthogonal.
On which azimuth I am am ead to recall a podcast, I am not sure whether it was part of a “Search Engine” or a “Future Tense” podcast, but defintiely one of the information technology ones blathering a bit about cloud computing. Cloud computing is the latest fashionable term for the diea that John Brunner originated in one of his novels, Shockwave Rider, I believe. And this led me to consider that there are two aspects of cloud computing.
One of the aspects is that there is this amorphous but ubiquitous environment of network out there that provides all of the information resources that I need save one. These resources include everything from software to storage. It is the epitome of the idea of service, having everything information available for me to use, for a small fee, of course.
The problem with this aspect of the cloud is that in reality it has to degenerate into that subset of the services that are economically viable which to first order means those that are in common, continuous, and widespread demand. If we view computer users in terms of the cleints they use, then the vast majority need little more than a browser, an email/calendar client, an IM client, and an office suite. So all the cloud does is move these people from using clients installed on their hard drives to using web clients on a stealthed network.
At the risk of sounding sour grapes, a significant fraction of these people are social maintainers. They may do fairly useful things to keep society and civilization operating but they do not directly contribute to advancement. They do indirectly contribute by relieving those who do advance society and civilization and the species from the tawdry administrivia that these folks do. How can this be determined? The answer is simple. What people do is to a certain extent defined by the tools and processes they use. That translates into which software they use and thereby there is a relationship between software and advancement of society……
So the wart of the first aspect of cloud computing is that it may very well lack the very tools that those who further our existence need. The wart of the second aspect is similar. The second aspect of cloud computing is accessing the cloud and this is a problem that I have advanced previously as well.
In the cities, network access is well nigh ubiquitous, largely because there is population density enough to make sure cash flow is adequate. This is not the hinterland. In the city one may wander about and connect to the network always because coverages are continuous. Out in the hinterland, the 0.99 of the area of the Yankee republic, coverage is discrete and even conspicuously absent over much of the land. The model of network connectivity is not nomadic or unfettered but tethered. In effect, one accesses the network by staying localized and this gives one a very different view of the utility of the cloud.
In effect, the cloud becomes like television rather than like satellite radio. To watch television I have to be within line of sight of one side of it; to listen to satellite radio I only have to have line of sight to the satellite. The range scope is entirely different and the use is different. Satellite radio is an accessory to activity; watching television is the dedicated activity and ceases when other activity is indicated.
So for the incognizent consumers of the cities, the cloud is an all prevasive medium that provides all they can think to buy but for others, it is too little. Those who build new will find it offers less than they need and for those who live outside the ant hill, it is too small.
