Warning - this article is in the academic literary genre in which you score points for name dropping, making "connections", asking "questions", and using as many words as possible. I was unable to find the point of the article.
Sample:
> ...we seek once again to “make visible the invisible,” to open the “black box,” while also, paradoxically, aestheticizing the wires and algorithms themselves. We have accelerated the cycles of making-visible and making-invisible that are so entangled with Western urban planning and its ideologies. How do we reconcile our competing aspirations for ordered knowledge about how the world works with our desire to believe in its magic?
yeah, i hate this style of writing. it's designed to make people feel dumb, but if you're smart enough to actually parse the language, you realize they're not saying anything.
also, they just draw the wrong conclusions.
The Cloud is composed of multiple levels of code, and no one person can see, let alone interpret, the full stack.
this isn't true. i've worked with a handful of people throughout my career that could tell you exactly how the entire thing works, from x86 registers all the way to javascript running in the browser and everything in between, including details of the content addressable memory on the layer 2 switches! certainly not literally everything that exists, but they understand the entire stack for sure. i suspect there are at least one of these types that exist at every 'cloud' company actually building products.
i think to a lay person technology just seems impossible to fully understand because they do not understand even the most basic things. it's just projection.
I hear these people are called 'full stack developers' even. Though I wouldn't want to use the colonial methods of 'looking, collecting, and record-keeping.' I've heard that doing these things is how you understand systems from front to back.
I wonder what will happen when she finds out about the master/slave relationship inherent in replicated datasets. Is Cassandra transgressing the boundaries of colonial data replication?
I am reminded of Foucault's referencing of Borges' fictional Chinese encyclopedia, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Which divides animals into 14 categories:
Those that belong to the emperor
Embalmed ones
Those that are trained
Sucking pigs
Mermaids (or Sirens)
Fabulous ones
Stray dogs
Those that are included in this classification
Those that tremble as if they were mad
Innumerable ones
Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush
Et cetera
Those that have just broken the flower vase
Those that, at a distance, resemble flies
I think people have realized for some time that all efforts at cataloging carry the baggage of ethnocentrism and cultural biases.
The "cloud" is not organized in such a way as the article wishes it to be, to have ecologies to be explored, such that a field guide or niche study is appropriate.
Lots of assumptions required to back the parallels, most of them off-base, and so the article kind of just confuses like urban exploration and eco/techno-tourism as some kind of like 21st Darwinian voyage stuff that will tell us the hidden structures we're creating and unintentionally relying on as a new networked, data-laden society.
At least I think that's what they're getting at.
The linked videos are cool though on their own merits.
The central sentence is a few paragraphs in: "And again we are searching for the right metaphors and models to guide our investigation." That's what the whole article is about. People are looking for a useful way to describe the masses of new infrastructure, and this article lists some of them. It also calls out past and present ways of looking at the world, for context.
Sample:
> ...we seek once again to “make visible the invisible,” to open the “black box,” while also, paradoxically, aestheticizing the wires and algorithms themselves. We have accelerated the cycles of making-visible and making-invisible that are so entangled with Western urban planning and its ideologies. How do we reconcile our competing aspirations for ordered knowledge about how the world works with our desire to believe in its magic?