Freedom In the Cloud

I haven’t mentioned the word “cloud” because the word “cloud” doesn’t really mean anything very much. In other words, the disaster we are having is not the catastrophe of the cloud. The disaster we are having is the catastrophe of the way we misunderstood the Net under the assistance of the un-free software that helped us to understand it. What “cloud” means is that servers have ceased to be made of iron. “Cloud” means virtualization of servers has occurred.

So, out here in the dusty edges of the galaxy where we live in dis-empowered clienthood, nothing very much has changed. As you walk inward towards the center of the galaxy, it gets more fuzzy than it used to. We resolve now halo where we used to see actual stars. Servers with switches and buttons you can push and such. Instead, what has happened is that iron no longer represents a single server. Iron is merely a place where servers could be. So “cloud” means servers have gained freedom, freedom to move, freedom to dance, freedom to combine and separate and re-aggregate and do all kinds of tricks. Servers have gained freedom. Clients have gained nothing. Welcome to the cloud.

It’s a minor modification of the recipe for disaster. It improves the operability for systems that control the clients out there who were meant to be peers in a Net made of equal things.

So that’s the architecture of the catastrophe. If you think about it, each step in that architectural revolution: from a network made of peers, to servers that serve the communication with humans, to clients which are programs running on heavy iron, to clients which are the computers that people actually use in a fairly dis-empowered state and servers with a high concentration of power in the Net, to servers as virtual processes running in clouds of iron at the center of an increasingly hot galaxy and the clients are out there in the dusty spiral arms.

All of those decisions architecturally were made without any discussion of the social consequences long-term, part of our general difficulty in talking about the social consequences of technology during the great period of invention of the Internet done by computer scientists who weren’t terribly interested in Sociology, Social Psychology, or, with a few shining exceptions — freedom. So we got an architecture which was very subject to misuse. Indeed, it was in a way begging to be misused and now we are getting the misuse that we set up. Because we have thinned the clients out further and further and further. In fact, we made them mobile. We put them in our pockets and we started strolling around with them.

There are a lot of reasons for making clients dis-empowered and there are even more reasons for dis-empowering the people who own the clients and who might quaintly be thought of the people who ought to control them. If you think for just a moment how many people have an interest in dis-empowering the clients that are the mobile telephones you will see what I mean. There are many overlapping rights owners as they think of themselves each of whom has a stake in dis-empowering a client at the edge of the network to prevent particular hardware from being moved from one network to another. To prevent particular hardware from playing music not bought at the great monopoly of music in the sky. To disable competing video delivery services in new chips I founded myself that won’t run popular video standards, good or bad. There are a lot of business models that are based around mucking with the control over client hardware and software at the edge to deprive the human that has quaintly thought that she purchased it from actually occupying the position that capitalism says owners are always in — that is, of total control.

In fact, what we have as I said a couple of years ago in between appearances here at another NYU function. In fact, what we have are things we call platforms. The word “platform” like the word “cloud” doesn’t inherently mean anything. It’s thrown around a lot in business talk. But, basically what platform means is places you can’t leave. Stuff you’re stuck to. Things that don’t let you off. That’s platforms. And the Net, once it became a hierarchically architected zone with servers in the center and increasingly dis-empowered clients at the edge, becomes the zone of platforms and platform making becomes the order of the day.

Some years ago a very shrewd lawyer who works in the industry said to me “Microsoft was never really a software company. Microsoft was a platform management company”. And I thought Yes, shot through the heart.