Freedom In the Cloud

So we had a lot of platform managers in a hierarchically organized network and we began to evolve services. “Services” is a complicated word. It’s not meaningless by any means but it’s very tricky to describe it. We use it for a lot of different things. We badly need an analytical taxonomy of “services” as my friend and colleague Philippe Aigrain in Paris pointed out some 2 or 3 years ago. Taxonomies of “services” involve questions of simplicity, complexity, scale, and control.

To take an example, we might define a dichotomy between complex and simple services in which simple services are things that any computer can perform for any other computer if it wants to and complex services are things you can’t do with a computer. You must do with clusters or structures of some computational or administrative complexity. SEARCH is a complex service. Indeed, search is the archetypal complex service. Given the one way nature of links in the Web and other elements in the data architecture we are now living with (that’s another talk, another time) search is not a thing that we can easily distribute. The power in the market of our friends at Google depends entirely on the fact that search is not easily distributed. It is a complex service that must be centrally organized and centrally delivered. It must crawl the web in a unilateral direction, link by link, figuring out where everything is in order to help you find it when you need it. In order to do that, at least so far, we have not evolved good algorithmic and delivery structures for doing it in a decentralized way. So, search becomes an archetypal complex service and it draws onto itself a business model for its monetiztion.

Advertising in the 20th century was a random activity. You threw things out and hoped they worked. Advertising in the 21st century is an exquisitely precise activity. You wait for a guy to want something and then you send him advertisements about what he wants and bingo it works like magic. So of course on the underside of a complex service called search there is a theoretically simple service called advertising which, when unified to a complex service, increases its efficiency by orders of magnitude and the increase of the efficiency of the simple service when combined with the complex one produces an enormous surplus revenue flow which can be used to strengthen search even more.

But that’s the innocent part of the story and we don’t remain in the innocent part of the story for a variety of uses. I won’t be tedious on a Friday night and say it’s because the bourgeoisie is constantly engaged in destructively reinventing and improving its own activities and I won’t be moralistic on a Friday night that you can’t do that and say because sin is in-eradicable and human beings are fallen creatures and greed is one of the sins we cannot avoid committing. I will just say that as a sort of ordinary social process we don’t stop at innocent. We go on, which surely is the thing you should say on a Friday night. And so we went on.

Now, where we went on is really towards the discovery that all of this would be even better if you had all the logs of everything because once you have the logs of everything then every simple service is suddenly a goldmine waiting to happen and we blew it because the architecture of the Net put the logs in the wrong place. They put the logs where innocence would be tempted. They put the logs where the failed state of human beings implies eventually bad trouble and we got it.

The cloud means that we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore and because we can’t even point in the direction of the server anymore we don’t have extra technical or non-technical means of reliable control over this disaster in slow motion. You can make a rule about logs or data flow or preservation or control or access or disclosure but your laws are human laws and they occupy particular territory and the server is in the cloud and that means the server is always one step ahead of any rule you make or two or three or six or poof! I just realized I’m subject to regulation, I think I’ll move to Oceana now.

Which means that in effect, we lost the ability to use either legal regulation or anything about the physical architecture of the network to interfere with the process of falling away from innocence that was now inevitable in the stage I’m talking about, what we might call late Google stage 1.

It is here, of course, that Mr. Zuckerberg enters.

The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age.