This was a recipe for disaster. Now, I haven’t mentioned yet the word “cloud” which I was dealt on the top of the deck when I received the news that I was talking here tonight about privacy and 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 Instead, what has happened is that iron no longer represents a single server.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.
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.