Hu, Tung-Hui. _A Prehistory of the Cloud_. The MIT Press, 2015. [[../writing/Bibliography|Bibliography]] > “The cloud is both an idea and a physical and material object, and the more one learns about it, the more one realizes just how fragile it is” – Tung-Hui Hu, *A Prehistory of the Cloud* ^14a762 > “perhaps the most surprising thing about the cloud is how old it is.2 Seb Franklin has identified a 1922 design for predicting weather using a grid of “computers” (i.e., human mathematicians) connected by telegraphs.3 AT&T launched the “electronic ‘skyway’”—a series of microwave relay stations—in 1951, in conjunction with the first cross-country television network. And engineers at least as early as 1970 used the symbol of a cloud to represent any unspecifiable or unpredictable network, whether telephone network or Internet.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. > “While the thing that moves through the sky is in fact a formation of water vapor, water crystal, and aerosols, we call it a cloud to give a constantly shifting thing a simpler and more abstract form. Something similar happens in the digital world. While the system of computer resources is comprised of millions of hard drives, servers, routers, fiber-optic cables, and networks, we call it “the cloud”: a single, virtual, object.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. “the cloud is the premier example of what computer scientists term virtualization—a technique for turning real things into logical objects, whether a physical network turned into a cloud-shaped icon, or a warehouse full of data “storage servers turned into a “cloud drive.” – Tung-Hui Hu, *A Prehistory of the Cloud* ^a04ebf Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. ” > “the cloud, as an idea, has exceeded its technological platform and become a potent metaphor for the way contemporary society organizes and understands itself. Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. > “If Foucault originally described a shift from sovereign societies to disciplinary societies, Gilles Deleuze extended this shift into a third phase, in which subjects are governed by invisible rules and systems of regulation, such as our credit scores, web history, and computer protocols.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. > “Seen correctly, the cloud is a topography or architecture of our own desire. Much of the cloud’s data consists of our own “data, the photographs and content uploaded from our hard drives and mobile phones; in an era of user-generated content, the cloud is, most obviously, our cloud (this is the promise of the “I” in Apple’s “iCloud,” or to use an older reference, the “my” in “mySpace”). Yet these fantasies—that the cloud gives us a new form of ownership over our data, or a new form of individualized participation—are nevertheless structured by older, preexisting discourses.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. ” > “Scholars concerned about such issues [as privacy and surveillance] have typically embraced the idea of materiality (or, more specifically, “platform studies”) to recuperate the often invisible logics, algorithms, and apparatuses that structure digital culture. Focusing on digital culture’s media-specific properties typically involves examining the technological platforms within: Internet Protocol, lines of Java code, network cables, or conventions for the Unix operating system.21 In doing so, such scholars claim that an awareness of a medium’s materiality will lead to a more effective understanding of its ideological content. Yet the cloud, I am arguing, inevitably frustrates this approach, because by design, it is not based on any single medium or technology; it is medium-agnostic, rather than medium-specific. As an inter-network, any type of communications network or technological platform can conceivably be attached to it” ^7a328d Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. “So, impulsively, I took a fiber-optic cable and unplugged it. Then I held it up to my eye and looked in. On the other side of the fiber, I imagined, was Japan. The light was red, and it winked like a star on a smoggy night… my naive desire to look into the cloud’s fiber-optic network is a little like asking what a film is about, and looking into the most direct source of the image—the projector beam—to find out.” - Tung-Hui Hu, *A Prehistory of the Cloud* ^7e1745 > So, impulsively, I took a fiber-optic cable and unplugged it. Then I held it up to my eye and looked in. On the other side of the fiber, I imagined, was Japan. The light was red, and it winked like a star on a smoggy night…A single-mode laser would have lased a hole into my cornea and blinded me instantly. Multi-mode is often powered by LED light sources rather than true lasers. Single-mode is indicated by a yellow cable; multi-mode, orange. The cable I had grabbed was orange. That I can still see today is a testament to both my dumb luck, and also, metaphorically, to the paradox that the cloud represents: that you can never see it by looking directly at it. Indeed, my naive desire to look into the cloud’s fiber-optic network is a little like asking what a film is about, and looking into the most direct source of the image—the projector beam—to find out. Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. ” > “Photographs, drawings, videos, and even games that offer insight into how visual culture functions in the cloud: what the cloud looks like on-screen; how we draw or map its shape; how the cloud grew out of TV/video networks. Crucial to this enterprise is the belief that visual culture does not merely reflect or represent beliefs; it also anticipates and shapes it. As Marshall McLuhan put it, artists serve as a “Distant Early Warning system” for societal change,23 and the artistic avant-garde offer us a window into the bleeding edge of how new media might be used. The art objects I consider—by Ant Farm, Trevor Paglen, the Raindance Corporation, and others—bring into focus key moments of the cloud’s development, and allow us to think through historical problems of power and visibility. Because visual culture tracks the minor mutations of power that shape the cloud, the question of power’s visibility may be best interrogated by artists.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. > “Over the last twenty years, the Internet has been variously described as a “series of tubes,” an “information superhighway,” an “ecosystem,” a “commons,” a “rhizome,” a “simulacra,” a “cloud” (note the title of this book), and even, as the director of the MIT Media Lab once put it, a “flock of ducks.” Each term brings with it an implicit politics of space: if the Internet is imagined as a “public commons” being walled off by regulations such as the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, this serves as potent rallying point for those who would defend it from such incursions; but if the Internet is a “rhizome,” then such incursions are already part of the network’s anarchic structure: “The Net treats censorship as noise and is designed to work around it.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. > “the cloud’s infrastructure was responsible for 2 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions in 2008, and data centers have grown exponentially since then. The long-term consequences of the cloud are worlds away from the seductive “now” produced by its real-time systems. It is our job to catch up with this legacy.” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books. > “One of the reasons that a network engineer thinks of a cloud in this way is because the cloud signified a network in the 1970s, while cloud storage did not explicitly declare itself “the cloud” until the late 2000s. In other words, as each infrastructure becomes naturalized, we tend to refer to it with increasing amounts of abstraction, talking about its use (cloud storage) rather than the infrastructure itself (storage servers in data centers). Thus each level of abstraction is a sort of archeological deposit that records the idea of what we thought of “the cloud” at a certain moment in time” Excerpt From: Tung-Hui Hu. “A Prehistory of the Cloud.” Apple Books.