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Captives of the Cloud: Part II → Continued from “Captives of the Cloud: Part I” Is the future of the world the future of the internet? – Julian Assange1 01/14 The cloud is the informational equivalent to the container terminal. It has a higher degree of standardization and scalability than most earlier forms of networked information and communication technology. From social networking to retail, from financial transactions to e-mail and telephone, these and many other Metahaven services end up in the cloud. Surely, the internet already was a wholesale for all types of information and media formats. As Milton Captives of the Mueller notes, these “used to be delivered through separate technologies governed by Cloud: Part II separate legal and regulatory regimes,” while now having converged on the internet and its protocols.2 In the cloud, such “digital convergence” goes even further: data becomes more effectively and thoroughly harvested, analyzed, validated, monetized, looked into, and controlled than in the internet; its centralization is not just one of protocol, but also of location. The Form of the Cloud Many writers in recent decades have grappled with a seemingly borderless information society rooted in physical territories, and finding words for this condition has been key to most serious writing about information networks. For example, the term “space of flows” was coined in the 1990s by the Spanish sociologist Manuel n e Castells. It describes the spatial conditions of v a the global movement of goods, information, and h a t money. According to Castells, the space of flows e M Ê is 2 1 0 2 r constituted by a circuit of electronic I I e b t r exchanges (micro-electronics-based o t a c P devices, telecommunications, computer o : d u — processing, broadcasting systems, and o 8 l 3 C high-speed transportation – also based on # e l h information technologies) that, together, t a f n r o form the material basis for the processes u s o j e v we have observed as being strategically x i t u l 3 p f crucial in the network society. a - e C Castells adds that this material basis is “a spatial form, just as it could be ‘the city’ or ‘the region’ in the organization of the merchant society or the industrial society.”4 As legal scholars Tim Wu and Jack Goldsmith note in their study Who Controls the Internet?, beneath “formless cyberspace” rests “an ugly physical transport infrastructure: copper wires, fiberoptic 10.16.12 / 11:23:36 EDT “Cypherpunk Dream” versus “Data's Empire.” The dichotomy of the internet according to Michael Froomkin. “Like” versus “Law”: An “Extrajudicial Dislike” by US Senator Joe Lieberman prompting an industrial embargo against WikiLeaks. 10.16.12 / 11:23:36 EDT cables, and the specialized routers and switches propose a radical reification of it. This that direct information from place to place.”5 would mean its transformation into a finite James Gleick describes the network’s data “thing” among other finite things, and not center, the cables, and the switches as “wheel- always see the network and its derivatives works,” and the cloud as its “avatar.”6 The cloud like something immaterial and invisible, presupposes a geography where data centers without a form we can trace and change.9 can be built. It presupposes an environment protected and stable enough for its server farms 03/14 In discussion with Aureli, the theorist Boris Groys to be secure, for its operations to run smoothly asserts that the network is situated on (or below) and uninterrupted. It presupposes redundant a “defined territory, controlled by the military.” power grids, water supplies, high-volume, high- On those terms, Groys claims, speed fiber-optic connectivity, and other advanced infrastructure. It presupposes cheap the goal of future wars is already energy, as the cloud’s vast exhaust violates even established: control over the network and the most lax of environmental rules. While data the flows of information running through its in the cloud may seem placeless and architecture. It seems to me that the quest omnipresent, precisely for this reason, the for global totalitarian power is not behind infrastructure safeguarding its permanent us but is a true promise of the future. If the availability is monstrous in size and scope. network architecture culminates in one According to 2012 research by the New York global building then there must be one Times, the cloud uses about thirty billion watts power that controls it. The central political of electricity worldwide, roughly equivalent to question of our time is the nature of this thirty nuclear power plants’ worth of output. future power.10 About one quarter to one third of this energy is consumed by data centers in the United States. According to one expert, “a single data center A Renaissance of the State can take more power than a medium-size town.”7 The early internet, in the hearts and minds of its ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊA data center is a windowless, large, flat idealists, was something of an anarchic place. building. Its architecture is foreshadowed by the John Perry Barlow prefigured the “cyber-idealist” suburban big boxes of Walmart and the like. position in his manifesto, “A Declaration of the Unlike megamalls, the precise locations of data Independence of Cyberspace,” published in 1996. centers are secret. Companies don’t usually Barlow asserts that the network and its advertise where data centers are: not the public inhabitants are independent from the old- image of their operations, but their actual fashioned rules and regulations of territorial operations, depend on them.8 To users, the cloud states, who have “no sovereignty where we seems almost formless, or transparent – always gather”: available, ever-changing, hanging in the air, on n screens, in waves, appearing and disappearing, e Your legal concepts of property, expression, v “formless cyberspace” indeed. Yet at the core of a identity, movement, and context do not h a this informational ghost dance lies a rudimentary t apply to us. They are all based on matter, e M physical form – steel and concrete Ê and there is no matter here. ... Our 2 infrastructure. If the enormous, energy-slurping 1 identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we 0 2 data factories are the cloud’s true form, then r cannot obtain order by physical coercion. I I e b t these instances of the “space of flows” recall the r We believe that from ethics, enlightened o t a c P medieval castle, the treasure chest, and the self-interest, and the commonwealth, our o : d u military base. They recall the political and — governance will emerge. Our identities may o 8 l 3 C military conflicts that have dominated geography be distributed across many of your # e l 11 since recorded history. As the architect and h jurisdictions. t a f n r o writer Pier Vittorio Aureli states, u s o j e v Barlow’s manifesto declared cyberspace a socio- x i t u l p Any power, no matter how supreme, f political commons. A space seemingly beyond a - totalitarian, ubiquitous, high-tech, e C gravity, beyond the state – “a world that all may democratic, and evasive, at the end has to enter without privilege or prejudice”; “a world land on the actual ground of the city and where anyone, anywhere may express his or her leave traces that are difficult to efface. This beliefs.” Barlow’s ideas have somehow is why, unlike the web, the city as the actual resonated; indeed, Saskia Sassen mentions that space of our primary perception remains a “a distinct issue concerning the relation between very strategic site of action and the state and digital networks is the possibility counteraction. ... But in order to critically for the average citizen, firm, or organization frame the network, we would need to operating in the internet to escape or override 10.16.12 / 11:23:36 EDT most conventional jurisdictions.” Some of this of any jurisdiction.20 HavenCo joined the dotcom thought, according to Sassen, is “still rooted in boom with angel investment from Joi Ito (among the earlier emphasis of the internet as a others), who declared himself, still in 2002, “a decentralized space where no authority great fan of the concept.”21 Sealand’s fragile structures can be instituted.”12 Milton Mueller sense of half-tested nationhood would comments that cyber-libertarianism “... was theoretically raise the bar for any opposing never really born. It was more a prophetic vision jurisdiction to physically invade the offshore than an ideology or ‘ism’ with a political and 04/14 host. It would, indeed, demonstrate that cyber- institutional program. It is now clear, however, libertarian ideology could take full control of an that in considering the political alternatives and experimental country, and reform the internet in ideological dilemmas posed by the global its name. James Grimmelmann, a professor at internet we can’t really do without it ...”13 New York Law School, is skeptical about Sealand ÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊÊConfusingly and hilariously, one place where and HavenCo’s treatment of the law: the rhetoric of borderless information freedom is most pervasive is in the cloud. The world’s most HavenCo was selling the end of law. ‘Third- powerful information companies have inserted world regulation’ was a euphemism for some of the internet’s foundational optimism in minimal regulation – or none at all. In its their mission statements. These tech giants talk search for the lowest common about themselves as heartwarming charities. denominator, HavenCo was willing to divide Every billionaire CEO is his own private Dalai by zero.22 Lama. Pseudo-liberal jabberwocky of assumed universal validity permeates the junkspace of Grimmelmann also questions HavenCo’s mission statements, annual reports, and TED effectiveness, as “for most purposes, cheap talks, especially when it comes to the cloud.
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