Abstract
Vincent Mosco’s book, To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, focuses on the social implications of the advancement of the internet and highlights a great communicative phenomenon: the cloud and its by-product, Big Data. Based on his observation that the cloud has made changes in international political economy, academia, and informational capital, Mosco observes growing “cloud-consciousness” and attention to the philosophical assumptions associated with the cloud. Mosco writes that the decision to send data into the cloud is “a choice that has implications that are economic (who pays for it?), political (who controls it?), social (how private is it?), environmental (what is its impact on the land and on energy use?), and cultural (what value does it embody?)” (p. 4).
Mosco tells the story of cloud computing beginning with the 1950s concept of computer utility, navigating through the 1990s in which the Internet realized its full potential on desktop computers, and finally arriving at present-day data centers around the world and familiar names such as Microsoft, Google, Apple, and Facebook. In the historical narrative, Mosco points to an important advantage of the cloud: it enables on-demand self-service information and global networking services. Mosco also addresses the historical debate on whether computer utilities should be regulated by the government.
Chapter Three examines assorted forms of worldwide cloud movement, including campaign advertising, blogs, corporate research, and lobbying. In this chapter, Mosco demonstrates how the promotion of cloud movements brings global players in business and government to expand the cloud itself.
Chapter Four, named “Dark Clouds,” reveals potential danger. The first concern Mosco points out is the environmental burden of the electrical demand of the cloud. Next are privacy and security, especially the present reality that cyber-attacks can become instruments of government policy. Also mentioned is the chain of resistance in the occupational world faced by the dynamic international division of labor within information-technology industries.
Chapter Five talks about cultural significance, which I think is the essence of this book. Mosco points out four elements of the cloud—its quantitative, correlative, atheoretical, and predictive qualities—that contribute to the perception that it is a “global superintelligence.” As a social scientist, Mosco inevitably shows concerns about the intellectual clash caused by Big Data. In general, he argues that Big Data enables quantification of the academy and ends “reliance on causality, theory, and history, the traditional bedrock of social scientific analysis” (p. 11). Also dangerous are the commercial goals of cloud companies and the oversimplifications of digital positivism.
Mosco ends his book with allusions to three literary works: Aristophanes’ The Clouds, the anonymous 14th-century tract The Cloud of Unknowing, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. This creative expression of his challenge to technological utopia well represents Mosco’s vision of the cloud beyond technology. This book will be valuable to social scientists and information technicians. Mosco provides a critical perspective that calls attention to the impact of state-of-the-art technology on the intellectual orientation of academia.