What's up with the cloud

What's up with the cloud

The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest x Varia, September 2023 (written for the Pocketpower! intervention)

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"The Cloud" is a marketing term that has become a commonplace way to refer to centrally managed computational infrastructure to which customers can subscribe. The Cloud is used to deliver services across a continuously growing number of industries, from financial markets and health institutions to game industries, mining, government and agriculture. Smartphones are essential accessories for computational infrastructures, because they provide uniquely addressable nodes for delivery on the one hand, and demand for continuous streams of data on the other.

The Cloud is made up of storage, networking and compute, which generates and hosts billions of services and devices, operating in diverse geopolitical and financial contexts. Massive amounts of computers are brought together, to then offer smaller and larger bits of computation-as-a-service through a specific financial model of "pay-for-what-you-consume". This financial model differs from the up-front server infrastructure and software licensing costs that you would typically pay on-premises in your data center: there is no more ownership, autonomy or product, just services. The move to software, infrastructure and networking-as-a-service has a dramatic effect on the spreadsheets of organisations and businesses as they shift their budget allocations for all computing and data services from the column "capital expenses" to "operational expenses". At first sight, this means they are able to reduce their fixed costs, and increase cash flow within their organisation. But eventually, it paves the way for them to sign up to decade long subscriptions which put them in debt, and spend potentially exponential amounts on computing. Now all expertise has been outsourced and their dependency on cloud services (including their extractive logics) has become permanent.

Much like financial or legal services, it would be difficult to identify an area of life which does not consume cloud services for designing, implementing, managing and circulating their products. It is run by Big Tech companies such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft that reap humongous profits which never return to the place of extraction. But more than that, The Cloud consolidates a software paradigm of continuously updated software-as-a-service, with scalable computational infrastructure which includes strategically placed large datacentres such as the one in Wieringemeer, that puts smartphones in everyone’s pockets, and normalizes a political economy of publicly traded Big Tech companies which increasingly count on the grabbing of land and on the extraction of energy, minerals, data and racialised labour (side note: Big Tech now also owns around 80% of renewable energy production). What becomes clear is that The Cloud is not just other people’s computers.

We have been busy articulating and contesting how The Cloud is changing the fabric of institutions, and depleting possibilities for organising collective life. In the process we made the move from thinking about The Cloud as an infrastructure, to thinking about it as a regime. By referring to The Cloud as a Regime, we shift away from the dominant narrative that Big Tech is the one and only elite decision making force, in order to bring attention to the role of various overlapping coalitions in the design/choreography/composition and implementation of cloud regimes and their interests, coalitions which besides Big Tech companies also include (public) institutions, city councils, consultancy firms, telecommunication companies and other governmental bodies. The cloud regime is not only capturing and enrolling the resources of public institutions and depleting communities' sensibilities, dependencies, political feelings and talents, but also rapidly remaking the norms of institutions such as health, finance, environment and their rules, ethics and structures through which communities organise by. In addition, the cloud regime is becoming increasingly essential in maintaining the conditions for life, and taking on much of the social reproduction previously performed by institutions for communities. This is why we described what was happening as "digital depletions" and why we call (with many other structural antagonists) for Cloud Regime Resistance and Counter Cloud Action.

We understand the cloud regime to be dependent on and proliferating racial capitalism and its social and environmental violences. Therefore, Cloud Regime Resistance needs to be about abolition. This means destroying (not just disinvesting in) the clouds tools and services, its imaginaries of endless growth, its racial capitalist, imperial and colonial logics which are based on always more pervasive, counting on more compute. Resisting The Cloud regime is about punching holes in the shiny image of 99,999999 uptime. We don't think its possible to reform the social structures or the politics of the cloud regime. Instead we see ourselves as part of a growing social movement which demands for a radical alternative of life affirming infrastructures. Following abolition practices, this deconstruction is in tandem with the construction and creation of communal social institutions that prevent harm and foster collective decision-making. Finding and offering alternatives (Free Software, Nextcloud, Fairphone, Greenhost) can be part of this work but often too easily continues the same imaginary, even if the business models and software licensing are different. Cloud abolition is a rejection of the rugged individualism instilled in us by white supremacy and late-stage capitalism, and an investment in communal support.

We take a lead from abolitionist studies which works towards resisting and abolishing the prison-industrial complex and all opressive infrastructures through identifying their key practices and looking to replace them. Our commitment is to support and invent organisational infrastructures that are working on the abolition of the cloud regime. We propose that we can learn from the from the politics and practices of abolition in the BIPOC Radical Tradition (W.E Bois, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Marianne Kaba, Saidiya Hartman, Robin Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson and others) which at its core, rejects the idea of stopping at reform, be it to slavery, prisons, or police and creating life affirming institutions. Abolition is presence not absence, it is figuring out how to make something with people, rather than figuring out how to erase something (Gilmore).