The Metaphor of the Cloud
“The metaphor of the cloud is a specific network metaphor: one that blurs the nodes, relations, topology and protocols of the network. The cloud metaphor invokes associations with innocence, and the weather, but most of all with weightlessness and immateriality - attributes already present in the metaphor of softness in software. The cloud is ‘soft’ raised to the square, without the suffix of -ware in software: softer than soft. Not software as a thing (the classic business model for software production), not software as language (the open source principle) but software as a service, stripped of its thingness and thing-based control. At issue is where this control is located and how it is metaphorized. Clouds have been heralded as much more controllable than classic client-server models: a flexible, scalable and efficient mode of computing, saving users and system managers from tedious installing and patching labour on local PCs. They also have been criticized as undermining user control of data, programs and operating systems (Stallman 2010), as the return of Digital Rights Management, the end of peer-to-peer file sharing and the end of open source (Stalder et. al. 2010). It will be argued that clouds are transmaterial constructions (Whitelaw 2008): material configurations of hardware and software posing as immaterial disembodied cloud, non-transparency posing as transparent and user-friendly, control posing as freedom. Cloud computing is thus a matter of network control, not only protocological control (Galloway 2004) but also a networked politics of soft control, that has been dubbed noopolitics (Terranova 2007; Ronfeldt and Arguilla 2007).” Marianne van den Boomen
