I keep coming back to Jason Scott’s post “Fuck the Cloud” in my head. (Yes, there are other things bouncing around up there, but I’ve already explained I’m on a roll here.)
I understand his point and his frustration. But right on cue, a service turned up in my feed reader that offers to back-up your digital service content. Let me be clear however: their implementation, as I understand it, is awful. As in, don’t use it. You pay them, give them your credentials and they back-up your stuff to Amazon S3. Thanks, but no.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t this notion of the cloud or the problem of having your data on servers you don’t pay for. I know it’s silly, but extrapolate Jason’s issue out — even though I pay for hosting for madeofglass, I don’t maintain the server. I don’t rent the space. I don’t own the wires or silicon and I have no control over the electricity that connects you to this server. At some point, the control breaks down.
And of course you keep copies of items you post to these services. That’s common sense.
What has really turned his argument on his head, for me, is the ah-ha moment where I realized that most (all?) of these services are about conversations.
I am a packrat. And I backup furiously. And, for a long time, I saved every IM convo I had with Rachael. Loggers and histories and records, I saved so much. And one day I woke up and realized that there was zero reason to spend time on this.
Most everything Internet-related revolves around conversation — the notion of comments, chats, emails, sharing media, blogs, facebook/myspace — it’s all about conversations. And, in reality, conversations are impermanent things. They are fleeting and don’t need to be backed up.
Who cares where this stuff is?*
Sidenote: This is all a very literal interpretation of his complaints; waxy linked a more basic retort the other day, though the argument there is more about renting/owning, which is good and logical when we are talking about other people’s media. But Jason was originally talking about his own (or, self-made works, even if they weren’t his explicitly).
Two elements that do overlap are these: “Free things don’t generate strong feelings of ownership.” and “As more items are invented and manufactured – while the total number of hours in a day to enjoy them remains fixed – we spend less and less time per item.” The former is extremely true and represents my own personal shift in media the last 10 years — from buying DVDs to subscribing to Netflix to streaming from Hulu. The second item is far more important in this context.
As more and more items become available to us and as we improve personalization systems, it will be easier and easier to only be exposed to things we like. I used to think this was a huge problem and, to some extent, I still do. There is something to be said for spending time with things you don’t like (see: my moving to LA); this notion is best argued for when combined with social media viewing (see: talking about Lost over the water cooler).
Part of this whole stream of thought has been about how to move writing and media past these filters and find a way to make the very notion of reading/writing more interesting.
* Fair to say that I do care. But I think I care less about where the data lives and more that the very act of creating a dialogue on facebook is tedious for me. I haven’t found the sweet spot for myself yet. But I don’t need a personal copy of all my facebook activity.
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