People are nowhere to be found

January 21, 2015 4:06 PM

'The Cloud' and Other Dangerous Metaphors. What’s notable about dominant data metaphors is that they consistently compare data to naturally occurring physical resources. And just as the history of resource exploitation in America—from westward expansion through the Gold Rush, and beyond into modern-day debates about water and air rights—involves the appropriation of resources that belonged to someone else, online data collection policy treats personal information as a natural, inexhaustible good—ripe for exploitation in the name of economic growth and private gain.
posted by Sebmojo (24 comments total)

And in all our talk about streams and exhaust and mines and clouds, one thing is striking: People are nowhere to be found. These metaphors overwhelmingly draw from the natural world and the processes we use to draw resources from it; because of this, they naturalize and depersonalize data and its collection

Cloud to Butt to the rescue!
posted by aubilenon at 4:42 PM on January 21, 2015 [12 favorites]

If the contagion experiment is like any other routine A/B test, then there is no foul.

Depending on the situation, data is either like a liquid (data streams), a solid (data mining), or a gas (the cloud).

I'm not surprised that one of these author's most recent preceding oeuvre was a piece on the World's Largest Ball of Twine. I'd hazard to say that the articles tech writers put together about the metaphors that tech industry marketers and "thought leaders" use are possibly more dangerous than the metaphors themselves could be.
posted by XMLicious at 4:53 PM on January 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

The real danger in the "cloud" metaphor is that, one day, you will be asked to explain The Cloud to your parents. It will be unpleasant.
posted by zachlipton at 5:03 PM on January 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

I double clicked so hard some of my solid data sublimed directly into a gas!
posted by parki at 5:03 PM on January 21, 2015

What is lacking is a good understanding of privacy. If we use the same term to talk about embarrassing photographs of celebrities, Intelligence service operations and ad-tracking on websites that term has lost all utility. We need a better understanding of the nexus of harm in these cases if we are going to be credible.
posted by Another Fine Product From The Nonsense Factory at 5:06 PM on January 21, 2015 [8 favorites]

Waaaaait a minute, this is stupider than I first thought. They explain that "the cloud" is the place where we store data (in fact, it includes other computational resources as well, not just storage), and then three sentences later say how it refers to the data itself.

They suggest some alternative metaphors , that a) don't address their actual complaint, and b) are stupid.

Data desalinization still doesn't have anything to do with people either, but also incorrectly implies that the 965‰ of the data would be potable if you could just get rid of the 35‰ that's not. A mountain of data certainly is a metaphor I have used, but the reason we call the cloud the cloud is because it's size and configuration is changing and don't matter.

It also seems insane to claim that people would suddenly get more ethics if they'd drop the "data mining" metaphor and just said "data analysis" instead.
posted by aubilenon at 5:11 PM on January 21, 2015 [6 favorites]

I always thought that "the cloud" was named for the idiomatic icon for the internet. Just like how databases are always cylinders, firewalls are brick walls, etc.
posted by rustcrumb at 5:15 PM on January 21, 2015 [7 favorites]

The real danger in the "cloud" metaphor is that, one day, you will be asked to explain The Cloud to your parents. It will be unpleasant.
posted by zachlipton at 1:03 AM on January 22

"It's where your hotmail lives, mother."
posted by dng at 5:23 PM on January 21, 2015

"It's where your hotmail lives, mother."

To a lot of people Hotmail lives on their personal computer.
posted by brundlefly at 5:28 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

"On my cloud, baby
The telephone is ringing"
posted by clavdivs at 5:31 PM on January 21, 2015

I believe Maciej Ceglowski did it better:

"These big collections of personal data are like radioactive waste. It's easy to generate, easy to store in the short term, incredibly toxic, and almost impossible to dispose of. Just when you think you've buried it forever, it comes leaching out somewhere unexpected." A talk by Maciej Ceglowski, founder of Pinboard, about why we have Big Data and why it's frightening.

Quote from the Metafilter post. Also repackaged by the Atlantic.
posted by Tobu at 5:38 PM on January 21, 2015 [17 favorites]

Siri, take a memo:
Advertising idea: Amazon should hire the Stones to perform "Get Into My Cloud".
posted by uosuaq at 5:53 PM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

To a lot of people Hotmail lives on their personal computer.

To some people (including people in powerful positions in business), they think their *Outlook* data lives solely on their computers.
posted by surazal at 5:54 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think the article started off on an interesting note, but it got a few different topics jumbled up together. As if it was edited by someone who doesn't know what they're talking about. For me as someone who works on the human side of this stuff, the discussion about how we are trying to use metaphors to wrap our heads around this new thing we made that's rapidly getting more complicated than what we can fathom is really interesting. Just repeating the words "big data", "Facebook","privacy", and "the cloud" along with that shrug emoticon like every other article is unbearably boring.
posted by bleep at 6:19 PM on January 21, 2015 [3 favorites]

Certificate in Malapropisms - Final Exam
Question 3 - Pick one answer (10 Marks)

The IT company "Dogberrysoft" advised the businessman to upload his data into:

(a) The clown
(b) The crowd
(c) The crown
(d) Connor MacLeod of the clan MacLeod
(e) The fog
(f) Myst
(g) His asshole
posted by the quidnunc kid at 8:44 PM on January 21, 2015 [5 favorites]

Any mention of the Cloud must include: HP Offers 'That Cloud Thing Everyone Is Talking About'.

Reporter: "So how much capacity will HP's Cloud users have access to?"
Engineer: "One thousand."

Kills me every time.
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 9:13 PM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Let's also not forget about the Ardent Mobile Cloud Platform (watch the video, it's great).
posted by aubilenon at 9:19 PM on January 21, 2015

Metaphors fail to capture the nuance of reality. News at 11.

On the other hand, it would be interesting to consider just how "The Cloud" fails to capture the reality (which the article doesn't really do) and consider whether there might be alternatives.

One problem I see with "The Cloud" is that "cloud" means something different to most people. "The Cloud" is really about the amorphous "location" of a particular bit of data, it's more like "a cloud of gnats" than "a cloud in the sky." I found it interesting that the article actually promotes this misconception with its imagery but doesn't appear to notice.

In terms of privacy in things like Facebook and email, both liquid and gas metaphors are clearly useful because data naturally goes from a highly ordered distribution (just one copy in one place) to a highly disordered distribution (copies in lots of places not local to each other). "Like pee in a pool" is the best analogy I've heard to describe trying to clean up distributed data. One difference is that "The Cloud" is sort of homeopathic -- there's no threshold for cleaning it up, one copy produces the same "imprint" as a million copies.

Somehow I think "homeopathic gnats" is unlikely to catch on as a metaphor, though.
posted by bjrubble at 10:23 PM on January 21, 2015 [2 favorites]

Regardless of the metaphor, the privacy problem is really that data is useful to the extent that it's accessible. Even if data is "private" the whole point of the cloud is that the work, and thus the data, exists in some sense "everywhere at once." There's a good way to make data private -- keep it on a single machine that's not connected to anything. Few people do that because that renders the data nearly useless.
posted by bjrubble at 10:35 PM on January 21, 2015 [1 favorite]

I'm not seeing this article as a failure. It got me thinking about why the metaphors matter. This is not a bad thing.
posted by Thistledown at 4:52 AM on January 22, 2015

"The real danger in the "cloud" metaphor is that, one day, you will be asked to explain The Cloud to your parents."

I just tell them to substitute "someone else's computer" for "cloud". It works pretty well.
posted by mrgoat at 6:43 AM on January 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

And in all our talk about streams and exhaust and mines and clouds, one thing is striking: People are nowhere to be found. These metaphors overwhelmingly draw from the natural world and the processes we use to draw resources from it; because of this, they naturalize and depersonalize data and its collection

I would have thought it's because people really are nowhere to be found in these data resources.

Number of people in my HD: 0.
Number in my Android phone: 0.
Number in my subscription backup plan storage center: 0.
Number of people inside the internet: 0.

I don't need a community-based metaphor for gasoline or copper ore, either.

Now, the servicing, design, construction, maintenance, and so forth are all pursuits that involve people, but to start off by suggesting that we're somehow dehumanizing data resources is silly.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:31 AM on January 22, 2015 [1 favorite]

rustcrumb: I always thought that "the cloud" was named for the idiomatic icon for the internet. Just like how databases are always cylinders, firewalls are brick walls, etc.

Database symbols aren't merely cylinders; that symbol represents an array of (naked) computer disks behind the glass in old-time computers, and by extension "a shit-ton of stored data that can be rapidly accessed". Kinda like the "Record" symbol isn't merely two circles inside a rectangle, but a cartoon depiction of a cassette tape.

/Old timer. Get off my RAM.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:36 AM on January 22, 2015

Upon reflection... the "cloud symbol" might just represent the puff of smoke* that comes up from your computer informing you that you're hosed unless you backed up your data to The Cloud.

* From the SEDs (Smoke-Emitting Diodes). They exist. I've seen them in action, several times.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:41 AM on January 22, 2015