User:Trashpuppy/Mapping
FIRST WEEK
This weeks PAD: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/The_dark_cloud__a_centre_for_data
Writing 1: Interconnection: the 13th Moon
Collective speculative writing exercise for which we have taken the offered services, semantics and imag(inari)es from the website of data centers NorthCand Interxion, as our point of departure. From this we have constructed a skeleton that we are both going to elaborate and refine separately but bringing them back in parallel connection! Diverting but never divorcing.
The method is inspired by reading "The twelth Moon" in Sepculative Facts, it's a collaborative story written on whatsapp by Sepake Angiama, Clare Butcher, Byron Kalomamas. The story speculating on the conservative election win in the UK at the end of 2019.
File:12thMoon reading.pdf
Research
The Big Hack (2019) - Karim Amer, Jehane Noujaim
Birgitte Kaiser: last year data surpassed oil in value.
Alice Sparkly Kitten: data has no value. Data is capital, that against which the value of things is measured. ... Data is dept
Interxion
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NorthC
Castle in the sky - Studio Gibli
As a short synopsis, the story revolves around the quest of a hidden and mythical treasure.
We are guided by a boy from a mining worker's village, girl taken away from the farm where she grew up, strange English looking men wearing black suits and small oval sunglasses, and a bunch of pirates lead by an authoritarian matriarch.
The girl has in her possession a powerful stone worked into a crystal by her ancestors.
All of the characters are linked through their common histories and desires to a floating land navigating the sky protected and invisible behind a thick cloud as a fortification. Some are driven by power and wealth, some by curiosity, and restitution of righteous history, and some are driven by magical forces coming from intuition and natural elements.
The cloud is a physical infrastructure, a city. Often depicted indeed, suspended in mid air.
Laputa, the highly technologically advanced city of the sky, as a metaphor for the cloud
penetrating the dark cloud thanks to the help of the pirates
Attack of the pirates, a metaphor for the hacking the cloud.
In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical Perspective - Hito Steyerl [1]
Self-hosted servers
Counter-point to the inaccessible pandora's black boxes of data centers.
Agiles - The history of the cloud: a journey through the last 60 years [2]
First cloud was amazon cloud, not apple.
"The development of microchips made computing considerably "cheaper" and smaller."
Moore's law (1965),"the observation that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production."[3]
the amount of circuits would double in regards to the size of a chip.
Really related to the weight of the files you want to transcode, process. Rules the laws of the industry
Interesting how this is talked about in the industry as a law of physics, while it's a predication a trend, a business model: we have to live up to this prediction. While you can question it. It's a given, a goal. So of course they are going to reach this goal. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Adele: a self-fulfilling prophecy "that becomes the definition of progress in a way. What do you define as progress? What do you want as progress?"
What is a transistor?
The evolution of the number of transistors, the amount of data you can process or store on a chip, over the years. The curve is so exponential. Right now we are arriving at this moment where we don't know where it's going, but its not that exponential. Probably things are going to cost more. We are at a point where its stabilizing. But maybe that's why it's gonna become expensive. A shortage of chips/ships and resources. We are now going to have to rely on the materiality of the hardware and efficiency of software. We're running out of resources but people are convinced we are not going to run out of resources because of colonizing the ocean and space.
Workshop Automation of care V2:
"Hardly any other achievement represents the rapid progress of the technologies underlying the cloud like the World Wide Web."
"In the mid-1990s, the term cloud computing was used for the first time with its current meaning in a business plan of the computer maker Compaq. However, it was the conceptual predecessor of the cloud that prevailed back then."
Compaq [4] There already is a visualization of the cloud in this document!
"The modern cloud was born in 2002 when Amazon founded a cloud computing platform to ensure the security and stability of its website. The possibility to rent unused storage and computing capacity was a side benefit." [5]
Digital realty: renting outage unused storage space sounds like the housing industry.
Kendal: squatting abandoned websites. The website and server, infrastructure is still there but what is happening there? Opening up the potential for re-appropriating.
"In 2005, OpenNebula was initiated."[6]
"With the foundation of Dropbox in 2007, the concept of storing files in the cloud emerged. New data centers popped up everywhere.
"Given the possibility to monitor the resources, the trust in the cloud grew."
"Containers are the most common virtualization technique in the microservice architecture."[7]
"...data gravity, edge computing and fog computing"[8]
"Machine learning in the cloud is becoming increasingly important, for example to predict user preferences. Google developed cloud Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) to accelerate machine learning workloads."
tensor processed unit (tpu): custom-designed machine learning [9]
"How to differenciate a CUP, an APU, a GPU, an IGPU and A TPU ?"[10]
"Moreover, the hardware in the data centers is becoming more heterogeneous. This is because graphic processors complement the traditionally used processors (i.e. CPUs) to speed up the execution of applications running on the cloud."
"In 2018, Microsoft started testing the world’s first subsea data center." [11]
"The history of the cloud is a success story"
"Moreover, IT experts from the provider take care of software updates and of the operation and maintenance of the data centers."
"The golden age of the cloud has only just begun.
On the symbolism of the cloud
Where does the image of the cloud come from? The cloud as a visual connoting progress and technological advancement could perhaps be traced back to the industrial revolution - power plants, steam engines, factory pipes : the domination over nature.
Martin: "But this is not the desirable or attractive connotation of the cloud now, we are partially moving towards a more organic imaginary of the cloud. The greenwashing of the cloud : working with nature."
Adele:"The next nature - virtual reality as part of nature. We are going to erase the consequences of these consequences."
Martin: "There's an irony that we envision data centers as in the sky, while they are on the ground or in the sea. Interesting that we see it, even before it has gone up, as something divine and heavenly."
Adele: "I wonder what the role for satellites is in this. Maybe it has something to do with relaying. I wonder how this works.Does it really travel through air and space?"
Sylvie: "Yeah I find this connection between the Cloud and heaven, just iconographically quite interesting."
Martin:"yes both are a gateway. ... Bad gateway: heaven"
Morning chat 7/1: The jamming highway
The highway is going to jam.
Adele: "There's 2 things: 1) We are running out of these resources with which our hardware are built 2) There is a higher demand in these resources things. this demand can be explained by the fact that people invent new tools that require bigger and stronger processors and more space. Very techno optimist. Utopian idea of connectivity that completely outruns the resources. People are trying to solve, reduce this demand by inventing new ways of compressing and more efficient or consuming ways to process and store data. Shortening code strings."
John Perry Barlow: Silicon Valley hippie - libertarian activist. Pioneer of the web. Defines the cyberspace as exempt from matter, emancipated from matter. Its a perfect space for freedom of speech. "Freedom of speech is permitted by the fact that in our world there is no matter".
Adele: "its the poet that brings the idea that its a cloud. Artist with images and metaphors that invent the way we envision something. ... The fact that it is free also gives the illusion that it is dematerialized."
Sylvie: "but is it really free?"
Adele:"its your data that's the money. if you do not accept the cookies you are sometimes not granted access"
Sylvie:That makes me think of this quote: Alice Sparkly Cat: "data does not have value ... it is debt"
I saw an interview of Guillaume Pitron, who wrote "The war on rare metals, the hidden part of energetic and digital transition"
I find his voice a bit French imperialist but he has accumulated a massive research.
instead of surveil and punish -> surveil and pollute
Guardian article by Ben Tarnoff: consumption of water by Nasa
The first link when I search "Ben tarnoff: consumption of water by Nasa" -> hahaha
The second link is the article:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2019/sep/17/tech-climate-change-luddites-data
Jeremy Rifkin: "This is the second industrial revolution is the revolution of the communication. And the 3rd industrial revolution of energy where everyone produces the energy of ever."
Interesting to see communication as an industry. This 3rd revolution combines the 1st and 2nd.
Adele: "with digital communication we are better at talking to our neighbors about buying the energy they produce"
Random unverified facts:
Adele: "It's interesting to see where and why they lay fiber optic cables. First reason to lay them is often economic speculation more than making the communication better. It is trade exchange, they want to be faster."
Adele: "they laid one under the arctic to make that happen. It's trading companies that started that."