“Generally speaking, I’m concerned with the continuation of autonomy of action”: A Cloud Culture interview with Ivan Sigal
Author: Jonathan Mundey
Ivan Sigal is Executive Director of Global Voices, an important and innovative news organisation in the blogosphere. Produced by a community of some 200 bloggers who aggregate and curate the best blogs or any product of citizen media from across the world, Global Voices emphasises voices that are generally not heard in the mainstream media, and in doing so aims to “amplify the global conversation online”. Catherine Fieschi, Director of Counterpoint, asked Ivan his views on Cloud Culture and the future of the internet. Aptly they corresponded by email, and this is the result.
Catherine Fieschi: While overall developments in cloud computing spell greater access to data and software, it is difficult to fall into uniform celebration of these developments since they raise a number of issues. Which issues, given the field you work in, do you think it raises most sharply?
Ivan Sigal: I agree that we shouldn’t discuss cloud computing uncritically. A couple of points in this regard:
1) Security and privacy in the cloud, as both a consumer and a citizen. When you no longer directly control your own data, it’s more vulnerable. As recent events in China show, even Google is vulnerable to security attacks. With cloud computing, to what degree are we trading convenience for autonomy, and who gets to decide where those tradeoffs sit? In general, I think it’s fair to say that the owners of different clouds tend to be the deciders, driven by market values if they are commercial organizations, and nudged, encouraged, or coerced by the legal and regulatory environments in which they are located.
2) In many places and contexts, the shape of the cloud, and the kinds of activities that can occur within it, are limited, censored, or monitored. The dominance of clouds as systems can also mean that control is set at the top. This is especially true in the context of repressive legal and political environments. To what degree is any given cloud a closed system, and what does it mean for networked media environments generally if a significant proportion of people engage online primarily through structured, restricted clouds?
A concrete example – we see a difference between a world in which most people online communicate and share on open, searchable blogs and content management systems, in which each person controls their data and sets their own levels of privacy and openness, and social network sites that have legal rights to user data, set limits on certain kinds of content, build social and cultural values into that that content, can change the nature of the network interface without user consultation, and, in some countries, are required to share data with government authorities.
The obvious contrast in the English-speaking world is between the relative user control built into a Wordpress blog, and the corporate control of Facebook (both kinds of clouds, but with different values). A more drastic comparison point would be the Russian social network sites vKontake.ru, and odnoklassniki.ru, which exist under an opaque legal regime and are widely considered to share their data with Russian security forces. [Ed: for the debate over online anonymity in Russia click here]
An extension of this concept – when the actions of users result in online attacks, the commercial nature of much cloud computing means that there’s an increased cost to allowing the inclusion of marginal actors. As a result, those under attack for freedom of expression issues may find themselves shut out – as with ISPs who refuse to host people and projects who are the target of repeated cyber-attacks (eg DDOS attacks).
3) On the rhetoric of cloud computing. We recognize that the concept is in part a marketing tool, and that to the extent it is adopted, profit will flow to those who own clouds. Server farms may indeed offer convenience and efficiency, but as with any product, there is an element of hype we should be aware of.
The promotion of cloud computing should be analyzed critically – a sentence such as:
“When computing becomes merely a utility we plug into, the focus for innovation will shift to the demand side”
seems to elide the question, to bring in an element of technological passivity for the user. It seems to imply that the user becomes, increasingly, a consumer of a product over which s/he has no control. That’s not the case with the internet at present – in which anyone with the skills and creativity can write code and innovate on the structural side.
CF: Our understanding of cloud computing rests in great part on a financial analysis of the media environment. Do you think this analysis actually captures the real value of what’s happening in the cloud?
IS:Financial analyses capture some aspects of cloud computing, but focusing on it as the primary vector ignores many other kinds of networked engagement, activities, events, that occur for civic, social, or leisure purposes, many of which exist without explicit financial transactions. This is especially important when we engage the question of culture, and consider the degree to which online culture is owned or shared, locked up in copywrite and intellectual property, or openly created, shared, and reused.
Perhaps it’s better to consider the issue in terms of different value sets, and to analyze the relationship between them. To what extent do commercial values support or hinder other values, and does the underlying code (structure) of different clouds, and the regulatory environments that support them, promote one value over another?
I still prefer the language of networks over clouds (is every project that shares data across many users, with that data consolidated in one “address” a cloud, including in the metaphorical sense) or are we speaking more narrowly about the technical requirements of data not housed on the individual’s computer?
The financial analysis seems, broadly, to favor institutional interests in cloud computing – those with the resources and capital to build and market server farms, those with ownership rights over content for sale. This is not to say that smaller users don’t have financial interests, but to ask to what extent non-commercial interests are represented in a financial analysis. The answer is usually either as an aggregate, or more simply, calculated as value as users (subscribers, customers, eyeballs), rather than as content (producers, participants, creators).
CF: What do you think is the likelihood of a variety of clouds emerging and what kinds of clouds are we likely to see (would you like to see)?
IS: We will clearly see clouds that are created and maintained by large corporations with capital for investment. We may also see state-owned clouds – is this the future of the Chinese internet, for instance? Another possibility is public interest and nonprofit clouds – libraries, community based nonprofit projects and collaborative efforts. We will also continue to see illegal, shadow clouds – botnets of computers controlled by proxy.
Generally speaking, I’m mainly concerned with the continuation of autonomy of action, and the ability of users to control the level of ownership they desire, in secure and private environments, for both civic and commercial uses. In the open internet, this means that there exists a base of people who also believe that, and write (create) the code and the content in such a way as to ensure it’s continuance. As with so many elements of the web’s development, we see a trade-off of convenience for autonomy. Web 2.0 tools and search are a vital part of how we engage the internet today. Choosing to use those tools enhances our ability to participate in everything online that falls within the purview of code, but it also diminishes our ability to know what might exist beyond that code.
