Charles Leadbeater on Cloud Culture: promise and danger
Author: Charles Leadbeater
Cloud computing promises a huge liberation of human creativity and communication; but can this precious space for our collaboration be kept open and free? Charles Leadbeater, leading thinker on creativity and innovation writes here about the issues he addresses in his new pamphlet published by Counterpoint on 8 February - Cloud Culture: the global future of cultural relations
The internet, our relationship with it, and our culture…
are about to undergo a change as profound and unsettling as the development of web 2.0 in the last decade, which made social media and search – Google and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter – mass, global phenomena. The rise of “cloud computing” will trigger a battle for control over a digital landscape that is only just coming into view. As Hillary Clinton’s announcement to release funding for the protection of the net – a day after Google’s announcement to stop self-censoring its service in China – indicates, the battle lines are already being drawn.
The internet we have grown up with is a decentralised network of separate computers, with their own software and data. Cloud computing may look like an extension of this network-centric logic but, in fact, it is quite different.
As cloud computing comes of age, our links to one another will be increasingly routed through a vast shared “cloud” of data and software. These clouds, supported by huge server farms all over the world, will allow us to access data from many devices, not just computers; to use programs only when we need them and to share expensive resources such as servers more efficiently. Instead of linking to one another through a dumb, decentralised network, we will all be linking to and through shared clouds.
Which raises the question: whose clouds will these be?
Cloud computing is bringing with it “cloud capitalism”. Companies will make money from organising these clouds for us. Apple already is, with its iTunes cloud of music and its cloud of thousands of third-party apps to run on the iPhone. Cloud computing will also bring a kind of cloud culture: increasingly, we will express ourselves through these clouds of films, videos, pictures, books, stories and music.
But cloud capitalism and cloud culture will not always be in harmony. The best way to understand the coming conflicts over the cloud is to look at the issues already being raised by some of the earliest applications. China, where Google is belatedly standing up for the principles of a cloud free from government interference, is the most immediate example.
But Google also has a more pragmatic, commercial motive. Gmail is a cloud service. Users do not store their messages on their own computers but in a remote cloud run by Google. (The Guardian newspaper recently junked its own, costly email service in favour of Google’s enterprise-level Gmail offering.) If Google cannot maintain the integrity of the Gmail cloud, it does not have a secure service to sell. There will be many battles of this kind in years to come where corporations, citizens and governments struggle for control of the cloud.
An equally significant battle involving Google’s influence over the cloud is being played out in a nondescript courtroom in New York, where the company has been defending its plans, devised with several university libraries, to create a cloud of more than 10m digital books. The question is: on what terms will Google make these available to readers and recompense their authors and publishers?
This shared cultural cloud will come at a price that is difficult to calculate. Google will acquire considerable power over the future of publishing and books – which books to include in the cloud and which not.
The French and German governments warned the court that the company’s plans would create an “uncontrolled, autocratic concentration of power in a single corporate entity” that would threaten a fundamental human right: the free flow of ideas through literature. Google’s peers are also opposed. The Open Book Alliance, which includes Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo, wants to create its own cloud of digitised books.
This dispute is a template for many others to come. Governments will also have their own views about these clouds, seeing in them threats to national culture (the French response); threats to security (the Chinese response) or threats to competition (the response of the US department of justice).
Thus, just as it is emerging, open cloud culture is threatened on all sides by vested interests of traditional media companies, hungry new monopolists and governments that are intent of reasserting control over the unruly web. The “netizen” beneficiaries of open cloud culture are far less well funded and organised than its opponents. That is why before cloud capitalism becomes entrenched, there should a clear statement of principles to defend the public, open cloud against the encroachments of both corporations and governments.
I propose five main points towards that manifesto, an Open Cloud Declaration:
• The first main threat to open cloud culture is homogeneity: we do not want a digital sky dominated by standardised clouds branded Google and Apple. The first principle should be variety: we need public clouds, such as the World Digital Library being created by a set of leading museums around the world and open, social clouds such as Wikipedia.
• The second threat to open cloud culture is corporate control. To counter that, we need new approaches to regulate these commercial clouds, to limit their power and to expose them to competition, ensuring people have a diversity of potential suppliers of cloud-based services. Personal information stored in clouds needs to be safe and clearly to belong to the person rather than the cloud. The emergence of cloud capitalism will need to be matched by new forms of media regulation.
• The third threat is the rearguard action being fought by industrial-era media companies to prevent clouds forming. At the heart of this is copyright. Cloud culture will breed creativity only if people can easily collaborate, share and create. New forms of licensing are required, building on open access and creative commons, which are designed to allow sharing but also to channel rewards to creative artists.
• The fourth threat comes from attempted government control of the cloud on grounds of state security, public decency or economic necessity. These threats do not just come from authoritarian regimes in the east, but also from western liberal democracies where governments lack the courage to stand up for the open web. To counter that we need to find ways to support online activists in authoritarian regimes with ways around firewalls and to connect them with potential supporters outside.
• The fifth, and most significant challenge to a truly open, public web is inequality. When people from the poorest countries arrive in the digital world, as many million will in this decade through the mobile web, they will find people in the rich countries a long way ahead. For cloud culture genuinely to promote global cultural relations, we should focus on: open source development of tools that develop capabilities outside the dominant regions; creating more initiatives like Wikipedia that are public, but diverse and global in reach; promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva which allow resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another.
The potential for a more cosmopolitan, open cloud, which can connect hundreds of millions of people all over the world in shared endeavours, will only be realised if we tackle these threats. We are entering a new, exciting and yet dangerous phase in the web’s development. Huge untold opportunities will exist for anyone connected to the web – and by the end of this decade that will be several billion people – to draw on shared culture resources and add to them through their own creative expression.
Yet if we are not vigilant, we will find our culture will belong to corporations and governments, rather than us. That is why we need an Open Cloud Declaration, a set of principles for a global campaign to keep open a large, public, diverse space for clouds in all possible shapes and sizes.
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But why Cloud Culture and why should the British Council care? The obvious answer to this is that Cloud Culture is our culture—so it’s our business. Although the metaphor of ‘the cloud’ is relatively new, for many that ‘cloud sensation’ started long before cloud computing; that sense of a loosening of the grip of hierarchy, of distance and of professional niches that came as citizen journalism emerged, as we downloaded our first albums, posted our first blogs, uploaded the first wobbly Youtube videos and effortlessly created new networks on Facebook and other social networking sites. The ‘letting go’, that joyful disconnection that – paradoxically – allowed us to connect so much more and so much faster has been a part of our lives for years now. Something is changing again and, as usual in this landscape, the change will be exponential, transformative. It has already begun: we take gmail and other cloud based email systems completely for granted for instance. While we still work with Outlook and the likes, the fact is that many organisations (The Guardian newspaper for instance) are perfectly comfortable with a rather intangible system whose servers are located nowhere near where they are based. As for the digitization and remote storage of archives and many other kinds of material, it is an ongoing process. Such profound change needs a pause. A think. Here is some space to do so and to think about the enormous potential this transformation carries with it..
This huge potential is why we really care. Both in terms of what we do (cultural relations), and in terms of who we are as an organisation.
The British Council works through culture to achieve better, richer and more creative relationships between the UK and the rest of the world. How then could we ignore the potential of the Cloud?
Culture is by definition collaborative: it is the intricate web of shared knowledge, conventions, institutions, languages, habits, rituals, quirks, jokes, that bind us together and help us to recognise one another. Access to more of that web, quicker access, cheaper access, voluntary, whenever-I-like access to all this from different parts of the globe is the best promise yet that we might ‘recognise eachother’.
Cloud Culture means, in Charlie’s words, that ‘We have the potential to make available more culture and ideas in more forms to more people than ever. A digitally enabled, cultural cornucopia. More people than ever will be able to connect through culture, sharing experiences and ideas. More people than ever will be able to contribute to this unfolding shared culture, through easy to use digital tools’. This translates into the possibility of new forms of collaboration, grass-roots mobilisation and multinational communities as well as richer relationships when we connect I regular space.
It’s not fatherhood and apple-pie; All of this contains its’ own risks and threats (many of which Charlie outlines and all of which warrant our mobilisation), but it is a promise on which we want to make good. Because it will transform – it is transforming – the way we relate to another and how we imagine that we can live together.
For us this is a huge challenge in terms of how we work and how we conceive of our work. The digitization of artefacts, the increased access to archives entails rethinking how we think and talk about ‘British culture’, how we interact with others, and who ‘the others’ are. This means a huge act of re-interpretation and most especially it means rethinking our networks and rethinking how we support them. Creatively and effectively but in ways that recognise their capacity for autonomy. In challenging places, in areas where there has been war, or where the political situation is difficult these transformations will lead us to re-examine the nature of our presence and the kind of support we can offer.
All large organisation are faced with internal transformations that challenge specialisms, traditions and hierarchies. We are an organisation whose bread and butter is cultural relations and relationships. Cloud Culture is the new frontier.
I’m trying to imagine what cultural relations might look like in/from Gaza in the Cloud Culture world. Well first we would need to have some kind of smart tools to overcome challenges of access; to overcome the minimal existing infrastructure. I’ve no idea how that works, perhaps there’s a way to link mobile phones with the net where you can’t access broadband.
Let’s say that’s sorted. How do we get beyond the “intense interactions among highly connected people in the developed world”? My starters for 10 for how a cultural relations organisation might respond – with:
1- maximum open access
2- fluid, continuously developing topics, debates and challenges
3- multiple language functionality
4- people-generated content
5- access to ‘repository’ content (ours plus global libraries etc)
6- multilateral not bilateral perspectives
7- reversed marketing – let people define themselves
8- being smart connectors of networks to networks
9- being smart guides to networks
10 – being repackagers
we should focus on: open source development of tools that will allow local solutions to emerge and develop capabilities outside the dominant regions; creating more initiatives like Wikipedia which are public, but diverse and global in reach; promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva which allow resources and skills in one place to be matched with need in another.
nice post Charles – very thought provoking. On the first point regarding homogenity, I think it’s also worthwhile thinking about interoperability (it’s top of my mind as I just finished a post on it).
I think we actually *do* need standardised clouds in the sense that they use standards which makes it easier to connect them together and move data between and off them when we choose – rather than tie a user to one providers cloud or another. I think that’s the point you’re making around open – though I’m conscious that the terms “standard” and “open” often get misused so thought i’d open it for discussion.
If there is a worthy test case to understand the power of open cloud computing, it is, ironically, climate. The recent cracks that have appeared in the climate chaos arguments appear, to a layman like me at least, to be the result of an inability or unwillingness to share information. The UEA, I think, have claimed that they can not release the data they use because it belongs to someone else. Whether people should ‘own’ data about the sun, wind and rain is surely moot. However, if cloud computing is a technical solution looking for a problem, it doesn’t come much bigger than testing the threat of climate change.
Thanks so much for this Charlie – making sure that plurality, diversity, equality are key to cloud computing is a timely challenge – much to think about.
Excellent post and 5 points in Cloud Declaration are spot on!
This appears to resonate, in part, with the tone of the response by the OW2 consortium to the EU commission on their 2020 strategy that proposes the concept of a European Union Common Cloud (EUCC), please see here:
http://ec.europa.eu/eu2020/
http://www.ow2.org/view/Events/EU2020StrategyConsultation
You might find it interesting to follow the OW2 president’s activity (@jplaisne) in this area, the 2020 FLOSS roadmap being one example:
http://www.2020flossroadmap.org/
Finally, the RIN has been sponsoring research into the concept of archives, libraries and public access under the auspices of the British Library which might interest Catherine Fieschi, above:
http://www.rin.ac.uk
I hope the links provide useful material for you and inspire further posts & commentary on this subject.
A similar analogy from which we might draw some solutions??
Water rights in the American West have been the cause of wars and disputes for more than a century. Rivers and streams, springs and reservoirs are carefully allocated according to very strict laws. There is even a Water Court for such disputes. Now the fight has moved to the Cloud.
Cloud Seeding is a technique used by Ski Resorts to encourage water in clouds to convert to snow. Sounds cool doesn’t it? Unless you live east of the Rockies, let’s say in Kansas, and are counting on that rain for your crops.
Who owns the clouds over Colorado? Colorado, of course! And who owns the Clouds over Kansas? Kansas, of course. But the question is not who owns the clouds but who owns the rain residing in the clouds (and didn’t that moisture get picked up over California any way?).
Historically, the rain’s ownership was determined by where it flowed once it fell. Once it landed, carefully distributed water rights determined how much could be harvested along a river’s route to the ocean.
But technology affords us the ability to somewhat “harvest” rain at-will via a Cloud Seeding app of sorts. The problem is that once harvested in Colorado, there may not be enough left for Kansas. Hmm… maybe it’s California’s fault anyway, right?
Reading this I couldn’t help think I’d read a lot of these arguments about commercial control and states limiting access before, although now juxtaposed with an argument for regulation which can influence the actions of both states and multinational corporations.
Then watching the Saints win the Super Bowl it came to me…
- The 1999: Voices from the Open Source Revolution; 10 years ago 29% of the web ran on Linux based servers, this was a year after SCO had tried to flex its commercial muscle to limit the adoption of Linux and their open source / Unix counterparts.
- Thinking back further, ‘The Tanenbaum-Torvalds Debate’ now 17 years ago, which among the many issues included the tension between ‘free’ software and commercial control.
- Back further still, Richard Stallman and the GNU project in 1984 put the case that source code should be free. If it were not, Stallman reasoned, a very few, very powerful people would dominate computing.
It is likely we will revisit these arguments with every evolution of digital capabilities, but it helps little to arrive at them as if we haven’t been round this block a few times before. The way individuals have faced this challenge in the past may influence the way it is negotiated in the future.
However, as we go round the block of authorship, commercial vs. free, open vs. restricted access a few more times some things won’t change. First amongst them, Humans Huddle. Coordination games will impact how individuals interact. The key question will be what individuals coordinate around and how this impacts on the ability to experience numerous and diverse forms of creativity. In short how do people behave? These interactions and their impact on cultural relations seem to have had limited attention so far.
- How will this large-scale interaction happen if communities are coordinating around different spaces and places? The opening with references to Facebook and Twitter highlight the problem in the pre-release material, these platforms have particular geographic reference points.
- Facebook’s demographic is heavily skewed toward certain countries – recent analysis of dominant social networks by country demonstrates the range of platforms which are being adopted. Equally, anecdotal evidence from Russia shows inhabitants of St. Petersburg & Moscow tend to used different social network sites.
- Mass interactions over culture sound great, huge networks of liberated human creativity are certainly the things from which big ideas are made. However, the key to understanding both the previous and forthcoming struggles over the direction of online development is something more humble. The interactions between individuals and communities will impact this development and the subsequent influence on cultural relations.
- In the Cloud Culture material thus far, it is an irony that the nature of the interactions, the identification of key nodes and the focus on behaviour has received such little attention in a report about cultural relations. Particularly as the report is published on the same day as one of the best open source network mapping programmes releases a new version…
- A final quirk is that the report is in part about authorship and the threat of large organisations controlling data and clouds – the first response by Catherine Fieschi refers to ‘our networks’. After reading about the threat posed by large companies owning clouds, it seems strange an organisation with an annual turnover well in excess of £600 million claims possession over ‘our networks’ … what makes them your networks rather than the networks with which you engage?
For my money, thus far, Charles’ writing on the release of Halo 2 was better.
Are you related to Charles Webster Leadbeater, a disciple of Madame Blavatsky’s?
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