Katharina Brunner

Big Data

The illusion of the Cloud

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  • „[The] “cloud” is a massive interconnected physical infrastructure which exists across the world.“
  • By using cloud services from Amazon, Google, Microsoft one can outsource one’s own infrastructure setup with all it’s challenges
  • now: Infrastructure-as-a-Service
  • super-cheap hosting with a price that depends on usage and is scalable
  • „The actual infrastructure at the heart of AWS’ infrastructure-as-a-service isn’t the thing that makes it important to developers; it’s the services and APIs built on top of that infrastructure.“ (Ingrid Burrington)

Links:

Zuboff und das Zeitalter des Überwachungskapitalismus

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Shoshanna Zuboff beobachtet und interpretiert die Digitalisierung seit 40 Jahren. Die Professorin an der Harvard Business School hat ein Buch geschrieben, das der Guardian in eine Reihe mit Adam Smith, Karl Marx, Max Weber, Karl Polanyi und Thomas Piketty stellt. Es heißt The Age of Surveillance Capital und es sollte bald in meinem Buchregal stehen, wie ich finde.

Ein Auszug aus einem Interview mit dem Guardian:

In my early fieldwork in the computerising offices and factories of the late 1970s and 80s, I discovered the duality of information technology: its capacity to automate but also to “informate”, which I use to mean to translate things, processes, behaviours, and so forth into information. This duality set information technology apart from earlier generations of technology: information technology produces new knowledge territories by virtue of its informating capability, always turning the world into information. The result is that these new knowledge territories become the subject of political conflict. The first conflict is over the distribution of knowledge: “Who knows?” The second is about authority: “Who decides who knows?” The third is about power: “Who decides who decides who knows?”

(…)

Surveillance capitalists were the first movers in this new world. They declared their right to know, to decide who knows, and to decide who decides. In this way they have come to dominate what I call “the division of learning in society”, which is now the central organising principle of the 21st-century social order, just as the division of labour was the key organising principle of society in the industrial age.

Shoshanna Zuboff