Manifold | Ecem Arslanay

The Cloud’s Lightness, The Cloud’s Ponderousness

This sound plays when you ascend to heaven.
—@DaFuqBoom, 2020

This makes me feel an emotion that doesn't exist.
—@joshdotjpeg04, 2019

This is what the word “Imagine” sounds like.
—@Nellers_, 2021

This sound makes me feel like everything is going to be okay
—@isaacjohnson1817, 2020

Why do I feel nostalgic for a sound that was made 10 years before I was even born
—@thorn9382, 2019

This what a fading memory sounds like. Beautiful, short lived before fading out. No other pieces of music make me feel this way but I cannot get over how this song feels so nostalgic, emotional and somewhat eerie all at once. Truly a masterpiece for the ages, almost 30 years old too.
A bit dramatic, sorry lol
—@Tangrowth_Fan, 2022

We got going with comments regarding the Windows 95 startup sound. I asked our beloved ChatGPT to carry out a discourse analysis of the 8,922 comments posted underneath the all too famous YouTube video, only to find out that was unable to. Being left with no other choice, I – relying on my organic, forgetful, messy, clumsy operating system – will gather the nerve to convey my smitten and imperfect impressions, offering nothing remotely like quantitative certainty. In the present instance, the impression I formed was that beyond signalling the launch of an operating system, this series of magical sound waves, extending over 6 seconds, resonated as though the harbinger of a brand-new era... Ironically produced for PCs with the help of a Macintosh device by Brian Eno, this atmospheric music is as deep as it is plain, as intricate as it is straightforward, and as turbulent as it is serene. With its hypnotising gamut of emotions, the sound of Windows 95, just as the desktop background against which it is placed, is volatile, pure, hopeful, and enchanted. A checkered window, hovering amid cumulus clouds, generally associated with fine weather, within a deep blue sky. A luminous portal, supplanting the darkness of MS-DOS, which required the user to possess knowledge of command line, and opening up into the limitless horizons of the future: mice obeying the slightest successions of clicks, pixelised games, cheerful icons, personal screens, messages popping up from the other end of the world, and new, exotic lands to “surf” through... As it tamed the computer, it also ushered the user towards all sorts of adventures. Its baby blue sky and emblematic timbre bespeak the exhilaration of an ingenuous belief in a freer, more creative, and accessible future. This formed the culmination of a mesmerising era, which began with Intel 4004, the central processing unit that first combined the processing, memory, and control functions on one single chip. While, prior to its existence, interacting with computers required writing complex codes and entering commands, the bewitching Graphical User Interface (GUI) introduced by Windows 95 transformed those prompts into a straightforward and easily comprehensible series of graphic icons and windows. That groundbreaking era, starting from which operations such as processing or saving data and communicating with hardware components were performed through swift, hocus-pocus-like actions, formed the very moment when the foundations of cloud computing were laid.

The cloud metaphor was first used by an IT company called General Magic in 1994. How could one not fall under the spell of that name: something like Hogwarts’ R&D and Innovation Coordination Department... Telescript, the software programming language that this company developed, relied on the interaction between virtual agents (small bits of software) and various service points, in order for the former to carry out their tasks. The company branded the environment in which these points operated, on a cluster composed of multiple servers, “the cloud”. Although this fellowship of visionary wizards – which put an end to its activities in 2002 after failing to achieve the sales achievements it had aimed for and terminated its virtual agents when it eventually vanished in 2004 – cloud computing as a term was given a new sheen by Google’s CEO in 2006. With its collecting and coalescing structural abilities, water vapour’s light, flexible, and flowing storage environment, in other words the atmospheric cloud, provided a remarkably convenient analogy for its digital counterpart. With regard to the digital cloud, seamlessly carrying data from device to device, allowing for simultaneous uses from every corner of the world, and constantly updating itself, the atmospheric cloud constituted a metaphor that proved both good and all the more so optimistic... Just as the digital era that saw its inception.

In the first phase of the digital transformation, which could be delineated as stretching from the early 1990s to the mid-2000s, some of the characteristics of the internet, otherwise referred to as Web 1.0, allowed it to constitute a utopian promise: that of providing a space of freedom that eluded the authority of governments and eliminated boundaries in the physical world (see A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, penned by John Perry Barlow in 1996), of granting equal access to information by knocking down censorship mechanisms, of instating an egalitarian and inclusive environment, outreaching social and biological limitations, and even challenging patriarchal hierarchies by generating a space where individuals could use technological tools to empower themselves (see A Cyberfeminist Manifesto for the 21st Century, published by VNS Matrix in 1991), and ultimately that of unrestrictedly fostering creativity, freedom of expression, and democratisation.

The cloud is more like Bismarck’s
unification of Germany, sweeping up
formerly distinct elements, bringing 
them under a central government.(1)

By enabling data to circulate unrestrictedly, without remaining tied to a physical centre, the very architecture of Web 1.0 incapacitated censorship mechanisms and enabled data to freely reach its destination through a set of nimble manoeuvres and alternative routes. However, this very decentralisation ideal was torn asunder by the storm unleashed by the emergence of social media platforms and Web 2.0, which encouraged users to create content in a participatory manner.This newly arising internet, which soon turned into a marketplace where user data was heavily commodified in the grip of giants such as Google, Amazon and Facebook, was a centralised structure. As was laid bare by the Cambridge Analytica scandal involving Facebook,(2) the web giants not only exploited user data for manipulative purposes, but also acted in the service of governments, which, once they realised how cyber freedom could generate anarchy, took to developing censorship laws and surveillance technologies. One early example of a step in this process was China’s implementation of the “Great Firewall”, a censorship and surveillance system which, while monitoring and filtering its citizens’ internet traffic, prevented them from accessing certain foreign websites. As for the documents disclosed in 2013 by Edward Snowden, a former systems analyst at the US National Security Agency (NSA), they revealed that with the help of programmes such as PRISM, the US government was not only spying on its own citizens, but on the entire world as well.Under the pretext of the security concerns triggered by the September 11 attacks, the Patriot Act, which formed the legal coat of arms bulwarking these mechanisms, bestowed global surveillance authority on the US government. This insidious version of imperialism operated under a cloak of invisibility, which itself was an innocent-looking heirloom bequeathed from Windows 95. To this day, the technological process of covering up complex technical infrastructures while improving the user experience serves dark forces...

And we are going through a cold age. Through ages
A halo of blackness upon our heads.(3)

The cloud – a data ecosystem typically stored in “underdeveloped” countries, abandoned industrial zones or windowless server farms in places that benefit from a natural cooling effect so as to reduce energy costs and harness tax benefits, on machines with endless energy and water supply needs, entirely accessible to the watchful eyes of corporations and governments – travels by fibre-optic cables laid on the ocean’s floor. While materially subterraneous, through a round of hocus-pocus trickery, it provides (or rather purports to provide) the lofty, seraphic care of those fluffy heaps that hover across the sky. In fact, the cloud might perhaps, more than anything else, be a metaphor for the act of isolating the user – from obscure and complex processes. Present-day users are entirely disassociated from the knowledge of the raw materials, labour, processing and logistical happenings that underpin everything from food to commodities, energy, and infrastructure. The backdrop of Apple’s minimalist aesthetics, i.e. the labour of workers pulling twelve-hour shifts in the huge factories, heavily clad in webs of security precautions, of its supplier Foxconn, the life struggle of children labourers working for a pittance in the cobalt mines of Congo, or the havoc wreaked on the ecological balance by the excavation of rare earths in China, perhaps forms a body of knowledge that some users might wish to be kept abstracted from. So, too, is the way animal food is being bloated up at an artificial speed, and slaughtered while at its most profitable moment; or, still, how such innocent-looking alternatives as almond milk or avocados actually deplete groundwater reserves, causing nature to wilt away at an alarming rate. This state of unawareness, which one could liken to eating the grape while not bothering to inquire into the vineyard, endures even when microplastics and pesticides are being blasted at the user’s own body. Does the heart stand what the eye fails to see? Now, in the critical, doomsday time we are currently in, adjusted as it is according to the vibrations of subatomic particles rather than tangible pulsations, such as the moments when flowers bloom and close up, the seasonal migrations of birds, and the cyclical flow of the Moon, the advanced optical device that we call the eye strives to remain apace with the endless flow of images drenching a space that is constantly being reshaped by algorithms, under the surveillance of satellites in the sky... Is it actually so shameful to seek if only a slight bit of respite, and choose not to see and not to know certain things within this endless turmoil? Is this surrender really that weak, naive, conformist, ignorant, tired, or helpless?

Infrastructure space is not only an infrastructure of pipes and wires for utilities or transportation networks but also a rule set for reproducing — almost 3D printing — the mega-cities, free zones, refugee migrations, suburbs, or highways that look the same anywhere on the globe.(4)

Infrastructure is the technology that determines whether we live or die. Your infrastructure will kill you—if it fails, you fail.
—Smári McCarthy

The Cloud of Unknowing, the anonymous text of medieval mystics, approaches knowledge with utmost scepticism: humans cannot comprehend God, for comprehension itself constitutes a boundary. Therefore, those who desire to attain God must first let go of themselves into a “cloud of unknowing”. This behaviour actually forms a sort of emancipation ritual; a disappearance that calms the mind, perhaps even numbs it. Yet scholasticism, the dominant intellectual movement in that period, considered the unknown in no way as a virtue, but rather as a deficiency that needed to be either gotten rid of or disciplined. According to that system of thought, knowledge forms a pre-arbitrated upon corpus, which the systematic interpretation of sacred texts grants access to. Questions may only serve to ratify answers that are already given. The following view, expressed in Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of the Rose, perfectly articulates that redundant cycle: “Now I realized that not infrequently books speak of books: it is as if they spoke among themselves”. Scholasticism’s approach to knowledge is predicated on the corroboration of what has long been stated by travelling across ancient texts, rather than generating new meanings. The pursuit of knowledge resembles the effort at filling a map whose borders are already set: rather that an empty spot on the map, the unknown is a flaw that ought to be straightened. In fact, this remedial approach exhibits striking parallel with the crave for regulation, based on experimentation and observation, that pervades the Enlightenment’s epistemology. Published in 1830, Edward Quin’s Historical Atlas portrays the dissemination of knowledge as a beam of light staving dark clouds off. In this context, light represents Eurocentric progress, whereas darkness embodies regions of the world characterised as “barbaric and uncivilised”. This view clearly exposes how the age of discovery not only consisted in an enlightenment process, but also in a form of domination that negated both the knowledge and experiences of local populations. Just as maps and categorisations were employed as tools in order to place territories and peoples under control during the early stages of colonialism, so the same craving for hegemony still endures in the digital era, furthered by the addition of tools such as algorithms, big data and cloud computing. Incidentally, the dark areas on Quin’s map exhibit a conspicuous correspondence with the geographical distribution of present-day data centres. Indeed, these facilities are typically set up in “underdeveloped” countries whence, while resorting to the ruthless consumption of natural resources, they configure the flow of information on the basis of “enlightened” countries’ benefit.

[…] the goal of future wars is already established: control over the network and the flows of information running through its architecture.(5)

Dominating something begins with the knowledge of that thing; as for knowledge, so long as you do not choose to get lost in the “cloud of unknowing” like medieval mystics did, it is enabled by its object’s measurement, weighing, and the delineation of its boundaries.  From the observation of the stars in ancient Mesopotamia to Aristotle’s effort at categorising nature and ultimately to the eagerness to discipline nature that marks the scientific method as it emerged in the 17th century, humankind has consistently searched for ways to make sense of “nature”, as something it equally admires and seeks to subjugate. One of the most subtle instantiations of this endeavour may be observed in the effort deployed to build a classification system pertaining to the cloud. When Luke Howard distinguished them according to categories such as stratus, cumulus and cirrus in the 19th century, these intangible celestial masses became strictly defined parts of a system. From that juncture on, they were no longer mere random shapes hovering about in the sky. On the contrary, clouds, whose names, boundaries, and even predictable behaviours had thus been identified, emerging as pictograms in the weather reports of the 20th century, assumed the same rudimentary curved forms we still use today. Or rather, they were reduced to these forms. However, that fate did not befall clouds alone. Do we not still reduce all sorts of celestial bodies whose size, instability and complexity exceed the limits of our perception, such as bolts of lightning or stars, to solid, rigid, measurable and therefore controllable objects as we squeeze them into elementary school template charts? 

In the current epoch, when everything can be reduced to data, objects that exceed the volume that human beings can record are being recorded, those that exceed their surveillance capacities are being observed, those outreaching their calculation capabilities are being calculated, and all of them can now be analysed and studied, and reproduced by artificial intelligence so as to form an aesthetic area, which is in fact already the case... If we were to start with the most popular figure, we should stress that Refik Anadol, who touches on artificial intelligence’s potential for imagination with tremendous technical mastery and elegance, despite his opening the door to an utterly unique ontological questioning, merely mesmerises the viewer with the surface’s dazzlement, condemning them to a passive spectacle, deprived of depth, and, in a way, advocates for submission to the “cloud of obscurity” of a superior intelligence. In this day and age, while we are constantly being manipulated by being reduced to data sets, we do not need new divinities, or dazzling “lava lamps” for that matter;(6) our lives are already under an exhaustive enough aesthetic siege as it is. On the contrary, what we need is for the passive spectator, rather than remaining an isolated end-user or a fatalistic mystic, to become truly emancipated spectators,(7) or even creative resisters.(8) An ironic and jocular response to that need consists in Legrand Jäger’s video titled Deep Digital Twin-Facial Yoga, showing a form of resistance practice that trains facial muscles to thwart emotional facial recognition devices. As for Al-Badri’s The Post-Truth Museum, it employs artificial intelligence and deepfake technologies to turn the directors of the Prussian Heritage Foundation, the Louvre, and the British Museum into “the penitents of imperialist plunder”.

A cloud is a promise, whereas rain is fulfilment.

In actual fact, the core of the matter does not lie in the flamboyance of technology so much as in the revolutionary willpower of creativity. Indeed, despite the static, linear structure inherent in Web 1.0, a net.art classic from the 90s may still endow the viewer with agency. My Boyfriend Came Back from the War, Olia Lialina’s elementary hypertext, calls them into a narrative where every click forms a decision that irreversibly affects the story. The viewer is compelled to think and create their own meaning, rather than being hypnotised, within a structure where information does not fit into a stable order, but rather acquires its signification through experience and interaction. Not unlike the intangible nature of clouds, the days when the digital era was still dawning were heavy with boundless hope as well as creative chaos. The clouds have been pulled from the sky to the ground, made small enough to fit in our pockets; however, the weight of control and surveillance has made them all the more ponderous. That being so, the future of the internet may still lie in clouds’ propensity to transform; for what we refer to as the “World Wide Web” must without fail be “woven” once again by those who have the capacity to dream. Perhaps a reminder as to the cloud metaphor is called for once again: forms, sometimes appearing as hopeful cumuli, hovering in a clear blue sky, sometimes as dark strati, foreboding an approaching storm, but in all cases evolving, transforming, and prone to spring into action...

Ecem Arslanay: Is it foolish to be hopeful regarding the future of the internet?

ChatGPT: It is not foolish to be hopeful regarding the future of the internet; on the contrary, that is the first step required in order for change to occur.

1. Metahaven, “Captives of the Cloud: Part I”, e-flux.
2. The Cambridge Analytica scandal, which broke out in April 2018, formed one of the most striking examples of this transformation. Cambridge Analytica, a London-based data analytics firm, was accused of utilising personal data collected from the accounts of 87 million Facebook users without their consent so as to influence the US presidential election in 2016, as well as the UK referendum on European Union (EU) membership, held the same year. This turmoil eventually exposed on a global scale how the internet’s libertarian and democratic potential is liable to manipulation. Moreover, in 2022, Meta Platforms Inc. agreed to pay $725 million in compensation so as to settle a class action lawsuit, filed in connection with this scandal, a milestone development that went down in history as tearing apart the internet’s promise of freedom.
3. Edip Cansever, Tragedyalar [Tragedies], Yapı Kredi Publishing.
4. Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space, 2014.
5. Boris Groys. “Form”, In Uncorporate Identity (Baden: Lars Müller, 2010), 263.
6. Likening Refik Anadol’s works to “lava lamps”, Jerry Saltz contends that although they may be visually mesmerising, they lack any depth. See Jerry Saltz, “MoMA’s Lava-Lamp Show at the Start of the A.I. Era,” in Vulture, 2023.
7. Jacques Rancière articulates his views on the spectator’s emancipation primarily in his work The Emancipated Spectator. In this book, he contends that in lieu of the traditional art spectator, passively trying to understand the works, the viewer ought to be a qualified subject, interpreting and reshaping art. In Rancière’s view, art is not limited to an aesthetic experience, but constitutes a political tool, allowing individuals to question social structures.
8. In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau sheds light on the creative resistance practices that individuals develop in their daily life in order to counter certain strategies. In this book, he contends that individuals develop tactics that stretch and transform the boundaries of existing structures in accordance with their own needs, against the strategic dispositions of ruling powers. Certeau’s concepts of “strategy” and “tactics” provide a fundamental framework for understanding how individuals and communities creatively resist in a daily life context.