{"id":7253,"date":"2011-01-17T15:13:32","date_gmt":"2011-01-17T19:13:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=7253"},"modified":"2011-01-17T17:42:20","modified_gmt":"2011-01-17T21:42:20","slug":"qotd-the-impermanence-of-the-cloud","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2011\/01\/17\/qotd-the-impermanence-of-the-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The impermanence of “The Cloud”"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

We adopt many web services because they\u2019re convenient (and free!), but it\u2019s only after becoming dependent on those services that we recognize why<\/em> they were provided for free in the first place: after all, it\u2019s only by eliminating the inconvenience of paying users that startups can snag attention and secure the freedom to alter, downgrade, or cancel their services at will. By then, of course, we\u2019re trapped in an unstable relationship, and our only means of recourse is to wail as loudly as possible, \u201cYou broke my heart!\u201d<\/p>\n

The big lesson that should have come out of the Tumbleocalypse was that we trust too easily. Did any of us listen? Nah. Instead, we\u2019re signing our friends up to Dropbox to score 250 megs of bonus storage space and sending our most important documents to \u201cthe cloud.\u201d We trust Dropbox because we trust others who use Dropbox: web designers, tech writers and professionals who, we believe, would never<\/em> gamble with an unproven, flaky, or suspect service. Without this kind of trust-by-proxy, free web services couldn\u2019t survive at all. Can you imagine anybody in their right mind signing up for a Facebook account today without a good friend by the sidelines whispering, \u201cDon\u2019t mind all that privacy whaffle. I know<\/em> these guys mean well.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cloud storage is convenient, of course — ask anybody who\u2019s experienced the horrors of manually synching PC to iPhone — but we downplay the risks involved in outsourcing control of the data we own. We so badly want to live in the future that we\u2019ve lost the ability to question what living in the future might actually mean<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

Those who believe that \u201cthe cloud\u201d can act as a storage platform for our collective memories believe that everything that was available to us yesterday will be just as available to us tomorrow. Where exactly does this conviction come from?<\/p>\n

The web is like any other sprawling city, and maybe worse: it\u2019s so damn rickety it\u2019s a minor miracle it hasn\u2019t collapsed entirely. When you link, you do so trusting that the data to which you direct your readers won\u2019t just up and disappear into the virtual ether. Except that, inevitably, it will — the short history of the web has established that much. We live somewhere, we leave, it becomes forgotten, and then we come back years later to find our old haunts brutally 404\u2019d.<\/p>\n

Connor O\u2019Brien, “Link Rot”, The Bygone Bureau<\/em><\/a>, 2011-01-17<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We adopt many web services because they\u2019re convenient (and free!), but it\u2019s only after becoming dependent on those services that we recognize why they were provided for free in the first place: after all, it\u2019s only by eliminating the inconvenience of paying users that startups can snag attention and secure the freedom to alter, downgrade, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,15],"tags":[86,58,154,139],"class_list":["post-7253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-technology","tag-criticism","tag-internet","tag-privacy","tag-psychology"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-1SZ","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7253"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7257,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7253\/revisions\/7257"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}