By Tung-Hui Hu
We may perhaps think the electronic cloud as placeless, mute, airy, and unmediated. but the truth of the cloud is embodied in millions of huge info facilities, anybody of that may use as a lot electrical energy as a midsized city. Even some of these info facilities are just one small a part of the cloud. at the back of that cloud-shaped icon on our displays is an entire universe of applied sciences and cultural norms, all operating to maintain us from noticing their life. during this e-book, Tung-Hui Hu examines the space among the genuine and the digital in our knowing of the cloud.
Hu exhibits that the cloud grew out of such older networks as railroad tracks, sewer strains, and tv circuits. He describes key moments within the prehistory of the cloud, from the sport “Spacewar” as exemplar of time-sharing pcs to chilly conflict bunkers that have been later reused as information facilities. Countering the preferred notion of a brand new “cloudlike” political strength that's dispersed and immaterial, Hu argues that the cloud grafts electronic applied sciences onto older methods of exerting strength over a inhabitants. yet simply because we make investments the cloud with cultural fantasies approximately safety and participation, we fail to acknowledge its militarized origins and beliefs. relocating among the materiality of the know-how itself and its cultural rhetoric, Hu’s account deals a collection of latest instruments for rethinking the modern electronic setting.
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5). These earlier moments of reconfiguring the network structure hold uncanny parallels to modern-day digital networks. ) to compete with AT&T by renting CATV circuits; a “‘quasi-laser’ broadcasting system . . [that] transmits up to 15 miles,” a technology pioneered by MCI that will anticipate fiber-optic cable; the US Defense Department satellites, along with Soviet and the commercial Comsat networks. Youngblood’s union of heterogeneous networks is eerily similar to the union of satellite, land, and radio networks that was dubbed, five years later, the Internet.
It may appear odd to begin a book about digital networks by following the transcontinental rights of way granted in the 1860s by the Pacific Railway Acts. 5 billion fiberoptic cable across the Arctic will shave between twenty and sixty milliseconds off the route from Tokyo to London for stock market traders, but the toxic metals used in their electronics inevitably end back up in the bodies of laborers manning poorly regulated disassembly plants in China. 5 Their bodies are absent from the picture, just as the Chinese bodies of railroad workers are absent from nineteenth-century railroad photographs.
Begin with space, power, and the combination we call history. Then the cloud will follow. 1 THE SHAPE OF THE NETWORK The Graft Here is how you tear up railroad track. “The jaw of a giant loader plucked up railroad ties in its teeth. A wheelbarrow-like contraption sucked up bolts and spikes, and spit them out. ”1 Stripped for metal during World War II, railroads are now stripped for tax reasons. Gradually, thousands of miles of track have been abandoned since peaking at 254,000 miles in 1916;2 the pace has only sped up since deregulation in 1980.
