Page 109 - Carbon Capitalism and Communication Confronting Climate Crisis

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also creating major environmental, privacy and labour challenges. The
change is so massive and the upheaval so sudden that it is forcing leaders to
quickly rethink the models that have described our dominant system of
communication, prompting even some technology executives to consider
the concept of an information utility. As one CEO puts it, “In the not too
distant future, cloud computing will become a ‘dispersed utility’ and we
will come to regard it in much the same way that we view our other core
utilities such as gas, water and electricity” (Bridgwater 2016).
The brilliance of the original Internet was figuring out how to get a
decentralized, distributed world of servers to talk to one another and
thereby connect users through simple, universal software standards. This
began to change with the growth of cloud computing, symbolized best by
the enormous data centres that have sprung up, seemingly overnight, all
over the world. The cloud is a system for storing, processing, and dis-
tributing data, applications, and software using remote computers that
provide information technology (IT) services on demand for a fee. Familiar
examples include Google’s Gmail, Apple’s iCloud and Microsoft Office,
which increasingly distributes its widely-used word processing and business
software through the cloud for a monthly fee.
The cloud enables businesses, government agencies and individuals to
move their data from onsite IT departments and personal computers to
large data centres located all over the world. What is saved in storage space
also opens a rapidly growing business for companies that profit from
storage fees, from services provided online and from the sale of customer
data to firms interested in marketing products and services. Government
surveillance authorities like the National Security Agency (NSA) and
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) also work closely with cloud companies,
particularly Amazon, to meet their security and intelligence needs (Kunkel
2014). The diverse collection of servers providing the foundation for the
original Internet has evolved into a centralized, global system of data
centres, each containing tens or hundreds of thousands of linked servers,
connected to the world through telecommunications systems, and oper-
ated primarily by private corporations and government military and
surveillance agencies. The leading science journal Nature made very clear
the practical difference between the original Internet and one based in the
cloud when it called on the US government to establish a “Cloud
Commons”, one version of an information utility, for biological research,
especially in genomics. It did so because research on large data sets is far
easier and faster to carry out in the cloud than through servers based in