#84: Cloudgaze
In her newsletter last week, Joanne McNeil recounted a recent experience of boarding a plane and catching an unobstructed glimpse of the cockpit. The sight evoked what she calls “cockpitpunk” (a la steampunk)—the "gearhead aesthetic of wires and gauges and complicated not-for-the-layman buttons" that we associate with planes, space shuttles, large hadron colliders, and so much science fiction from the ‘70s through the ‘90s. The Death Star is probably the most cockpitpunk object ever imagined. The day of McNeil's newsletter, coincidentally, I discussed a similar topic with my barber during a haircut—the difficulty of depicting today's technology in a visually dramatic way in movies ("like the spaceship in Alien”), now that we understand cutting-edge hardware as tiny, smooth, and invisible, wrapped in whites and soft grays, and emitting twee chimes and buzzes instead of more abrasive sounds. McNeil observes that we currently lack the "intentional embrace of the chaos of wires and buttons” that we used to have. Blame and thank Apple: The hassle of cords and switches is largely a thing of the past, dissolved into wireless signal and touch screens.
Now, instead of the cockpit's baroque mess of tangled wires and flashing lights, we have the cloud, a single world-spanning object that absorbs the disarray of an earth-sized computer and lets us forget about most of it. If the cloud's original, more precise definition was computing that happens somewhere else, rather than on your own device, that definition has now expanded to mean everything computers do that we don't have to think about, everything that happens behind the curtain. James Bridle writes, "The cloud is the central metaphor of the internet...It is something we experience all the time without really understanding what it is or how it works.” The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing; today we are hedgehogs who know the cloud. When cloud processes fail, interestingly, they fall out of the cloud, re-entering our purview as small cockpitpunk crises until we fix them and banish them back to the magical aether where they belong.
The cloud’s false simplicity is a conscious aesthetic decision, not a technological inevitability: The cockpit’s complexity still exists, it just doesn’t face the end user (and in the specialized cases when it does, we get something that looks more like a cockpit). By concealing all that intricacy behind glass and aluminum, we’ve created an elegant myth, like shoving a household mess into a closet before guests arrive. Bridle also writes, “The cloud is not weightless; it is not amorphous, or even invisible…it is a physical infrastructure consisting of phones lines, fibre optics, satellites, cables on the ocean floor, and vast warehouses filled with computers, which consume huge amounts of water and energy.” Not to mention human labor: the content moderators who scan Facebook for disturbing images; the food deliverers who are obscured behind app interfaces; or the miners who help build the very cloud that hides them by extracting the rare earth metals that make our phones work. A technological aesthetic like cockpitpunk, then, might inspire more than just visually exciting cinema; it could help us take the global computer we live within more seriously.
Reads:
Rob Horning on Airbnb's relationship with surveillance, community, and trust: "A platform isn’t matching people in hopes that they will cooperate or get along. They are matching people in hopes that both parties will become more dependent on the platform to mediate their encounters."
Kate Wagner on the inflexibility of contemporary houses, which are too frequently overbuilt for future uses that never materialize. Heavy doses of Stewart Brand's amazing How Buildings Learn as well as Christopher Alexander.
Garfield phones have been mysteriously washing up on France's shoreline for decades. The source, discovered last week, is a single shipping container full of the phones that has been lodged inside a sea cave since the '80s. "Behind the fun character of Garfield, there is plastic pollution that does not decompose in the ocean."