Ground Control with Major Tom: Technoreliants in the hands of a fickle god

I am not an alarmist, but the recent Google outage, and my personal experience with AT&T's poor service for the iPhone has got this Modular Man to thinking. Or, pondering what I preach, at least.

There have been several articles lately raising a skeptical eyebrow about the future of cloud computing, where you "do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question". I would like to take it to a more base level, and talk to the whole of cyberspace, or whatever we are calling it nowadays. We are at the whim of infrastructures not in our own hands. We don't truly own the land, we play in the space. When Google went down, my emails were gone to me. I have no backup of these threads back and forth (I guess I should start doing that...). The prophets of technology constantly cry for the future of the one omnipotent structure of data, making things faster and less cluttered, smaller and fashionable.
But what they fail to point out, just like with all other utopian ideals, is that the dream must rest upon some one, or something's shoulders, and inevitably, that someone or something is faulty.
It is true that in the days of yore, the connection of communication rested on the likes of the backs of the Pony Express. The horse could get shot out from under the rider, the letter may get waterlogged or burned by careless hands.

But is cyberspace anymore reliable?

It is very convenient, and I am reliant upon it, but I believe it would behoove us all to remember the ephemeral quality of the new age. It would take a house fire to destroy my whole library, but just the flick of a glitch to destroy my life in the cloud. My iPhone, my computer, they mean nothing in a digital black out. It is when we fail to realize these certainties that we take what we have for granted, and it is when we take things for granted that we lose sight of humanity in the cloud around us.