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.

Extra, Extra: Major Tom to bore you with personal insights!

I have decided in foolish earnestness to try and post my own column of the modern malaise every other week or so, entitled "Ground Control with Major Tom". I will be posting personal articles based on transience and so forth. I have done this every now and again, but I would like to give it a more formalized process, hence the name. I will list it as a label for easy use. Look for one such post today.

That is all,



The author.

Transience

• Main Entry: ¹tran·sient
• Pronunciation: \-sh(ē-)ənt, -zē-ənt, -sē-; -zhənt, -jənt\
• Etymology: Latin transeunt-, transiens, present participle of transire to cross, pass by, from trans- + ire to go — more at issue
• Date: 1599

1 a : passing especially quickly into and out of existence : transitory <transient beauty> b : passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn <transient visitors>
2 : affecting something or producing results beyond itself

Stop Google Books: World literature is not just another dataset

The world is being digitized at a furious rate. Indeed, we are at an “inflection point,” Thompson says, after which the world will be fundamentally different. In the U.S., we have a long history of handing public resources over to private monopolists. Think railroads. Think mining. Think television. Think FCC spectrum auctions.

ZD Net

Is digital nomad living going mainstream?

Sell the house and the car. Put up all your possessions on eBay. Pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to some exotic location. The plan? "Telecommute" from wherever you happen to be. Earn an American salary, but pay Third-World prices for food and shelter.

The digital nomad, location-independent lifestyle once seemed so impossible, exotic and unlikely that only a few people dared even attempt it. But now, a lot more people are doing it, and it seems like everyone else would like to. Could it be? Is the digital nomad lifestyle about to go "mainstream"?

ComputerWorld

The brain...

Visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet( click on image to enlarge).
Synapse and neurons of the human brain.

Human Relations 1932

"These were the days when stocks were stopping dividends, when lives of thrift and industry were being wiped out by the foreclosing of mortgages and the closing of banks, when Japan was carving herself a large slice of China. Everywhere there was the spirit of 'Take what you can, and to hell with your neighbor.' Those who were strong seemed to be, in sheer wantonness, gouging the eyes of humanity."

William Mortensen