The Clouds Are Grey

Abstract

The clouds are crowded and grey. They contain all the things no one deals with. Archived notes, vacation photos, spam emails, previous BIM iterations, scripts, and sketches: the stuff of life that is ignored or forgotten. They serve as a personal and collective dump, a graveyard of 1s and 0s. The cloud is the abstraction of the technical land. It operates on a geographic site and harnesses resources and energy. Its promise of dematerialization displaced the metabolism of all the processes somewhere else in the expanding virtual world. Most of the resulting generic grey windowless data centers are powered up on campuses that offer little to nothing in the physical space. Server farms are to the digital world what castles used to be: the seat of power. It is the greatest collective treasure of the virtual society, but one of the most selective and guarded physical infrastructures. Data is the most valuable commodity in the world and the most significant user of space.