CLOUD PUNK

THE DIGITAL FIFTH WAVE

Herlander Elias

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Author: Herlander Elias


Translation & Proof Reading: Herlander Elias & Ondina Pires

Cover Design: Herlander Elias

In This Future...

In this omnipresent Future everything has changed. For instance, there are half a dozen brands mastering the digital realm, and the separation between online [1] and offline [2] faded away. Everything is media, [3] digital, and therefore, digital media, [4] we just call it digital. But in fact, is it the “cloud” [5]. And, who or what is controlling it? What is noticeable is that a small conglomerate of hardware, [6] software, [7] and communication companies is currently controlling the “cloud”. Some people rise against this reality. However, in the present time we are so immersed in the Web Age that we cannot escape away from it nor remain unaware of it. After all, it is the chronological time of total information and the mighty control that it exerts on every domain of the human beings’ lives. From a pragmatic point of view, we’re nothing more but mere users and authorized consumers.

It is designated as GAFA the group of enterprises that it is lead by Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Once they were known as search engines, emotional computing [8] and social media, [9] or online bookshops, respectively, but now the GAFA group is a databank, storage service, consumerism club and media ecosystem, and financial-ludic center. This Cloud Age has formatted the consumerism, it has regulated gaming; it has centralized the access to information and got entertainment reinvented. The inexistent public was invented. It’s no longer about playing, sharing data, accessing news or editing files. It’s also no longer more about creating friend networks or professional or institutional profiles. Nowadays, the control in our lives exerted by who has both technological and economic power is defining what we should know or what we may know, and it almost won the battle for privacy. The gear is entirely on the side of private or federal institutions! Each and every data is retrieved from computers and other “smart things”. There is no private space left. This is a moment of a common and obligatory future. And in this future the machines seem to be winning. Products are already purchased by ourselves even if we are not aware of it. Brands and clouds are everywhere weaving bridges and connections.

What Orwell did not anticipate was that in this future the dictatorship of the “novelty or the new” has the consent of the present-day masses of the digital. We came to a point in which all the cloud’s information fits in one “singularity”, meaning in the palm of our hand − the entire network, the whole cloud, all the world-culture stands within our reach. And what does the common mortal amidst this financial-ludic dictatorship? He seems having fun, avoiding too much thinking because it causes suffering. We can add that it does not make sense anymore to be anti-system. Cyberpunks, [10] prone to the access to truth, knowledge and technologies, are a class facing extinction. Have they lost the war when it comes to information’s free right of flowing? Then, why is it that each and every data of ours lead to a “datification” whose master stands just on the other side?

It is in this scope of ideas that the cloud punk [11] comes to existence. The cloud has weaved a constellation of services on an optimal state for further access and consumption. Out of the ashes of the 80s and 90s of last century new heroes came up, characters simultaneously stylized and informed, proficient and revolutionary, that do not change the system from the outside, but rather from the inside. Elected as promethean characters, such new capeless and swordless heroes are experts when it comes to search, retrieve, manage and activate information, even in its raw state, of data.

As it all points out, the cloud is a remake of what once was a free and freedom-based Internet, when everything was basic, slow, interesting and rare. Today, the “futurists” are the ones dictating the trends of the cloud and they claim more data from people, using it as one’s heart’s content. The public of the cloud only stands accessing, sharing, consuming and playing. Somehow, in a sort of reaction against the masses stupefaction, cloud punks want more knowledge, more "world", and they deal with current corporations and creative hubs, as well as the forbidden areas of the web. Whether it is in the tall and ecological buildings, with their refined neons, or in the hallucinogenic night, cloud punks come up with a new signature: total access to the cloud, or to its entire information even in off-line mode. The new warrior of the obligatory future is an aesthete-soldier and a cyber-soldier dressed according to the fashion trends. Yet, he works with the cloud in a punk manner.

The cloud punks believe that information has to flow, and they also believe that there are singularities, people, events and unique media, more relevant than any other register. For example, the masses keen on the digital record quantities of yottabytes [12] of things that are irrelevant or that are stripped of emotional-symbolic value. Because once there were epochs in which the access to knowledge was outlawed (cloud punks know that!), as well as free access to the web, which they also acknowledge, hence we start witnessing a charge from the socially conscious cloud punks when it comes to disclose information and knowledge denied to the masses of the digital.

On Singularity

Author Kevin Kelly explains that “singularity” is a new regime in which, “our creations makes us better humans, but also one where we can’t live without what we’ve made. If we have been living in rigid ice, this is liquid— a new phase state” (2016, LOC 4314-5810). Following the same trend as Zygmunt Bauman, Kelly refers “liquidity” as being a new state where everything flows and rigidness becomes problematic. The updating and the innovating procedures towards the public began to be an obligatory stopping point. It just happens, as well, that the entire paraphernalia of technology is only making sense because we need to be wired. There is a reinterpretation of the bourgeois horror towards emptiness. It’s like driving a car in the United States; the Radio is always turned on. What the trends are indicating is that the ideal perspective relies on a comfortable access to the cloud and to technologies. Is there anyone capable of returning to the chaotic pre-digital media world? What Gibson labels as “the Non-Mediated World”? (in Neale, 2000). Within this new reality of ours, getting back to the world preceding the cloud and the singularity would be extremely painful and baroque.

As for Kelly there are two versions of “singularity”. One basic version stands as the human invention of AI (Artificial Intelligence); the second “hard” version has nothing to do with the super-intelligence in itself but rather with the ability of an AI generating far more superior AIs. Until now, this is the point that stands for us as a sort of “ultimate invention”, in which a computer AI or a hybrid one would have the capability of surpassing everything and everyone (2016, LOC 4305-5810). This is where the cloud punks come in, for they are believers that unleashing information is all about rendering the access to knowledge in a more liberal way, empowering people and machines, the crowd and the cloud. Thus, with a post-human attitude, the cloud punks log on to the web to further democratize and trigger stress tests. They are not terrorists; they just fight against the media-fomented ignorance. As it has been said so far, on behalf of intelligence, information and knowledge, cloud punks are fighting against the darkening and manipulation of data lead by digital media, and unlike hackers [13] and Wiki rebels [14] of other times, they do not need to physically work as a team. Welcome to the Cloud Age. In these days of eternal futuristic “presentness” a single individual has the same power as a corporation, a legion or a country. And every time one communicates with a cloud, one is establishing communication with the world. Born to be wired? [15]

Kevin Kelly advances that

“In 2014 alone more than $ 2 billion was invested in 322 companies with AI-like technology. Facebook, Google, and their Chinese equivalents, TenCent and Baidu, have recruited researchers to join their in-house [16] AI research teams. Yahoo!, Intel, Dropbox, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Twitter have all purchased AI companies since 2014” (2016, LOC 475-5810).

There are some people who assume the AI is still a monster to be afraid of; however, when it comes to global corporations the cybernetic intelligence represents profit, creativity, anticipation, futurism and control. By following a certain prediction of Futurism, the major corporate global players are already aware that enabled digital-voices with synthetic personalities will be the new next search engines. Though, one notices that there is a lack of cloud supervised by human presence every time people need to find out something on the web through a link. Cloud punks know that it is possible to get a cloud-enabled social change [17].

If massification dominated the 20th century, then the 21st century will be dominated by datification. And it all connects back to AI. Kelly lets us know that “Part of the AI breakthrough lies in the incredible avalanche of collected data about our world” (2016, LOC 584-5810). The larger is the access to data, the bigger are control and power. Let’s imagine a world with a smart cloud, in which the more we learn from it, the more it learns from us. Let’s picture a world in which the cloud punks learn this procedure and foment useful and revolutionary artificial intelligences. What happens afterwards? Once the cloud is explained, it helps us to understand the problem:

“The union of a zillion streams of information intermingling, flowing into each other, is what we call the cloud. Software flows from the cloud to you as a stream of upgrades. The cloud is where your stream of texts goes before they arrive on your friend’s screen. The cloud is where the parade of movies under your account rests until you call for them. The cloud is the reservoir that songs escape from. The cloud is the seat where the intelligence of Siri sits, even as she speaks to you. The cloud is the new organizing metaphor for computers. The foundational units of this third digital regime, then, are flows, tags, and clouds” (Kelly, 2016, LOC 968-5810).

It is precisely this Third Regime that matters to explain better, since it is under this regime that everything is played out: the hunt for the rare book, the search for the lost document, the right news to declassify, among other aspects. In practice, the cloud punks are claiming back the cloud’s public space that was rendered private. The access to singularity, to information and knowledge adapted to ourselves means a revolution in the history of mankind. As a matter of fact, for such neo-mankind, cities, information, the knowledge and the cloud, are patrimony of all publics and all generations. As for enterprises this access is a financial asset, an interface of services.

We are missing the link to the “full book”. What the cloud punks are looking for is this complete book, the huge archive turned available. For them, each and every media product, among which books stand too, just makes sense if they log on the “major connection”. It has been a while since some authors spoke of the ur-text,[18] this founding text, the first and relevant one. With today’s “expanded texts” and with the way we access to the cloud nothing seems to have ever been disconnected once, not even from the past. The cloud punks are archivists and users, and surprisingly they face the past as those who have a glimpse of the future.

It is a fact that new texts are scattered all around the cloud. Visionary Kevin Kelly tells us that “eBooks [19] today lack the ‘fungibility’ of the ‘urtext’ of screening: Wikipedia” (2016, LOC 1361-5810). And, actually, the true “connected book” is Wikipedia. Besides, more than being a global book it is about being an international encyclopedia. But before the cloud, the Internet was mostly like this: people would share things with people. There were web sites and web pages on a massive scale entirely available.

From the moment that digital media brands took control of their hardware and software investments, the erstwhile network died. We have before ourselves a wireless network of brands, a strategic layout of platform brands. The information torrent is so much overwhelming that the new interface is time. Sometimes we rewind, while other times we move forward across the data that the platform brands allow us to use, yet in a pay per use fashion.

One of today’s cloud features is this format that allows us to“scroll back” (Kelly, 2016, LOC 3621-5810) or “scroll forward”, like our entire undeletable digital past, or our volatile present (Rushkoff, 2013), would be no more than a prototype of a future we cannot contemplate anymore. It is no longer perceptible. The cloud has become a torrent of data laid out in a multiplex form, and it reorganizes itself as a data organism according to our will and intent. “Searches” in search engines are something belonging to the past. It is information now that is assigned to find us. Users and consumers are configuring a universe of choices. From then on, the cloud researches with AI; it manages, selects and activates for us whatever fits our requirements best. Authors such as David Gelernter (2013) did know that the cloud would become more like a time-based Internet, a futuristic flow-archive. In practical terms, the cloud became a “history-medium”, [20] and inside the cloud more sub-media will keep showing itself.

Corporations and Patterns

The cloud punks are the protagonists getting the best information amidst this invisible connections labyrinth. And this trend, in fact, has begun a long time ago. Sherry Turkle is concerned with how the cloud has redefined the behavior of young people through smartphones, tablets and wearables [21]. In less than two decades the public of the digital has totally changed. Corporations are establishing communication with us by means of semiotic patterns and are dominating almost entirely the cloud’s history-medium. The danger, as alerted by Turkle, is that we start to think of ourselves as being a “One” individual-based tribe, faithful to our party alone (2015, 4). Because cloud punks stand simultaneously isolated as they are connected to the cloud-world at the same time, they get to be the new information managers. They are the future tribe that is “already here”. They master both technologies and academic knowledge, decoding marketing [22] campaigns and they know how to read the street culture’s signs. They represent the “nomad” that was capable to penetrate the “war machine”, the superior being of the information landscape.

As for Kelly, over the last 30 years the social economy relying on this kind of technology had its ups and downs, and saw its heroes arriving and vanishing, yet it is quite clear that there were massive scale trends mastering the course of things(2016, LOC 55-5810). If there is one thing that in the last years became more obvious it is the way the cloud positioned itself as a history-medium in the hands of corporations. Consistent with William Gibson, Phillip K. Dick and Bruce Sterling’s science fiction vision, corporations stand present as brands, civilizational reports, and they act like small countries or Asian-like rising city-states without parallel. The patterns that the cloud punks are detecting and decoding are something clear in both digital information and entertainment. Though what concerns them is the transmedial knowledge crossing the cloud in a pay per use [23] model. This model has obliterated completely the “free world” Internet, and what remains of it is the streamlined cloud, endowed with clean design, [24] in which one may know everything as long as one pays to have access granted to a certain service brand.

The cloud punks have peculiar characteristics. Just as Mason mentions, regarding his vision of the new characters, what is happening with the cloud punks is that these heroes also act and live in a networked way, whether it is at work, or in leisure periods; from relations to culture(2015, Part II, Chapter 5). If Kelly alerts us to the inevitable emerging patterns (2016, LOC 59-5810) just as William Gibson or Henry Jenkins, the underlying reason is attached to the fact that cloud punks contemporaneity is the moment when the dominating corporations communicate by viral patterns and transmedial signs with the masses. Nothing appears in the cloud by chance.

The major enterprises "digesting" datification are merely taking advantage of the “over-informed society” (Lampreia, s.d., 108) in today’s “scientific present time” (Rushkoff, 2013). There is a framework of non-articulated information constellation, followed by a cloud-enabled social change through information that the cloud punk manages to find. AI permits that a person may be found by signs and narratives for which there is receptivity. In other terms, over time, our data are disclosing data about the things we look for and enjoy most; once our intentions are known an agglomerate of intelligent devices provide a forward of narratives for ourselves (films, games, news and knowledge); once this is resolved, the public stands sensitive to transmedia signs for easy, immediate, mental, visual and audio assimilation, even if it happens unconsciously.

The Total-Memory

While cloud systems outline an artificial memory, the cloud punks wander wirelessly across the network, and in this place everything stands at the distance of a thought; each and every narrative and “datified” element is a contribution to a ARS combinatoria, [25] a total-memory to which everyone is logging on to find people, information, brands, knowledge and entertainment, or merely the blending of all these elements.

These days it is through the cloud that all things are learned; it is no longer called computer, Internet, or media, but only-so and just as cloud. This artificial memory integrates people, platforms, companies and technical devices. It is all wired up. The cloud became the environment across which we learn and teach; perform science, art and journalism; where we stand in private and publicly. This time of ours is both a post-computer and a post-web as well. Ariane Van de Ven believes, regarding education, that the educational system will be replaced by different services: “Education will be replaced by life-longing learning services (…) People will be expected to update their knowledge regularly and to contribute to the global brain” (in De Waele, 2013, LOC 181-2059). In fact, what happens in the cloud stage is that everyone is learning from everyone, much as it happened in the first Era of the Internet all users learned with each other thanks to what they were publishing online. Now, the major difference by comparison to the first stage of the network lies in how each person stands as a brand personality, each user has his/her own service, his/her own start-up [26]. Everyone is selling his/her storytelling, his/her narrative. Furthermore, this has repercussions as the whole cloud seems more like a private college, a smart telephone company operator predicting and guessing what our universe of choices implies.

Similarly to the air force jet pilots from the pre-drones stage cloud punks are plugging into the history-medium that is the cloud, while they concentrate on the cloud and perform a disconnection in order to be able to decode the codes of this network. In the sample of interviewees that psychologist Sherry Turkle dealt with, it is identified a “cockpiting” behavior every time someone would log on to social media and zone-out [28] from the real world. Surprisingly, the “cyber” aspect of cyberpunks have always addressed the “pilot” behavior; whether it would be about videogame playing, listening to music on a Sony Walkman or the Apple iPod, or working out hacks. The cloud punks are the new pilots. And it is foremostly since social media came up and The Matrix movie that the cloud punks work in drone cockpit mode, zoning-out from reality, interacting with many screens by means of touching and clicking, or with AIs and voice interfaces, speaking to digital devices and their cloud-based cybernetic assistants. In the study conducted by Turkle, young social media users are not willing to speak to anyone. The smartphone triggers the resort to AIs that speak with people, supporting searches and refining researches. According to Turkle the astonishing part comes when one notices that the users have become network “pilots”, isolated with their digital devices, regardless of their age or generation(2015, 29).

In the Era of total-memory that the cloud provides, the easy-to-access universe of data becomes frightening. The data torrent is immeasurable; only machines may quantify this machine-space. For Kevin Kelly there is still this recollection about the time when the computer was plugged into the telephone, and when the access to infinite information was super-seductive. In our phase, the cloud was empowered to an overwhelming level. We are told by the author that

“There was an emerging universe on the other side of the phone jack, and it was huge, almost infinite. There were online bulletin boards, experimental teleconferences, and this place called the internet. The portal through the phone line opened up something both vast and at the same time human scaled. It felt organic and fabulous. It connected people and machines in a personal way. I could feel my life jumping up to another level” (2016, LOC 47-5810).

Today, the problem is that the portal the Internet used to be in the past changed. It became a portal configured by corporations much as science fiction had predicted. The fact of the cloud being an artificial memory that surrounds the datified planet brings some a new situation, by way of illustration, owning things, objects and records are not compatible with the extreme technological sophistication we are living, since everything is in the cloud, in the memory of the mega-archive, in the macro-history-medium where all personal and corporate narratives are crossing each other. Turkle refers the “end of forgetting”(2015, 337) and Google’s officials mention the “indelible archive”.

Changes

Gibson’s well known argument states: “The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed” (in Kelly, 2016, LOC 3124-5810). Once again, it matters to underline that cloud punks are rising up against the inequality of access to information and knowledge. For them, the cloud is both the stage in which there are countless problems, but also the opportunities to connect to the entire history-medium as civilizational and evolutionary jump-start. The Internet killed the computer much as the cloud killed the Internet. What is going on right now is completely new. The designations of “generation” and of “media” are incapable of explaining what is happening, given that today all things are media, and that each and every generation is logging on the cloud; which is considered to be “the medium of all generations”. It got changed the fact of ourselves accessing paper-sheet based medium, and then we are using a time-flows based medium.

The cloud is a medium that we tune relying on speed, where information is connected and shared by moments, Eras and generations. We are no longer in the Era of the innocent Archive. We are beginning to tune with the history-medium. The “when” became more important than it is the “where”. Speed and dematerialization forced the cloud to absorb everything like a Facebook timeline or a chain of Twitter hashtags. Currently it matters more to connect to the torrent than to save something in our own device. On the other hand, cloud punks would rather prefer the singularity, the total access to the flow-point, the cloud at their fingertips, since that the idea of the “Future” depicted in science fiction shows that “the medium is dominating the message”. So is there still a chance to have access granted to everything without having information compromised? The real change takes place when the cloud punks are fully aware that, whether it is due to search engines, AIs, or devices, in the end it is possible to “be” in the cloud and use datification in our advantage, on behalf of a better comprehension of reality.

Who speaks of unveiling the roots of digital change, so that one may embrace these very roots, is Kevin Kelly (2016, LOC 98-5810). Perhaps the problem lies in one concept of digital culture imported from biology: “interactivity”. Just in one epoch, like our current one, in which the cloud is basically a double-synchronization macro-service, it is due to interactivity that people answer back to us, in any service, interface, program, game, app or digital brand. Should there be no interactivity and especially “hypertext”, and nothing would be as connected as it is today. Once the wires vanished away, the connections stood still, always operating changes even when it seems that nothing is going on between the cloud, the interfaces and our devices.

Two types of interactivity are described by Marie-Laure Ryan, without which, in our understanding, there would be no transmedia and expansive storytelling [28]. In Ryan’s there are “selective” interactivity (where text interpretation fits in) and “productive” interactivity (which deals with our active participation in the construction of the text). As for now, the interactivity that embraces us is the selective one. It starts to be scarce entertainment, information elements not demanding active participation from ourselves in order to provide a feedback of sense. From design to videogames, Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) to cognition, everything requires response, effects, research, all features coming from “knowledge”. From Ryan we assimilate the “selective interactivity” criteria ([orig. 2001], in Evans, 2011, 95). The reality of the cloud that changed young people’s behavior and promotes themselves as cloud punks relies on the user’s contribution to fulfill the sense. The question lies in one knowing if anything makes sense today, even if it got to be datified.

Young Cloud Punks

It was Sherry Turkle who highlighted that young people were interacting with the Internet, in the 1990s, thanks to the “triumph of anarchic exploration”. They were asking fewer questions and interacting more; dealing with the digital was intuitive. The “Facebook Generation” changed the scheme; it interacts less intuitively, interactivity is more selective and, yet, the final interactions are quite multiple when compared to the questions asked. The cloud punks are different: interaction is constant and instantaneous, as indispensable as having electricity at home, and the amount of questions asked have increased. More than resorting to search engines, the cloud punks talk and deal with AIs. They are learning in a selective and productive manner with machines and vice-versa. What drives them is knowledge, not money, because data is the new capital. This is one of the reasons why the cloud punks are the new heroes of the Datification Age. Time and knowledge converge into search capital systems. First there was digitization and later searchability. In this way one finds all the time something designed to be found. Without the digitization process no information would be found nor would it be datified. We still need to know who or what finds what or whom. The cloud finds everything, and it finds us, but assures it seems otherwise — that we are the ones finding something through the cloud.

Commercial editor, Suzanne Bidlake, explains that adults deal with the digital by means of logic, experience and persistence, and equally by trial and error. Though it is young men that have a totally different approach, as it is intuitive, explanations come afterwards(2011, para.5). We may add that the anarchic exploration mentioned by Turkle is still dominating. Cloud punks have been raised with this world, with the “cloudification” of the digital that altered every habit regarding information, entertainment and knowledge access. The cloud punks also do not understand that there is both an ancient digital and a new one. Moreover, for them age differences or generation differences do not matter, for we all stand now at the same time in the cloud. This is the cloud of all generations, but this is the generation of the cloud getting ready for a cloud-enabled social change. Young cloud punks already began dealing with AIs much as previous generation interacted with social media, search engines and web [29] pages.

The common denominator distinguishing the cloud punks, besides their skills in dealing with datification, is how they use the cloud, not as a “fourth power” (something typical mass media and mass society-style), but instead as a battle for information and knowledge. Manuel Castells had already alerted us that the media were not the fourth power, but rather a battle for power(in. Silva, 2009, 138). When it comes to cloud punks the search-capital used and the access to the history-medium, that is the cloud, is transforming all digital activity in a chase around knowledge.

In The New Digital Age, Jared Cohen underlines that “the future will be shaped by how States, citizens, companies and institutions handle their new responsibilities” (2013). And the cloud punks are precisely aware of how to manage these new responsibilities. Following the same trend we do accept what Kelly says regarding the way such responsibilities do not only vanish, but they are increasingly important in the Cloud Age: “These technologies are not going away” (2016, LOC 105-5810). It seems that to speak of technologies (let’s say digital media ones) is same thing to speak of responsibilities, or of a battle for power, in Castells (1999a) sense, or about selective interactivity in Ryans’ manner. According to Cohen’s perspective, in the future no one, stronger or weaker, shall be insulated from what, in the majority of cases, is entitled as “historical changes”. And the truth is that the cloud has produced several historical changes, for it modified the way we entertain ourselves, the way we consume, learn and how we get to be informed, and even how we drive cars from the “car-cloud”. We still do not know who exactly shall be more important and mighty in reality, if it will be the individual, the State or the corporations. One thing is sure, the cloud punks are experiencing the future; they live ahead of their time, at their own time, capital-time. Cohen believes that being “savvy” will be one of the greatest and most important attributes for the future. And for which reason should one be expeditious in the Cloud Age? Because the whole data environment demands sintony, synchrony and agility to deal with the environment, which itself keeps requiring constant updates. Kelly himself even manages to refer this environment as a simple “memory”, that it is too! In his words:

“An interactive, extended memory of people you met, conversations you had, places you visited, and events you participated in. This memory would be searchable, retrievable, and shareable. A complete passive archive of everything that you have ever produced, wrote, or said. Deep comparative analysis of your activities could assist your productivity and creativity. A way of organizing, shaping and ‘reading’ your own life” (2016, LOC 3647-5810).

The reason why it all stands in the digital makes easier both the search and the “searchable”. The inexistence of something outside the cloud cannot stop being equally scary. The archive of totality, such “history-medium” is what Kelly identifies as the scope where devices assist us (we have in mind AI) about contents of our personal and professional life, where seriousness and creativity come together.

Somehow, cloud punks are the “new wave” of disruption that Nicholas Carr (2008, 40) speaks of. These two elements, the new wave of people and the punk disruption are detectable on cloud punks. Each logging into the corporate grid, into the branded network and into both interesting and interested cloud, is something recorded, marked, connected, sought and findable. By playing with these features cloud punks wittingly leave by on the cloud indelible and controversial messages. After all, the new wave thinks differently about the new mediatized and smart digital world. There were stages of publishing and searching over the history of the cloud. The current stage is a stage of time, history, narrative and capital search. The question, as Kelly remarks, is no longer focused on copies, but rather on the originality of the messages uploaded onto the cloud. More than the connection, the value now is on the media that can connect into more media. The more people may have access, comment and connect to something, authenticate and integrate the “major transmedia talk”, the more the cloud gets smarter. As for now, the environment is in itself considered to be smart. Kelly knows this and stands out that the most important thing is “to have work flowing” (2016, LOC 1100-5810). Regarding the entire “history-medium” in which the cloud has rendered itself, Lanier says that technology becomes a little intimidating when another party manages and appropriates itself of our “externalized memories” (2013, Part VII, Chapter XXVIII); the cloud is a memory, an artificial one that started with the first early web, and whose inspiration dates back to the setting up of books and cities, meaning information and urbanity. These are the cloud punks’ key-stones. Information and urban space, cloud links in Wi-Fi, are supporting the new digital life style. If it exists, it surely is in the cloud. In that case, how was it like to live before the cloud?

Cloud, City and Control

Cities have been altered by the “auto-mobile”, as erstwhile they were changed by the steam engine; they were also a target for modifications thanks to the usage of “mobile phones”, much as they were before with the Sony Walkman and the Apple iPod. What brings in closer the previously entitled “cyberspace” into the city is that the polis [30] inspired the virtual space during the 1980s and the 1990s. And secondly, the two first things to come up attached to the computer, besides videogames and control, were money through the ATMS of cash and the trading, much as the electronic music. By the time wireless connections appear there is already a full digital spectrum of “acoustic cyberspace” (Erik Davis in Elias, 2008) in cities, with layers of information well before there was Adobe Photoshop with image editing in layers, and wireless links with several layers of logins. Music and Wi-Fi changed cities, by occupying non visual space. William Gibson sustains the argument that the Walkman altered the way we regard the cities (2012, 13). The same thing happened with the cloud that changed urbanity and the information access by demanding constant connections, wearables datification and the empowerment of brands that today manage our information in the cloud.

Another relevant point regards how people transformed their cloud-enabled devices into self-reflexive devices. It reached a degree in which the whole cloud is pervaded by Selfies’ images and other self-control formats. In the old days, “cycling” through our apps was a manner of zoning-out. The person would flee from reality by swiping his/her own applications on the cell phone as it happened with casual games and Augmented Reality (AR). Yet, nothing came as close as music in terms of granting an easier flee-of mode, for music could be listened with headphones, while visual reality would be seen. AR is a second variation in terms of technology that allows one person to accomplish something on the cloud, while seeing information overlaid upon the real world, by means of camera or GPS. However, what once began with gaming, music, photography, wearables, soon became a datified space, of digital control in the cloud.

And let’s not forget that control is not just about corporate control, it also is about individual control, this means every individual is controlling himself, as it was the case of Selfies’ photographies and our consent in giving in data to the cloud in exchange of “free” apps. Sure! But, free thinking is extinct or perhaps it never truly existed. Additionally, as everything has a price the cloud punks became insurgent against this control of the Self; they are nostalgic of the free web and dream of the wandering of the original digital flâneurs [31]: the “hackers”. Presently, there are just a few people owning a computer. Information and knowledge are a luxury granted by the cloud. Cultural mediocrity was not eradicated with the vanished mass media and mass society, the latter have accepted control as it is exerted upon them in such terms that, and we may guess that if Orwell was alive, he would be horrified with this fact. What the writer did not predict was that in our obligatory future or present shock (Rushkoff, 2013) we, ourselves, would be the ones offering our data to corporations and using personal digital images as in a control check point. This cloud was also built with the consent of its users. Turkle’s patients assume that “you swipe your fingers through your music, your news, your entertainment, and ‘your’ people. You control this, own it. This is my zone” (2015, 85). It does not seem to be surprising that in the Age of dematerialization we still keep talking of “place”, “space” and our “mental zone”. Many science fiction writers, among whom William S. Burroughs stands out, have provided their intellectual contribution to the “place” issue; near the 1980s, Burroughs mentions the expression “Interzones” (for instance in his book, Naked Lunch). The cloud is the first global interzone, but especially one in which we ceased to have control since an early time. It all began in a smooth way with social media flowing in the first decade of the 21st century, when we aspired to take over control upon our connections, as if this fact would make out of us masters in relationships management. Connections and relationships are two distinctive things. It was the social media that increased our idea of control upon connections (Turkle, 2015, 85).

NOTES

PART 1.0

In This Future:

Online: controlled by or connected to a computer through Internet.

Offline: a disconnected state, opposite of “online”.

Media: plural of "medium"; the main means of mass communication as television, radio and newspapers regarded collectively.

Digital Media: digitized content which can be transmitted over the internet or computer networks. It includes text, audio, video and graphics. Even news from a TV network, newspaper, magazine or other presented on a Web site or blog can be included into this category.

Cloud (Computing): the practice of using a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet; "cloud" - with no frontiers, timeless, unlimited "place" where we can store, manage and process data without personal computer.

Hardware: the collection of physical parts of acomputersystem. This includes thecomputercase, monitor, keyboard, and mouse, plus all the parts inside thecomputercase, such as the hard disk drive, motherboard, video card, and many others;computer hardwareis what you can physically see and touch.

Software: the programs and other operating information used by a computer.

Emotional Computing: also known as "affective computing"; it is basically the capacity of emotional interaction between humans and machine.

Social Media: websites and applications that enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking.

Cyberpunk: science fiction subculture focused on dystopia – high technology versus a decadent, low life in the future; combination of two words "cybernetics" and "punk"; referring to the rebel and politicized youth counterculture of late 1970s and early 1980s. The concept cyberpunk appeared in early 1980s in science fiction genre with authors such as William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, John Shirley, Pat Cardigan, amidst others.

Cloud punk: current expression for coining highly educated youth groups and experts in handling information on the cloud in order to share free culture increasingly reserved for elites; sophisticated evolution of the cyberpunk concept. Throughout this book are expressed the various actions of the cloud punks.

Yottabytes: a unit of information equal to one septillion 1024 or, strictly, 280bytes.

On Singularity:

Hackers: people who are computer experts; able to deal with the Internet; those who enjoy the details of programming and who manipulate information, both for good or bad purposes. Hackers can enter other people's systems to steal or manipulate important information.

Wiki rebels: it refers to people addicted to making or disclosing information on a very volatile and large scale.

Born to be wired?: author's linguistic joke from a pop-rock choruses − "Born to be alive" − with the expression wired, which means "to be connected by wire." However, the cloud does not require wires.

In House: in this context means working within a group, a corporation or an institution.

Cloud-enabled social change: "the cloud that allows social changes for the benefit of all".

Ur-text: an original or the earliest version of a text, to which later versions can be compared, for instance the Bible.

eBooks: Eletronic, virtual books.

History Medium: a virtual medium that contains all historical files of the world.

Corporations and Patterns:

Smartphones, Tablets e Wearables: mobile devices; respectively, smart phones, small computers and mobile electronic devices like watches, jewelry or special glasses.

Marketing: action or business of promoting consumer goods and services of all kinds. In this case, marketing related to digital technologies.

Pay Per Use: Softwarepay per useis one of the contemporary trends to enter the market with the advent of cloud computing & SaaS (Software as a Service).

Clean Design: a modern conception of simple, clean design.

The Total-Memory:

Ars Combinatoria: an artistic and / or technical way of combining simple elements to build, create or invent something complex.

Start-up: the start of a small business.

Zone Out: fall asleep or lose concentration or consciousness.

Changes:

Transmedia Storytelling: technique to tell a story or narrative and broadcast it across multiple digital platforms.

Young Cloud Punks:

Web: a complex system of interconnected elements; synonym for “the net”.

Cloud, City and Control:

Polis: itis normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, and thus is often translated as "city-state".

Flâneurs: French word that characterizes people who like to roam idly around the city. In the context, roaming the network.