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Popular Communication: The

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To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent

World, by Vincent Mosco
a

Patrick Burkart
a

Texas A&M University

Published online: 14 Nov 2014.

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To cite this article: Patrick Burkart (2014) To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World, by Vincent
Mosco, Popular Communication: The International Journal of Media and Culture, 12:4, 266-269, DOI:
10.1080/15405702.2014.960779
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Popular Communication, 12: 266269, 2014

Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1540-5702 print / 1540-5710 online
DOI: 10.1080/15405702.2014.960779

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BOOK REVIEW

To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World. By Vincent Mosco. St. Paul, MN: Paradigm
Publishers, 2014, ISBN-13: 978-1612056166, 284 pages, $25.00 (paperback).
Patrick Burkart
Texas A&M University

To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World is Vincent Moscos seventh book on communication and technology, and it extends many of the themes which he has developed since his earliest
research. It is a comparative and historical account of different eras of experimentation with computer networks, from the time-sharing systems for big iron corporate and military mainframes
in the United States, to Soviet-era systems for central planning, to the Chilean initiative for local
management of national mines, to the celebrated French Minitel teletext network. The book is a
carefully researched case for regulating cloud computing and its data centers, although it is not
explicitly presented as such. Software as a service, remote storage and device synchronization,
streaming media, portalized business services, and all the other trappings of mobile life online
press us to think of networked computing as a utility and as a public service, despite the fact
that these technology practices and their underlying infrastructures are built and operate, for the
most part, free of public regulations. The book as a whole is an extended critique of digital positivism as an epistemology and scientistic attitude about computing which reduces experience,
knowledge, and history to the play of predictive algorithms over bigger and ever-growing data
sets, to the exclusion of critical reflection about art, culture, linguistic interpretation, and human
finitude.
The timeliest chapters focus on the social risks of cloud computing, showing the opportunities to be visibly diminishing as the relevant technologies become increasingly colonized by a
handful of media and software giants, and as the global technical infrastructure is found to be
shot through with NSA surveillance systems. To the Cloud consolidates and advances Moscos
systematic research program of research on the interplay of communication technology, freedom,
and domination that emerged as early as his masters thesis at Harvard (advised by Daniel Bell)
on the computerization of the USAA credit union. The timing of this special issue on technology
and empowerment for Popular Communication fortuitously coincides with this books release.
Mosco prepares the ground for the deeper political economic analysis of cloud computing with
a discussion of the metaphors and metaphysics of mind, clouds, mobility, and detachment, all ideals which we find to have been corrupted in the marketing and advertising of corporate promoters
and the glib happy-talk of information technology boosterism. As commonplace as marketing of

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267

the cloud has become, and in acknowledgement that marketing campaigns themselves should not
exhaust the scrutiny of critical media studies, Mosco considers the marketing functions aimed at
government and big business sectors meant to centralize storage and processing functions organizationally. He presents a full account of the push for centralization exerted through promotional
research reports, lobbying, trade conferences, and government reports, all of which have helped
reinforce the sense of welcome inevitability that accompanies any new push for large-scale technology change. Mosco leaves the engineering details of cloud infrastructures and services to
others, focusing instead upon the social and intellectual histories of the industries and political
initiatives for which networks have been developed to grow economies of computational scale
and scope. The ideological function of high-tech hype is, once again, a subject of longstanding
concern, and it is both instructive and enjoyable to discover how To the Cloud demythologizes
and debunks the seemingly endless waves of techno-Utopian claims about computer innovations
and futurology. In place of marketing signifiers, Mosco represents cloud computing as a field of
emerging social conflicts expressed in commerce, geography, and labor power.
To the Cloud breaks down the features and functionalities common to cloud based services,
namely, on-demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and
measured service. These characteristics round out the basic aspects of general-purpose cloud
computing, and address both user- and supplier-sides of the technology. One of the books greatest contributions is its reminders that these features and functionalities are not ends in themselves
but rather are means to the end of capital accumulation and centralization of knowledge-power in
vast data centers. Cloud services have come to supplant the more basic functionalities of custom
or special-use networks from earlier generations of technologies which proved the concept of the
business model behind the pay-per society (Mosco & Dervin, 1989) or the celestial jukebox,
for media, and enterprise computing, for other industry sectors.
For all the consideration of the immateriality and lightness of being attributed to the fluidity
of media and data flows in liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000), Mosco counterposes the rootedness of information commodities in grounded geographies and physical structures that make
significant material demands on resources and that call to mind the factories of an earlier era
(p. 37). A special strength of the book is its success in bringing the basic structures and functions
of the cloud down to earth, particularly in describing and explaining its equipment, energy, and
real estate requirements in data centers. Chinas venture with IBM to develop a cloud city in
Langfang near Beijing with more than six million square feet of facilities is an important case
study for the book. The strategic locations of data centers reveal a great deal about the environmental suitability and international political economy of cloud computing: the ideal situation for
practically any new data center is a geopolitically stable country with low electricity and communication costs, low ambient air temperature or proximity to a cool sea, a technically trained
and compliant workforce, and a host of tax breaks and other financial incentives. Nordic countries and Canada have attracted a good deal of this business. A growing proportion of the nearly
300 million square feet of data centers estimated to have existed in 2011 is situated at the rural
margins of cities where land and skilled labor both tend to be cheaper. The buildout of data centers for the cloud has accelerated the repurposing of many factories and warehouses originally
designed for military and industrial uses. The European Union (EU)-US trade relationship based
on media, information, and business services is about to become much more conflicted as the
cloud aggregates ever-more user data with personally identifying information. Online territories
carved out for greater personal privacy protections look set to dissolve, as Europeans discover

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BOOK REVIEW

the fundamental vulnerabilities of cloud storage in data centers located outside the EU, and even
within the EU. Besides the privacy risks to individual users replete in the cloud, Mosco discloses
even more systemic risks. As the Snowden and Wikileaks revelations have disclosed, the close
insinuation of US military espionage with cloud technologies simply reformats old imperialistic
impulses with updated systems, creating new dependencies and vulnerabilities in the process,
as state-sponsored hacking by China, Russia, and Syria can illustrate. Mosco provides numerous points of departure for ongoing research in the area of spatialization in the age of cloud
computing.
The core of the book is its chapter entitled Dark Clouds, which besides detailing the environmental impacts of cloud computing, also collects illustrative accounts of the clouds effects on
labor. Data retention combined with concentrating ownership and control of computing storage,
applications, and business analytics fuel a new stage for the Taylorization of knowledge work,
with troubling and predictable indicators for the systematic separation of knowledge and labor
in large enterprises. The outsourcing, offshoring, and deskilling of creative labor and technical
labor knows no bounds and confronts professions previously inured, including higher education instructors and attorneys. By providing examples of incipient labor unrest in China related
to the inhuman robotization of workers by Foxconn and others, together with new experiences
of Amazon with labor organization in Germany, and incipient unionization activities among
Amazons crowdsourced Mechanical Turk piecework factory, Mosco has set the stage for much
more work to be done on this next phase of structuration in the digital economy.
To be sure, critical media studies, particularly in Europe, have examined cloud computing with
a hermeneutic of suspicion and exposed its riskiest implications. The contours of cloud computing as an unregulated information service become much clearer in this volume, which extends
existing research on the law and policy implications of the tight coupling of data retention and
surveillance. Although Moscos new book portrays a range of legal interpretations and implementations of online privacy policies, including the more stringent European consumer protections,
one aspect of privacy rights that goes unexploredand not only by Mosco but also by most
researchers in the fieldis the seemingly paradoxical state of affairs presented by tech-savvy
adopters of cloud services who choose to ignore or even celebrate losses of personal privacy
online. Those who not only recognize but willingly capitulate or even embrace the postprivacy
condition are a growing contingent of Internet users, and their rejection of privacy norms confounds most analysts, including Mosco, who tend to assume personal privacy online to be an
obvious, self-interested consumption norm (Burkart & Andersson, 2013).
To the Cloud concludes with a fine chapter on cultural critiques, philosophical discourses,
and artistic representations of many of the social harms portended by digital positivism and
the visibly darkening clouds on which this review essay has lingered; it is a pity that it cannot be reviewed more fully here, as it restores a humanistic perspective on the social science and
engineering topics that ground it in a political economic analysis. Let it be said only that big
data and cloud culture unites cultural and political economic concerns in a historical reflection
on metaphors of knowing and unknowing from Aristophanes to Teilhard de Chardin, Leonard
Cohen, and Annie Proulx, among many others. Moscos latest contribution to scholarly studies
of media and politics provides an engaged, clear-eyed, and absorbing perspective on an otherwise
hazy and ideologically saturated topic area.

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REFERENCES

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Bauman, Z. (2000). Liquid modernity. Cambridge, England: Polity.

Burkart, P., & Andersson, J. (2013). Post-privacy and ideology: A question of doxa and praxis. In M. Christensen &
A. Jansson (Eds.), Media, surveillance and identity: A social perspective. New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Mosco, V., & Dervin, B. (1989). The pay-per society: Computers and communication in the information age. Westport,
CT: Greenwood Publishing Group.