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?
