Bryson's Reflections on Sandy's Talk

In his discourse on the opposing paradigms of "the cloud" and "the paradise of infinite storage," Mr. Pearlman aptly identifies the profound implications of this dichotomy on the music community in an economic as well as social context. To be sure, this duality represents nothing less than the very nature of our modern reality: the forces of centralization are under pressure from the forces of decentralization and autonomy. Through enabling the unfettered flow of all kinds of IP on a wide scale, the internet has catalyzed a major shift in consumer consciousness. Individuals have the power to give and receive IP from each other, circumventing The Company altogether. The corporate hierarchy that dominates the culture of the consumer stands to lose a lot of ground if file sharing and idea sharing continue in an unregulated and grassroots fashion. Products that once only had value in fixed form (the LP or the newspaper, for example) today exist digitally, ephemerally. This trend shows no sign of slowing down. Add to this the precipitously falling cost of the storage of digital information (and don't forget the "anarchic gearheads!"), and information autonomy seems like a sure thing. This has the added effect of upending traditional production and distribution models, causing everybody to reassess what actually constitutes a given 'industry.'

An element of cloud rhetoric that particularly troubles me is the notion that once information is in the cloud, it essentially belongs to everybody. In fact, only one (or a small handful) of companies will control this information, and everybody's access to it. As IP is asymptotically accumulated by those few cloud-owners (e.g. Google, Amazon), alternate means of access will likely be squeezed out of the market. This will force all users to depend on a publicly-owned company (whose responsibility to the shareholder of maximizing profits is paramount). Be not lulled by Google's dulcet strain of "don't be evil" (an actual tenet of company policy). We live in an economically unregulated and cutthroat business society. The acid rain monsoon from the digital cloud is just beginning. Beware of digital cholera.

Traditionally, clouds conjure images of a bountiful harvest, rolling soft and wan against the noon sky. In heaven, angels will strum lutes while we, the dead, snuggle playfully with a plush cumulonimbus. Lying on our backs in the park, gazing skyward, we ask ourselves, "is it a bunny, or a moose?" As any marketing guru can tell you, the most effective way to sell a product that is bad for you is to think up a really nice name for it (think "Celexa," not "Coke"). Were the digital version of 'the cloud' more appropriately labeled, snorting black horses and truculent goons would instantly replace the daisies-in-meadows hallucination that currently represents those forces who seek to build an omnipotent system of unfree information. Just as art itself tends to filter the human experience by casting vastly unique and divergent assessments of the human psyche, those mechanisms responsible for the creation, communication, and propagation thereof must tend away from centralization and hierarchical organization.