The fallen cloud is heavy.
It is the locus of a myriad operations, and it performs incessant acts of reading and writing to keep itself alive.
The ground beneath it powers every one of its actions, feeding its energetic needs so that it can function indefinitely, so that it remembers.
It is a matter of retrievability in time: the cloud holds stored records and, like a dutiful scribe, re-reads and re-writes them without break. Although the kind of storage it provides may appear neutral, inert, stable, any intermission or interlude would disrupt the processing of data held inside its framework.
Then, the hypothesis of a blackout in the cloud becomes a threatening and unsettling amnesia, like a sudden, irreversible memory impairment.
It is the locus of a myriad operations, and it performs incessant acts of reading and writing to keep itself alive.
The ground beneath it powers every one of its actions, feeding its energetic needs so that it can function indefinitely, so that it remembers.
It is a matter of retrievability in time: the cloud holds stored records and, like a dutiful scribe, re-reads and re-writes them without break. Although the kind of storage it provides may appear neutral, inert, stable, any intermission or interlude would disrupt the processing of data held inside its framework.
Then, the hypothesis of a blackout in the cloud becomes a threatening and unsettling amnesia, like a sudden, irreversible memory impairment.
Illustration by Giulio Scalisi.