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ISBN 9780863556357

www.counterpoint-online.org

Cloud

Culture

CharlesLeadbeater

Theinternet,ourrelationshipwithit,an

dour

cultureisabouttoundergoachangeasproound

andunsettlingasthedevelopmentoWeb2.0in

thelastdecade,whichsawGoogleandYouTube,

FacebookandTwitterbecomemass,world-wide

phenomena.Overthenexttenyears,theriseo

cloudcomputingwillnotonlyacceleratetheglobal

battleorcontrolothedigitallandscape,butwill

almostcertainlyrecasttheverywaysinwhich

weexerciseourcreativityandorgerelationships

acrosstheworldscultures.Yeteveninitsinancy,

theextraordinarypotentialocloudcultureisthreatenedonallsidesby

vestedinterests,

newmonopolistsandgovernments,allintenton

reassertingtheirauthorityovertheweb.

Inthisground-breakingreport,Charles

Leadbeaterarguesthatweareacedwiththe

greatestchallengeoourtime:theclashocloud

cultureandcloudcapitalism.Whowillownthe

cloud?Howcanwekeepitopenandreapitsvast

benefts?Andhowcanitempowertheworlds

poorestpeople?

CharlesLeadbeaterisaleadingauthorityon

innovationandcreativity.Heistheauthoro

We-Think:thepowerofmasscreativity.

CounterpointisthethinktankotheBritishCouncil.
http://www.counterpoint-online.org/http://www.counterpoint-online.org/


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Counterpoint is the think tank of the British Council.

We carry out research and promote debate around the

most pressing issue of our time: how to live together

well in an interdependent world.


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Open access.

Some rights reserved.

To nd out more about the rightto use this work please go tocounterpoint-online.org/cloud-culture

Counterpoint 2010. Some rights reserved

British Council, 10 Spring GardensLondon SW1A 2BN, United Kingdom

www.counterpoint-online.org

ISBN 978-1-90669-300-8Copy edited by Julie PickardSeries design by modernactivityTypeset by modernactivityPrinted by Lecturis

Text & cover paper: Munken Print WhiteSet in Transport & Scala

Cloud Culture

the future of global

cultural relations

Charles Leadbeater
http://www.counterpoint-online.org/cloud-culture/http://www.modernactivity.com/http://www.modernactivity.com/http://www.modernactivity.com/http://www.counterpoint-online.org/cloud-culture/


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Contents

Preface 3

Acknowledgements 7

Foreword 9

1 In Judge Chins Court 3

2 When the Bedouin have Mobiles 9

3 From the Web to the Cloud 27

4 Culture and the Cloud 35

5 The Cloud and Cultural Relations 4

6 Signals from the Future: Science and Software 49

7 Storm Clouds 6

8 A Future of Many Clouds 77

References 83


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3

Preface

Commenting on the scope and the pace o change in oursocieties has become a clich be it to emphasise theopportunities it presents or the anxieties and pressures itcreates. But whether or not the world eels bigger or smaller,global village or Devils island, what matters is that theexperience o this change is characterised by contrast andparadox: the contrast between the permanence o dailylie, made up o small and meaningul moments againstthe (increasingly encroaching) backdrop o a tumultuous

planet; and the paradox o or some unprecedentedindividual reach in a global context where human beingscan also eel meaningless and powerless. This contrastinevitably throws up two questions: How do we makesense o our place in such a world? And how do we createmeaningul relationships in the context o such change?

The British Councils work has always been aboutmaking sense o our place (both collective and individual)in the world. Building relationships across the globe,creating a sense o security through a shared knowledge

o one another, providing the opportunities or exchanges oten in dicult circumstances shaped by conict,tension or authoritarianism have all been means tothat end. These relationships have always been based ona recognition o the importance o local networks andcollaborative working, and are designed to support, in thewords o the human rights lawyer and ormer BritishCouncil Chair Helena Kennedy, the great conversationo mankind. Today we are in a position to play this role inunprecedented ways to conduct and support more and


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Cloud Culture

4 5

richer relationships, in more creative and imaginative waysthan ever beore. This is the continuation o our work,but animated by a recognition o the proound culturaltransormations that technology creates.

This Counterpoint pamphlet is about whathappens when technology (mobile, open-source, 2.0)

and cloud computing conspire to ofer more access tomore o everyones culture, heritage and ideas thanever beore. Charles Leadbeater outlines the promiseand the step-change that is cloud computing theresults o linking a ll sorts o devices to one another, theunprecedented level o access to vast stores o culturalarteacts and the enormous potential or new orms ocollaboration, grassroots mobilisation and multinationalcommunities. But the argument is not dewy-eyedidealism the potential is there but we know it is

already under threat. To make the most o cloud cultureall o us need to sign up to maintaining an open cloud.This means mobilising to preserve diversity o provisionand o access, exploring collaborative approaches tocopyright, supporting online activism across the world,nding ways o sustaining public initiatives that areglobal and diverse and, perhaps most importantly,countering technological exclusion by supporting thedevelopment o locally developed tools and sotware.Creating the space or such mobilisation is what the

British Council has been doing in myriad ways orover 75 years. Were ready or the next chapter o thatconversation. Welcome to cloud culture.

Catherine FieschiDirector Counterpoint, British Council


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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Catherine Fieschi, Directoro Counterpoint, or her support and patience whileI completed this project, Nick Wadham-Smith andSue Matthias or their helpul comments andAnnika Wong or her research. I would also like to

thank the many people whose work I have drawnon and reerenced in the text.

Charles Leadbeater


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9

Foreword

I am delighted to contribute a short oreword tothis assessment o how the web is re-shaping globalcultural relations.

Charles Leadbeater ofers a stimulating overviewo the debate between optimists and pessimists aboutthe cultural implications o ubiquitously available, inot ubiquitously afordable, web access. As a realist icoptimist he concludes that an open source approach tocultural relations will help us to build communities ocollaboration around shared interests and ideas on ascale previously unimaginable. He takes examples romscience and public diplomacy to illustrate the potentialbut warns that we must also work against the risks posed

to this vision by economic inequality and the wrong kindo corporate and political ambition. He calls or a newapproach to leadership, based on partnership, in what hecalls the world owith.

It is strik ingly appropriate that this essay shouldhave been commissioned by Counterpoint, the BritishCouncils think tank. The British Council is anorganisation which has been building partnerships incultural relations or hal a century longer than peoplehave been using the term public diplomacy and or six

decades beore the internet era. The UK Foreign Ocesnancial support or the Council, like its support or theeditorially independent BBC World Service, recognisesthat governments have an important role in acilitatingcultural dia logue and disseminating news andknowledge, but that they must beware o the instinctto coerce and control.

In a world ocloud culture, politicians need not onlyto show restraint, they also need to be creative and to takemore risks. In diplomacy, some o our work continues


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Cloud Culture

0

to involve high-stakes bargaining between states; butthere is scarcely an issue which is not also subject toshaping by movements o citizens acting collaboratively,organised through digital channels. Today there isvery little that happens wholly in private. Look at theCopenhagen climate negotiation or the G20s work

on economic recovery. We inhabit, in Eric Raymondsphrase, the political architecture o the bazaar, not thato the cathedral.

But i this digital inormation space is to develop asan open and trusted place where liberal values ourish,prosperity grows and interests can be negotiated,minority voices must continue to be heard and corporateinterests transparently held to account.

The politics ocloud culture is more demandingthan the politics o systems held in the grip o elites,

but also more exciting. In practice, politicians subject todemocratic mandate have no choice whether to acceptand embrace these new digital realities. The politics ocloud culture is politics o the people, by the people;the implications or government are ar reaching.

The Right Honourable David Miliband MPForeign and Commonwealth Secretary


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Cloud Culture

4 5

In Judge Chins Court

become available to anyone with an internet connection.That should spread knowledge and ideas. Other librariesthat have experimented with making rarely readdocuments available online have ound they attract amuch larger, global audience. More people than evershould be able to make more o the stock o our cultureheld in books. That should be good or all o us.

However, this shared cultural resource will come ata price which is dicult to calculate. Google is oferingto rescue millions o neglected, orphaned works inexchange or acquiring considerable power over theuture o publishing and books. Under the deal proposedby Google, the company would have exclusive rights tocommercialise orphaned works. I one turned into anovernight hit Google would make most o the money.Once it was established, Google would be able to head

of potential competition rom other, diferent, databaseso digital books. We would nd ourselves locked intoGoogles service. As we visited Googles database tosearch or books it would acquire yet more inormationabout our habits and interests, which it would aggregateand disaggregate in its vast servers, to sell advertising tous in yet more insidious ways. Google would retain theright to determine what books were made available. Aprot-hungry corporation run by sel-conessed sotwarenerds with tunnel vision would not be most peoples rst

choice to act as the custodian o our culture.Googles plans and its attempts to strike a

deal with the Authors Guild and the Association oAmerican Publishers have provoked a mass o protests,many rom outside the US. The French and Germangovernments invoked Molire and Descartes, Goetheand Schiller and their winners o the Nobel prize orliterature 28 between them to warn that Googlesplans would create an uncontrolled, autocraticconcentration o power in a single corporate entity,2

which would threaten a undamental human right: theree ow o ideas through literature. Googles plans havealready provoked accusations o cultural betrayal andprotectionist countermeasures. In December Frenchpresident Nicolas Sarkozy earmarked 750 million todigitise French books, lms and museum arteacts asan alternative to Googles plan. Sarkozy implied Frenchnational identity would be in question i its culturewere allowed to leave, as i Google were about to take itaway rom France by making it available to many morepeople.3 Earlier in 2009, the National Library o Franceprovoked a storm o controversy by suggesting it wouldwork with Google because the state-unded alternative,Gallica, was not up to scratch.4

The US Government Department o Justice wasmore concerned that Google would lock up the market

and make it a ll but impossible or new competitors toenter. As well as opposition rom old media publishers,Googles peers are also opposed. The Open BookAlliance, made up o Microsot, Amazon and Yahoo!,which wants to create its own cloud o digitised books,accused Google o cooking up a scheme which wouldusurp Congress and give the company de acto controlover copyright policy.

Sadly Judge Chins court will not be the place tocome up with ingenious new solutions to the issues

raised by Googles plans. One option would be to create agenuinely public library o digital works. Yet that wouldrequire primary legislation in Congress, and a nationalUS solution dreamed up in Washington would notimpress much o the rest o the world whose culture wasabout to be digitised. A state-run digital archive mighthave as many downsides as one provided by Google.An alternative would be to create a global not-or-protorganisation to look ater orphaned works and booksalready in the public domain. This organisation would


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Cloud Culture

6 7

then apportion its income among authors and publishers.At the very least, governments will have to regulateaccess to the digital cultural stores Google is helping tocreate, to make sure the public interest is not abused.

We have the potential to make available moreculture and ideas in more orms to more people thanever: a digitally enabled, cultural cornucopia. Morepeople than ever will be able to connect throughculture, sharing experiences and ideas. More peoplethan ever will be able to contribute to this unoldingshared culture, through easy-to-use digital tools. Yet thispossibility, a vastly enhanced global space or culturalexpression, is threatened by intransigent vested interests,hungry new monopolists and governments intent onreasserting control over the unruly web. Judge Chinscourt is a microcosm or the arguments that will rage

over the control o culture globally in the decades tocome. This essay is about that battle. Let us start withhow we got here.


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9

2

When the Bedouin

have Mobiles

We sit beneath the palms o a crude Bedouin shelter,in the Sinai desert, at the entrance to the deep, narrowWhite Gorge that leads to the oasis o Ain Kundra, awatering hole or travellers or thousands o years, whilea Bedouin woman makes us tea the traditional way onan open re o twigs protected by a ew stones. To gethere has taken a seven-hour drive rom Cairo, a jeep rideinto the desert and a trek rom the camp where we sleptthe night under the stars. Not a soul is to be seen on the

sandstone plateau blasted by the morning sun.Then rom the palms above our heads a amiliartone rings out. It is her mobile phone.

What is remarkable is that it should cause so littlesurprise that a Bedouin should be connected to the sameweb o communications as people in Cairo, New Yorkand London. In the space o a decade, mobile phones,Wi-Fi, broadband internet, satellite and digital televisionhave become commonplace, i not ubiquitous. That hasbrought in its wake a culture o mass sel-expression

on a scale never seen beore, which has the potential totouch and connect us all and to change how we relateto one another through culture. We are just at the rststages o the unolding o this new global culture, andalready it is producing remarkable things at breakneckspeed and on a vast scale.

A sel-made video by a Korean boy playingPachelbels Canon in D on the electric guitar in hisbedroom has garnered more than 65 million hits onYouTube, providing the starting point or a global


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Cloud Culture

20 2

When the Bedouin have Mobiles

community o guitar-playing boys. Without askinganyones permission they created a global televisionchannel devoted to a single piece o music. A largelyvolunteer-created encyclopaedia Wikipedia editedby about 75,000 volunteers has more than 3 millionarticles. Habbo, the worlds astest-growing virtualworld, has more than 35 million members, 90 percent o them aged 38. Avaaz, a global campaigningwebsite which has 3.2 million members, raised morethan 4 million in donations and undertook morethan mill ion actions, such as email campaigns andpetitions, in its rst two years o operation. Skype,which allows people to use the internet to make reetelephone calls, is in efect the second-largest telephonecarrier in the world, with almost 405 million users,just ahead o Vodaone with 380 million subscribers

and behind China Mobile with 450 million. It tookSkype just ve and a hal years to acquire this userbase. It took YouTube our years to attract 363 millionregular users. Facebook acquired almost 236 millionmembers in just ve years.5 More video is uploadedto YouTube in two months than i the US televisionnetworks ABC, NBC and CBS had been broadcastingnon-stop since 948. The websites o these establishedtelevision channels which have been around or 60years get about 0 million unique visitors per month.

MySpace, YouTube and Facebook get 250 millionvisitors per month. None were more than six years oldin 2009.6 The Technorati service tracks 93.9 millionblogs, an activity unheard o ten years ago. Most o thebiggest websites in the world are platorms or massparticipation and collaboration, sel-expression andsocial connection: YouTube attracts almost a th ointernet users; Blogger is the seventh most popular sitein the world; Twitter got 67 million unique visitors amonth in 2009; Flickr, the photosharing site, serves 68

million views a month; Facebook, the social networkingsite, attracts 370 mill ion unique visitors a month.7

Ideas and images were already being sharedbetween people and countries as never beore throughterrestrial, cable and satellite television and radiostations; eature lms and DVDs; video games andmusic. But in the past decade the World Wide Web,born in 989 and brought to lie only in 994 withmodern browsers, has wrought a creative and disruptiveimpact on culture and communications. What mightthe next decade hold or how we create, share andcommunicate culture and what might that mean orhow we relate to one another, across cultures?

The combination o mass sel-expression,ubiquitous participation and constant connection iscreating cloud culture, ormed by our seemingly never-

ending capacity to make and share culture in images,music, text and ilm. The rise and spread o theinternet and the world wide web are irst and oremosta cultural phenomenon. Their impact will be elt irstin culture and only later in politics and commerce. Theweb allows more people than ever to create and makecontent; distribute and share it; to orm groups andconversations around the ideas and issues that matterto them, which shape and express their identity andvalues. The current expression o that process Web

2.0 began to emerge in the late 990s, created bysocial media sites like Facebook and Twitter, bloggingand wikis. The next phase o that process will turnon a distinctively dierent kind o internet, the riseo cloud computing, which will allow much greaterpersonalisation and mobility, constant real-timeconnection and easier collaboration. We could all beconnected, more continuously and seamlessly, througha dense cloud o inormation. In the last ten years theweb gave rise to social media and social networking.

Cl d C lt Wh th B d i h M bil


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Cloud Culture

22 23

In the next ten years cloud computing will give riseto something new again, cloud culture and evencloud capitalism. Features o cloud computing andcloud culture may seem ar-etched and unlikely.Yet real-time, social media o the kind that is nowcommonplace was unthinkable just ten years ago. Justas much change is likely in the ten years to come as inthe ten that have just passed. Where might it lead us?

The uture o the web is still uncertain: how arand ast it will spread; how signiicant it will be orpolitics and democracy; who will control it and makemoney rom it. We are perhaps 5 years into a processo mass, social and cultural innovation, involvinghundreds o millions o people around the worldexperimenting with a technology platorm that is stil levolving, the ownership o which is ar rom settled.

Yet this much seems clear. Cheap and powerul digitaltechnologies are allowing us to create vast new storeso digital cultural arteacts o which Googles bookplan is just one example. These stores are in hugepublic archives like the World Digital Library, which isbeing created by a group o the worlds leading culturalinstitutions; in new collaborative stores like Wikipedia;semi-public stores like Flickr and in the libraries eacho us now keeps on our own computers and on ouriPods. Each o us, in our way, has become a part-time

digital librarian, storing, sorting, retrieving digitalcontent we have created or own and sometimes sharingthat with others.

These new stores o digital cultural arteacts willbecome more accessible in more ways to more peoplethan ever, through Wi-Fi and broadband, multiplemobile devices as well as amiliar computers. Morepeople will be able to explore these digital storesto ind things o value to them. That could set intrain something akin to the process o collaborative

creativity that drives open source sotware. The opensource sotware movements rallying cry is: manyeyes make bugs shallow. The more people that testout a program, in dierent settings, the quicker thebugs will be ound and ixed. The cultural equivalentis that the more eyes that see a collection o content,rom more vantage points, the more likely they areto ind value in it, probably value that a small teamo proessional curators may have missed. As morepeople explore these digital stores they will makeconnections and see signiicance where it has notbeen spotted, provide more context to add meaning.Thanks to better search tools, collaborative ilteringand recommendations by word o mouth throughsocial networks, we should be more able than everto search or and ind content that is particularly

interesting to us.We will also be equipped with more tools toallow us to make our own contribution, to post ourphotograph or composition. We will be able to mashup,remix, amend and adapt existing content, even i onlyin small ways. As we collaborate with others who arealso interested in the same issues so this will throw upclouds o cultural activity as people debate, compareand reine what they share. These clouds will otenhave at their core high-quality proessionally produced

content. But that will also attract to it skilled anddedicated amateurs as well as general users.

We will have more access than ever to more culturalheritage stored digitally andmore tools to allow usto do more, together, to add to this content creatively.That equation will produce in the decade to come a vastcultural eruption a mushroom cloud o culture.

When the Bedouin have Mobiles

Cloud Culture


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Cloud Culture

24 25

The Cloud Culture Equation

More cultural heritage

stored in digital form

+

More accessible to more people

+

People better equipped with more tools

to add creatively to the collection

=

Exponential growth in mass

cultural expression

=

Cloud Culture

The next most likely stage o the webs technicaldevelopment cloud computing will act as a giantaccelerator or cultural cloud ormation. It will be like agiant machine or making clouds o culture. So beoregoing any urther let us explore in a little more detailsome o the technological developments that will giverise to the cloud.


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3

From the Web

to the Cloud

When the New York Times wanted to make available onthe web million ar ticles dating rom the newspapersounding in 85 through to 989, the paper scanned inthe stories, converted them to TIFF les, and uploadedthem to Amazons cloud service S3, taking up ourterabytes o space on Amazons remote servers. TheNew York Times did not co-ordinate the job beorehandwith Amazon: someone in the IT department signedup or the service on the web using a credit card. Then,

using Amazons EC2 computing platorm, the New YorkTimes ran a PDF conversion application that turned theTIFF les in PDF les. The conversion process tookabout 24 hours. At the end the New York Times had anarchive o million art icles to be made available to theworld. It had created the archive and made it availableby using cloud computing.8

The net is still evolving and so too are the metaphorswe deploy to make sense o it. One thing is clear: as thenet develops it will connect more people, devices, data

and programs more densely and intensively. The scaleand diversity o these connections will drive us towardsa qualitatively diferent kind o internet.

The net we have grown up with was based arounddata and sotware stored quite close to where it is usedon personal and mainrame computers. That gavepeople a sense o ownership and control, exploitingcheap local storage because the bandwidth to downloaddata rom remote sources was too expensive andunreliable. The net was a way or us easily to link

Cloud Culture From the Web to the Cloud


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Cloud Culture

28 29

From the Web to the Cloud

these disparate and disconnected machines, with theirseparate data and sotware.

In the world o cloud computing our data emails,documents, pictures, songs would be stored remotelyin a digital cloud hanging above us, always there or usto access rom any device we like: computer, television,games console, handheld or mobile, embedded in ourkitchen table, bathroom mirror or car dashboard. Weshould be able to access our data rom anywhere, thanksto always-on broadband and draw down as much or aslittle as and when we need. Instead o installing sotwareon our computer we would pay or it only when weneeded it.

The most amiliar early version o a cloud-basedservice is webmail Googlemail and Hotmail in whichemail messages are stored on remote servers which

can be accessed rom anywhere. Google also providesways or people to store and then share documents andspreadsheets, so that many people can access the samedocument. Facebook and Twitter are like droplets opersonal inormation held in a vast cloud. Wikipedia isa cloud o sel-managed, user-generated inormation.Open source sotware platorms like Drupal are sotwareclouds, which coders can draw down rom and add to.

Sharing our programs, storage and even datamakes a lot o sense, at least in theory. Pooling storage

and sotware with others should lower the cost. Cloudcomputing would turn computing power into justanother utility that we would access much as we turn ona tap or water. The reservoirs will be vast energy-ecientdata centres 7,000 o them in the US to date. Googlehas two million servers running around the world.Yahoo! is busy building server arms and Microsotis adding up to 35,000 servers a month in places likeits data centre outside Chicago, which covers 500,000square eet at a cost o $500 million and will hold

400,000 servers. Sitting on top o these will be morepooled applications, like the apps used on the iPhone.The sotware company Salesorce.com has a c loud o 300ree sotware programs and 500 that can be bought perunit o usage.9

The potential benets are already becoming evidentto some leading global companies. Bechtel, the Swissengineering rm, or example, estimates data storagecosts could all rom $3.75 per gigabyte per monthunder its proprietary system to $0.5 per month with anexternal provider such as Amazon. Bechtel estimates itscomputing costs should all by more than 30 per centjust in the rst limited phase o its shit towards cloudcomputing. Bechtels head o IT Geir Ramleth put hisaim this way: We want anybody to be able to have accessto the right resources at any place at any time with any

device, in a cost efective and secure environment.

10

Cloud computing should also bring benets or manymillions o smaller organisations. A small businessshould be able to draw down rom the cloud basicprograms or customer relationship management, onlinemarketing, payroll, e-commerce, inventory management.

When computing becomes merely a utility weplug into, the ocus or innovation will shit to thedemand side. Imagine or a moment that electr icitywas used only to power one kind o machine known

as an electricity machine. That is what computer poweris like now: it mainly powers devices that sit on ourdesks with qwerty keyboards attached. As computingbecomes a utility it will power many more devices,many o them with no user interace, more o themmobile and handheld. The cloud should also encouragecollaboration. Diferent people, using diferent devicesshould be able to access the same documents andresources more easily. Work on shared projects willbecome easier, especially as collaboration sotware and

Cloud Culture From the Web to the Cloud


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30 3

web video conerencing becomes easier to use. Thisshould allow ar more o what Hal Varian, Googleschie economist, calls combinatorial innovation,11as developers mashup data rom diferent sources, asmany people are doing already with Google maps. It ismore sensible not to think othe cloud but clouds takingdiferent shapes and orms.

From the Cloud to Clouds

The clouds in our skies take many diferent orms bymixing the same basic ingredients. They are oten hugebut eeting, rarely retain their shape or more than a ewminutes and oten migrate rom one orm to anotherin the course o a day. Clouds range rom the giantcumulonimbus to the shreds o stratus ractus, the airweather cloud cumulus ractus to the beautiul wispso cirrus uncinus. Clouds can be produced en masse bythe advance o a depression or as a single orm by a localconvective eddy. Clouds live at ground level in the ormo og and at very high altitudes, the amous Cloud 9. Iwe are moving to a uture o cloud computing and cloudculture then we should hope or a similar variety in theorms it takes.

The basic classication o clouds into cirrus(bres), stratus (layers) and cumulus (heaps) was

developed by Luke Howard, an amateur meteorologistworking in Londons East End.12 Howards classication,rst published in 803, allows or constant mutation asone orm o cloud becomes another: thus cirrus cloudsthat are becoming stratus clouds are cirrostratus. Therst international inventory o clouds published in896 distinguished clouds by their altitude as wellas their shape, with renements to Howards schemaadded by German and French meteorologists. That hassince become a ten-point basic classication rom 0 or

cirrus to 9 or cumulonimbus, the highest climbingcloud. Within this scheme there are 52 main varietieso clouds, rom low cumulus clouds Cumulus humilisthrough to high-altitude Cirrocumulus occus.

We may well need something as exible andexpansive to distinguish the many varieties o digitalclouds that will emerge in the decades to come.

Digital clouds will be either commercial, social orpublic. Commercial clouds are either enabled or managedand supported by a commercial provider, which mightalso mine data rom the cloud and provide tools or peopleto contribute to the cloud. Flickrs clouds o photographswould probably t into the commercial cloud sector.Google and Amazon are ofering commercial cloudservices. The World Digital Library, on the other hand,which is being created by government-unded librariesaround the world, is a prime example o a public cloud.Wikipedia is a social cloud: it has mainly been createdthrough voluntary efort.

Clouds will be either open or closed. Bechtelscloud is a private, c losed and commercial cloud or theuse o its employees. Twitter is nominally a commercialcloud but it is open or anyone to join. Wikipedia isboth social and open. The cloud o online activityaround the Muslim Brotherhood is social but closed.Governments are creating both open and closed clouds.

The Open Data movement is orcing governments to bemore open with data and to allow socia l entrepreneursand citizens to reuse it. Meanwhile governments arealso creating large closed clouds o data or intelligenceand security purposes.

Some clouds will be airly permanent while othersare more transitory and emergent. Science, or example,is providing models or what might happen to the rest ocloud culture. Some clouds o scientic data and globalcollaboration are quite institutionalised and permanent,

Cloud Culture


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or example, around the Large Hadron Collider atCERN. Other clouds are more eeting and passing.Viral marketing campaigns succeed only i they allowpeople to spread content very easily and openly andwhen successul create huge balloons o media activity.Clouds will also difer in their reach. Some might beultra local, others global.

The web has already had many incarnations. Once itwas thought o as the digital superhighway. Others havelikened it to a rictionless market. In the last decade thesocial and networked eatures o the web have come tothe ore. In the decade to come it is l ikely that the cloudwill be the most persuasive and powerul metaphor,to link both technical developments in how computersand the internet work but also to understand its culturalimpact and signicance. What will the rise o cloudcomputing mean or culture?


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4

Culture and

the Cloud

Culture is our ever-evolving store o images, texts andideas through which we make sense and add meaning toour world. Our culture, in the broadest sense, helps us torame and shape our identity, to say who we are, wherewe are and which generation we are a part o. 13 Cultureis not something we choose but nd ourselves belongingto; it shapes what matters to us, and how we see theworld. Culture is customary and collective, to someextent intuitive and unreective; it is just there romthe style o ood that we regard as ours, to the stories wehad read to us as children, the songs o our teens, thetelevision characters we identiy with, the music we playat weddings, the poems we read at unerals, the way wedesign our houses, what we wear, how we distinguishourselves. Culture is what we assemble our identitiesrom and so it also provides powerul points o comingtogether, oten in upliting shared experiences, especiallyperhaps in societies where ritual, religion and politics nolonger provide that ocus as once they did. Most o our

culture is not kept in special cultural houses museums,galleries, concert halls and cinemas. It is all around uslike the air, grass, rain and language.

As so much o our culture is not owned by anyone,much o it is open to constant adaptation, evolution andreinterpretation, to be remade and remixed. A culturethat is alive is never entirely closed. As culture is vitalto what matters to us and explaining who we are, sogiving other people access to what we count as ourculture is a vital way or us to understand one another,

Cloud Culture Culture and the Cloud


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what we share and what makes us diferent. Culturecomes rom specic and dist inctive ways o lie. In aless ideological but more incessantly connected world,the most powerul way to distinguish what mattersto us as individuals, communities and nations isthrough culture. As a result culture can be a point odisagreement as much as a point o union.

I culture provides much o our sense o identity,then creativity helps to give us our sense o agency: whowe want to be, what mark we want to leave. Culture givesus roots, creativity a sense o growth. Creativity gives us away to add to and remake our cultural stock: it allows usto escape being entirely dened by our traditions.

The growth o the digital cloud will change bothculture and creativity. Digital stores o data in the cloud,ubiquitous broadband, new search technologies, accessthrough multiple devices these should make moreculture, more available than ever beore to more people.We are also living through a massive prolieration oexpressive capacity to add to and remix culture withcheaper, more powerul tools or making music andlms, taking and showing images, drawing up designsand games. That is why we are in the midst o a serieso cultural eruptions that are throwing up vast cloudso new Pro-Am culture.14 For some these clouds arebeautiul and inspiring. Others believe cloud culture

will drop the equivalent o acid rain. The most tellingcontemporary example o this tension is music.We can create and reorder our own vast collections

o musical content and play them wherever we wantthanks to our iPods. We can draw rom a variety omusic clouds, rom the legal and commercial iTunesand Spotiy, to sites which have led to illegal le sharing,such as Kazaa and LimeWire. We have console gameslike Rock Bandand Guitar Hero. Our computers carrysotware such as Logic and GarageBand, which allow us

to create and score music. Entirely new musical genrescould emerge rom this mixing, as James Boyle arguesin his book The Public Domain.15 Soul was created inthe early 950s when the singer Ray Charles decidedhe needed to leave the shadow o Nat King Cole andestablish his own style. His rst successul attempt todo so I Got a Woman was a blend o gospel and

blues, the nightclub and the church, the sacred andthe proane. Charless ormula was generative: it madepossible many more diferent kinds o soul music.As Matt Mason points out in The Pirates Dilemma,16most new cultural orms, and so most new marketsor culture, are opened up by people who initially areregarded as pirates and renegades: much the same wastrue or Hollywood lms, commercial radio and hiphop. More people are listening to, making and playingmore music than ever beore. All that makes or asterevolution, with more rapid mutation and adaptation.

Yet the heart o this modern culture o musicrecording depends on a reasonably ordered andcontrolled process or recording, marketing anddistributing music. Cloud culture threatens to disruptevery aspect o the industrys value chain. The musicindustry is in a state o disarray, even while musicalexpression explodes. There has never been more musicplayed, shared, created and listened to by so many

people, in so many places. Yet th is explosion o musicculture has been accompanied by deep angst over howto sustain music as an industry, rom the training oclassical musicians, to the uture o minority genresand the prospects or the mainstream pop recordingindustry. The same tension exploding possibilitycombined with morbid anxiety alicts most otherareas o cultural production.

Culture is increasingly important or nations,regions and ethnic groups to distinguish and explain

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themselves. We relate to one another increasinglythrough shared cultures rather than shared religiousor political belie. Yet the rise o the cloud will disrupthow culture is expressed and organised. As a result itis bound to have an impact on cultural relations: howpeople in diferent societies relate through culture. Itollows that cultural relations will increasingly depend

on the uture o the cloud.


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shared histories and the reality o international travel,trade and communications. Writers like Ulrich Beckin Cosmopolitan Vision and G. Pascal Zachary in TheGlobal Me: The new cosmopolitans26 take this as theirstarting point to celebrate the rich and poor migrantso this liquid world, living in diasporas, circulatingrom a home in one country to work in another. Beck

describes a global culture o mobility, constant andeclectic consumption, openness to others and ceaselessconnections between cultures. Marwan Kraidy inHybridity or the Cultural Logic o Globalization27andJan Nederveen Pieterse in Globalization and Culture:Global melange28 ocus on a culture shaped by peoplewith hyphenated identities Black-British, Chinese-American, what economic geographer AnnaleeSaxenian calls the new argonauts in her book o thattitle, people who shuttle rom Bangalore to SiliconValley, between Pune and Dubai.29

These stories Western domination; resistanceto it; celebration o diference; the culture o modernnomads and hybrids have shaped our view o thepossibilities and the power embedded in internationalcultural relations. Cloud culture ofers to create anotherstory, one which allows or much greater diversityo cultural expression rom many more sources, astechnology costs all, but which also allows or much

more difuse reciprocity and connection, based on theshared resources o the cloud. Cloud culture is a recipeor more cultural diference to be expressed, on an equalooting andor more connections to be made to ndpoints o shared interest. The task or cultural relationsin this context is to allow as many people as possible tocontribute and connect, translate and blend culture.

Pierre Levy led the way in painting an optimisticaccount o what cloud culture might mean in his997 book Collective Intelligence,30 which imagined an

intricately connected, all-encompassing knowledge spaceor all o humanity, which would be an archive o dataand a place where a community o researchers, thinkersand artists would search, explore, connect and consult,in a space at once universal, pluralistic, collaborative andevolving. A decade later in The Wealth o Networks, YochaiBenkler 31 hailed the emergence o commons-based

peer production, a new kind o productive communitythat would be radically decentred, collaborative, non-proprietary, based on sharing resources and outputsamong widely distributed and loosely connectedindividuals who co-operate without relying on marketsignals or managerial commands.

The World Summit on the Inormation Society, inTunis (2005), pledged to create an inormation societywhere everyone can create, access, utilise and shareinormation and knowledge, enabling individuals,communities and peoples to achieve their ull potentialin promoting their sustainable development andimproving their quality o lie.32

Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture 33 writesabout the power o ans and hackers to remake culture,cycling between the do-it-yoursel grassroots andthe mainstream media o television and publishing.Manuel Castells in Communication Power34 describesa culture o mass sel-communication in which people

increasingly communicate to and through one another,rather than through ormal media organisations likebroadcasters and publishers:It is sel-generated content, sel-directed in emission and

sel-selected in reception by many who communicate with many.This is a new communication realm, and ultimately a new media,whose backbone is made o computer networks, whose languageis digital and whose contents are globally distributed and globallyinteractive. True, the medium, even a medium as revolutionary as

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this one, does not determine the content and eect o its messages.But it has the potential to make possible unlimited diversity andautonomous production o most o the communication ows thatconstruct meaning in the public mind.

In short, according to the optimists, web cultureshould be a rare and delicate mix: more decentralised,

plural and collaborative; less hierarchical, proprietaryand money-driven; the boundaries between amateur andproessional, consumer and producer, grassroots andmainstream are breached, i not erased.

Where might we turn or signs o what that mightmean or international cultural relations? One guidemight be the way science is being remade by globalcollaboration over the web.


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Signals from the Future:

Science and Software

The most innovative science o the twentieth centurywas done in big laboratories. The most innovative scienceo the twenty-rst century wil l be done in a cloud ointernational, interdisciplinary collaboration.

Science in the twentieth century was driven bystate-unded basic research, mainly in the physicalsciences: so-called Big Science. Between 923 and 2005US government unding o research and developmentincreased rom less than $5 million to more than $32billion a year. By the end o the century R & D spending

averaged 2.2 per cent o GDP o countries in the OECD.World R & D spending reached $729 bill ion in the year2000. Total public spending on all aspects o science andtechnology development was worth about $ trillion.35

The latter decades o the twentieth century sowedthe seeds o a shit away rom national science systemstowards international and interdisciplinary collaborativeresearch. This will be the most potent way to do sciencein the century to come. The more elite the scientist, themore likely he or she is to be a node o internationalcollaboration. The best science and the most cited articlesare the product o international collaboration.

Take seismology as an example. In 990 about nineper cent o articles in internationally recognised sciencejournals were internationally co-authored. By 2000 thegure was 6 per cent. Between 980 and 998 interna-tional co-authored papers in seismology rose by 45 percent while nationally co-authored articles rose by 26per cent. Internationally co-authored articles were more

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likely to be cited by other scientists, suggesting theywere o higher quality. The networks supporting thiscollaboration became much denser: the ties betweenseismology researchers tripled in the last decade o thetwentieth century. Seismology was not alone. Sciencesas diferent as astrophysics, which requires heavy capitalinvestment, and mathematical logic (which requires

very little), exhibited large increases in internationalcollaboration. In astrophysics the proportion o inter-nationally co-authored art icles rose rom 29 per cent in990 to 47 per cent in the year 2000; rom 2 per centto 38 per cent in mathematical logic; rom per cent to33 per cent in soil science and rom 4 per cent to 24 percent in virology.36

Scientists are being driven to share knowledgebecause they are tackling such complex elds that no onehas the complete picture or answer. They want to match

themselves with collaborators with complementary skillsand assets, to pool data and resources, to develop theirreputation by attaching themselves to internationallyrenowned research projects. The web is not the soledriving orce behind international collaboration in science.But it is making it a lot easier. All research is becomingmore interconnected, collaborative and networked.

In part that is because science is increasingly drivenby the analysis o large overlapping clouds o data. CarolGoble, a proessor o computer science at ManchesterUniversity, estimates that in just one subeld nucleicacids researchers now routinely start work by scanning,070 connected databases. The Large Hadron Colliderwill generate the equivalent o 400,000 PCs worth odata a year. PubMed lists more than 7 million articles.According to Goble, scientic data will be held in large,overlapping clouds that will require mixed stewardship;the scientic method will depend on new kinds ointernational, virtual collaboration, and scientic

research will be published in orms that allow the data,sotware and results to be easily recombined to be usedin other research and publications.37

Caroline Wagner describes this process inThe New Invisible College,her account o the rise ovirtual collaboration in science:

Sel-organizing networks that span the globe are the mostnotable eature o science today. These networks constitute a newinvisible college o researchers who collaborate not because they aretold to but because they want to, who work together not because theyshare a laboratory or even a discipline but because they can oereach other complementary insight, knowledge or skills.38

One way to understand scientic clouds is to lookat where people work and how they share resources.Scientists working on various challenges with diferent

kinds o resources are nding new ways to collaborate.Some are creating clouds around science projects sobig they require the resources o several governmentsto create the shared inrastructure: the Large HadronCollider at CERN is a prime example. Scientists rommany locations come together in a single place to worktogether. Other collaborations are ormed aroundparticular locations, which become the subject o studyor researchers rom diferent places: the thousandso scientists involved in the International Polar Yearis a prime example. Projects such as the HumanGenome were initiated by a small central team, basedin the UK and the US, which drew in thousands oother contributors and collaborators. Emerging elds,like nanoscience and synthetic biology, in whichbasic knowledge is still evolving, depend on weak t iesbetween exible teams drawn rom many diferentdisciplines. Other elds, like seismology and the workdone by the Global Biodiversity Inormation Facility,

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rely on more difuse bottom-up networks with very littlecentral co-ordination and lots o shared inormation.

Another way to think o scientic clouds is to ocuson the diferent challenges people are tackling. Someare localised and acute chal lenges such as ooding orwater pollution. Others are global and acute challengessuch as the spread o SARS or the H1N1 virus. These

acute challenges oten lead to loose, emergent and rapidresponse science to help nd solutions to an urgentproblem. The Boston Childrens Hospital has createda real-time world health map showing where diseaseoutbreaks are being reported. The response to SARSin particu lar showed quite clearly that internationalcollaboration outstripped national eforts orinstance o the Chinese to nd a solution. Chronicchallenges meanwhile global warming or poor localsoil conditions require more structured, patient and

institutionalised orms o collaboration.The chie challenge or scientists and policy-makers

is to make these difuse orms o collaboration work. AsWagner puts it:

No nation can have a ully contained science system becauseall parts o science interact with and support each other. To createknowledge, scientists must nd ways to identiy and connect to eachother. As a result the goal o policy should be to create the most openand uid system possible.39

The ollowing are some o the lessons that science mighthave to ofer other areas o cloud culture:

clouds orm around key contributors and interestingquestions, which attract contributions rom many people

someone trusted has to put in place a kernel, thebeginnings o a project to which others add

it has to be easy or people to share knowledge, accesscodied data and do something with it

leaders o the community respected by their peers mustset the rules o engagement

individual contributors must get something rom their

participation either in helping them to solve a problem,in terms o their reputation, standing in the community,opportunities to learn and to make urther contacts inthe network

the collective efort needs to be ed by transparency, openinormation sharing and rapid eedback, so people canadjust quickly. An approach that is too bureaucratic orcentralised will kill of collaboration.

How might we carry these lessons into the eld ointernational relations? Let us examine what it couldmean or public diplomacy.

Open Source Diplomacy

The idea o public diplomacy rose to prominence inthe 990s as governments came to terms with aninternational environment that had become morecomplex and less stable. Governments had to interactwith a multiplicity o international actors regions,cities, NGOs, corporations, radical political groups.State to state diplomacy became just part o a gameinvolving many more players and ever-shiting sets orules. A widespread response was to invest more inpublic diplomacy: attempt to manage the internationalenvironment and promote national interests by engagingdirectly with oreign publics, to win the battle o heartsand minds, or example through dedicated television

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and radio channels, education and cultural initiatives.Yet public diplomacy retained an important continuitywith the past: it was the projection o power, albeit bysot means, to persuade and attract oreigners to buyinto a states goals and values, rather than through thehard power o military action and economic sanctions.Public diplomacy was a diferent tool to do the same job.

The sot power o public diplomacy was a license orbrand building to be applied to nations much as it was tointernational products.

This kind o top-down branding approach, whichtreats people as targets rather than participants in anexchange o views, is unlikely to work in the era o cloudculture, when people will have many more sourceso inormation, places or debate, the means to havetheir say and an expectation that they will be engagedrather than lectured. A more ruitul model is instead

to see this as a task or building cultural relations,links between people through culture. The best wayto understand how that might be done is to adopt anapproach inspired by open source sotware.

Open source sotware is sotware that anyone canuse, in which the source code is let open to be modiedby other users. Open source sotware proceeds rom theassumption that the basic code is probably unnishedand at best a rough approximation o what is needed. Thebest way to improve it, open source programmers argue,is to leave the code open so people can add improvementsand x bugs as they use and adapt the code in situ.

The key to that process o collaborative learningand improvement is that no one including theoriginators has the right to prevent someone elseusing the code. Generally people who seek to use opensotware are also under an obligation to contribute backany improvements they make. They cannot prejudice therights o other people to use the code by locking it up.

Open source has set of a cycle o collaborative, shareddevelopment among geeks. Most o the web and manycorporate computer systems, including Googles, runon open source sotware. These communities, such asLinux and Ubuntu, are the inspiration or much o theoptimism about the collaborative potential o the web.Steven Webber in The Success o Open Source 40 argues

that open source represents a new way or communitiesto organise work by labour sel-distributing itselto relevant tasks rather than ollowing a division olabour handed down rom on high. Richard Sennettin The Cratsman41 argues that the sel-regulating,problem-solving work done in open sourcecommunities represents a resurrection o the crattradition. Christopher Kelty in Two Bits,42 his journeythrough open source communities, describes themas recursive publics: sel-sustaining communities

that are simultaneously a market, a network, a publicspace and a movement. Media theorist Axel Bruns inBlogs, Wikipedia, Second Lie and Beyond43 writes ocommunities that share resources but reward individualcontribution, through a process o peer-to-peerevaluation. This has al l helped to eed the argumentso other commentators Clay Shirky in Here ComesEverybody, Ori Braman and Rod A. Beckstrom in TheStarsh and the Spiderand Charlene Li and Josh Bernofin Groundswell44 who argue that the web opens up awider menu o possibilities or people to be organisedwithout organisations and leaders.

Eric Raymond, one o the original theorists oopen source sotware, amously distinguished betweenthe cathedral and the bazaar as models or organisingwork.45 For Raymond, a proprietary sotware programdesigned by a central team was like building a cathedralaccording to a master plan. Open source sotwareemerged through a more chaotic, collaborative and

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decentralised process that was more like a bazaar inwhich good ideas spread ast, rom the bottom up.Traditional diplomacy is the diplomatic equivalent othe cathedral: teams o experts in endless talks over thedetail o treaties. The recent climate change summitin Copenhagen was a classic example o this kind odiplomacy at work on a global scale. However, more o

the uture will belong to open source style approaches,modelled on the bazaar. These involve mobilising a masso players, many o them in civil society, behind a newinitiative. The Copenhagen talks were shadowed by anencampment o NGOs and other groups, who were thegeeks-in-chie o climate change policy-making opensource style. From now on almost every large-scaleefort at traditional diplomacy on controversial issues, toorganise treaties between states, will be accompanied byan open source equivalent.

Creating platorms or these oten grassroots,multinational communities to orm will be a vital goalor cultural relations. Some international NGOs andcharities Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Oxam themselves creatures o the old media world, aredeveloping ways to enable their supporters to becomemore engaged in campaigns, contributing more thanmoney, and engaging more directly with those theyare try ing to help in the developing world. Ali Fisher,director o Mappa Mundi consultants, puts it this way:The open source approach argues or working as a genu-

ine partner with groups that seek to achieve congruous endsthrough providing them with what they need in an open andtransparent manner. The key is control; support cannot be usedor coercion. This approach builds a community that is basedon common interest and ability not a hierarchy that is basedon power.46

Kinds of Clouds

We associate science with laboratories. But increasinglyit will also be conducted in the cloud, through virtualcollaboration. We associate culture with books andlms, cinemas and libraries. But, like science, cultureincreasingly will be conducted in the cloud as well.Cloud culture is likely to take a huge diversity o orms:

Permanent clouds o global cultural resources orpeople to draw on will be created by public, private andvoluntary contributions. An example o global publiccloud culture is the World Digital Library. Wikipedia isthe prime example o a global cultural resource createdby volunteer contributions. Google is providing privateunding to digitise a vast collection o out o copyrightbooks. iStockphoto is a quasi-commercial collection ophotographs mainly taken by amateurs. Flickr allows the

creation o a vast collection o user-generated photographs

Emergent clouds will respond to crises. A prime exampleis Ushahidi a mashup o Google Maps or people toreport where attacks were taking place in the violenceollowing Kenyas disputed elections in late 2007.47Ushahidi is in embryo a mass, social human rightscloud an emergent response to crisis that may in timebecome more permanent

Fans-based clouds o culture will orm around globalmedia properties. Star Trek ans, or example, have createdhundreds o eature-length lms in homage to the series

Communities will orm around particular pieces o sharedand common culture. An example is the sel-organisingcommunity o young guitar players on YouTube dedicatedto mastering Pachelbels Canon in D

Cloud Culture

Clouds will orm around particular tools and platorms or


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Clouds will orm around particular tools and platorms orcreativity. A global community o lead users has ormedaround Sibelius, the score-writing sotware

Clouds will morph rom one orm to another, just asthey do in the sky. Susan Boyle became amous becausea video o her doing an audition or Britains Got Talent

became an overnight sensation on YouTube, garnering93.5 million views in just days, more than ve timesthe number o views o the video o Barack Obamasinauguration address. Boyles success online then playedback into traditional media: her rst album was a globalhit. The successor to the hit television show American Idolis due to start online to build up a loyal ollowing beoretranserring to television

Clouds will connect previously dispersed cultures. An

example is the way that part o the international Jewishcommunity has taken up social networking to make andremake connection. As globalisation creates more diasporacommunities, so the web will also create ways or thesecommunities to remain culturally connected

Cloud culture is likely to be as nationalistic as it iscosmopolitan. Much o the Arab blogosphere, whichnow amounts to more than 4,000 blogs, is nationallyoriented: they are commentaries on national politics.Russian nationalists have used mashups o Google Mapsto show where ethnic minorities live in Russian citiesto co-ordinate their harassment. There is no reason toimagine cloud culture will be purely civic. It could alsobe predatory and vicious.

The question o which culture you belong to and how youidentiy yoursel will be bound up with which clouds youbelong to.

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Storm

Clouds

Technology is creating the possibility o a diferent kindo global cultural relations, simultaneously more diverse,plural, participative, open and collaborative. Yet or allits promise that is no more than a possibility. Indeed,the emergence o this new kind o communication-based power, vested in orms o mass collaboration incivil society, is already provoking a erce struggle asgovernments and companies try to wrest back control.The web may prove to be such a pervasive and unsettlingorce, both or governments and corporations, that it will

provoke a counter-revolution, which wi ll bring with itmore pervasive surveillance and tighter controls. As theweb reaches deeper into the detail o our lives so too willthe apparatus designed by governments and corporationsto keep it under control. Having promised to be a zoneo ree, lateral association and collaboration the webcould soon become densely policed by ocial censorship,copyright restrictions and corporate policies. These arejust some o the threats to the webs potential or creatinga new global cultural commons. These threats will needto be met or the potential o cloud culture to be realised.

Censorship and the Power of Government

Cyberspace is providing a new space in which civilsociety organisations in authoritarian societies canorganise. The costs o producing a samizdat that canreach thousands o people has allen dramatically andwill al l urther with the advent o cloud computing.

Cloud Culture Storm Clouds

New collaborative tools should help civil society at Oxord University using the web as the basis or


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New collaborative tools should help civil societyorganisations and campaigns. Yet as ast as this space isopening up, authoritarian governments are becomingincreasingly adept and sophisticated in closing itdown. The idea that authoritarian governments willalways be so top heavy that they will be outwitted bythe ast-moving throng on the web is mistaken. As

Evgeny Morozov, a contributing editor at Foreign Policymagazine, shows, many regimes are eschewing directconrontation in avour o more subtle, pernicious andpervasive orms o cloud management.48

The Thai authorities, or example, have usedcrowdsourcing to uncover the addresses o websitesmaking comments critical o the Royal amily, whichare gathered in a site cal led ProtectTheKing.net. TheSaudi government has taken a similar approach tovideos on YouTube that are critical o the country. In

Georgia the authorities have helped to mobilise denialo service attacks on blogging platorms to orce themto evict bloggers critical o the government. The mostcritical bloggers have been turned into reugees unableto nd a home in cyberspace. In China up to 50,000people are members o the so-cal led 50 Cent Party: thesum they are paid or noting a critical comment on aweb site or making a avourable comment in supporto the government. Googles controversial provisiono a ltered search service in China, in line with vastgovernment censorship, points to the complex role ocorporate power in the cloud. The history o Googlesproblematic relationship with China has included hacksinto the Gmail accounts o Chinese human rightsactivists. The Nigerian government is recruiting a orceo bloggers paid to support the government online andto monitor web activity. The Russian regime has beenmost adept at using the web to consolidate its power,according to a recent report by the Reuters Institute

at Oxord University, using the web as the basis orauthoritarian deliberation online discussion tolegitimise state policies. A think tank closely linked toormer President Putin has led the way in creating asocial network site to act as a gathering point or youngproessionals.49

Even when cloud culture does seem to threaten

authoritarian rule it is easy to overestimate its power.A classic example is the role played by Twitter, themicro-blogging site, in the protests in Iran in June2009 ollowing the countrys disputed elections.Twitter became one o the ways that web users inIran distributed news o protests and crackdowns, assupporters o Mir Hossein Mousavi took to the streetsto protest against the victory awarded to PresidentMahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Twitter provided a direct and compelling

connection with events in Iran as they unolded.Original tweets rom Iran were passed on re-tweeted by other Twitter users in the West, oten people withlarge ollowings, ampliying their impact. The scale andintensity o the activity led some web commentators todub it the Twitter revolution. Between 7 June and 26June there were 2,024,66 tweets about the Iranianelection.For a ew days it seemed as i Iran wouldprovide conclusive proo o the webs power to remakethe world. As the dust settled, however, the complexreality emerged more clearly. A study o 79,000 tweetsabout the protests by Mike Edwards, a social networkresearcher at the Parsons New School or Design,

ound that a third were re-tweets, people passing on anoriginal posting. The majority o Mousavi supportersare young and urban, the main demographic o Twitterusers. About 93 per cent o Iranian Twitter users arebased in Tehran. Ahmadinejads supporters wereolder and rural. Twitter provided a part ial sample o

Cloud Culture

opinion in the country as a whole. Twitter is a public Keeping the cloud genuinely open or cultural exchange

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p y p bmedium and people can dip into it anonymously, so it wasan unlikely tool or secretly organising demonstrations.Traditional methods, closed social networks and bloggingmay have played a more signicant role. Most importantlythe numbers do not add up. According to Sysomos, whichanalyses social media activity, there was a surge in the

number o Twitter accounts in Iran rom 8,654 in May2009 to 9,235 in June 2009. Part o this surge, however,might have been due to Twitter users outside Iranregistering in the country to conuse the authorities. Yeteven the higher gure o 9,235 is equivalent to only 0.027per cent o Irans population (70,049,262 according to the2006 census.) A survey carried out by the The Centre orPublic Opinion and the New American Foundation ounda third o Iranians have internet access.That would meanTwitter users at the time o the revolution made up 0.082

per cent o internet users in Iran.50

Twitter was an important additional source oreal-time inormation rom the protests that becameespecially important as t raditional sources were closeddown. But in retrospect its clear that its inuencein co-ordinating a serious challenge to a powerullyentrenched regime was wildly overstated. Cloudscome and go, they balloon up into the sky and thenthey disperse. That is why cloud culture can be bothmesmerising and bewildering.

Not only do these authoritarian regimes oten usetechnology developed in the West to monitor and disruptonline dissent, they also use Western governmentpolicies, or example to crack down on illegal le sharingand monitor email trac on security grounds, in supporto their own censorship. Recent moves in Australia andthe UK to put more onus on internet service providers tocontrol how the web is used will have been welcomed byauthoritarian regimes keen to justiy their own controls.

Keeping the cloudgenuinelyopen or cultural exchangemeans we should ocus on:

providing online activists in authoritarian regimes withhelp to nd their way around rewalls and to connectthem with potential supporters outside

deending their rights to ree speech and association

avoiding restrictions in the West in the name o securityand decency that authoritarian regimes will use as anexcuse or their own eforts to control the web

empowering NGOs to monitor authoritarian regimescensorship o the web

asking Western technology companies to publicly

account or any sales o technology to authoritarianregimes that might be used to control or limit publicaccess to the web, just as arms companies are expectedto account or sales o sensitive equipment.

Copyright: Old Media Seeks Protection

from the Storm

From the point o view o many copyright owners theinternet is not a technology o cultural reedom but

o destruction: it is destroying their business modelsby making it easier to copy content or ree. Theyargue this will undermine the creation o high-qualitycommercial cultural products whether books, ilms,television. Far rom opening up a cultural cornucopia,quality culture will be blighted by a mass o low-grade,user-generated content. Critics such as Andrew Keenand Nicholas Carr 51 argue that the web is alreadydowsing us in the cultural equivalent o acid rain:

Cloud Culture

poor quality, short attention span, amateur culture will Already much o our culture that could be in the

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p q y pdisplace crated, proessional culture, which requirespatience and application.

To prevent that destruction, traditional publishersand content owners argue that they need increasedcontrol over how their content is used, reaching deepdown into how people listen to, watch and share culture.

As content can so easily be copied and shared, completecontrol over a single piece o content like a song ora book chapter would be impossible without controlover all the links made by someone sharing it. Thepromise o the open, collaborative web could eventuallylicense equally pervasive orms o control in the name oestablished commercial cultural industries threatened bythe web. Not surprisingly, content owners are pressingor expanded protections, longer copyright terms andharsher punishments or illegal downloading. Thus

as cloud culture is taking shape we also have attemptsto bring it back down to earth, with the US DigitalMillennium Copyright Act, the No Electronic Thet Act,the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act amongothers. The UK Government, in late 2009, proposedretaining the right to make changes to copyrightlegislation without needing primary legislation debatedin Parliament. All this could limit the spread, scale andcreativity o open cloud culture.

Cloud culture will breed creativity only i people

can easily collaborate, share and create. Culture,knowledge and inormation products are invariablymade up o ragments o other culture, knowledge andinormation products. I access to those ragmentsbecomes harder, because they are wrapped up incopyright, then so will the cumulative and collaborativeprocess o creativity. Our cultural clouds wil l berendered sterile and inert. Ray Charles would neverhave invented soul music.

yopen cloud is kept out o it by copyright. Accordingto the British Film Institute, or example, thousandso British lms are under copyright but are no longercommercially available. The copyright holders do notthink they will be able to make money rom thembut neither are the lms in the public domain, ree

to be used and reused. Clearing the rights to usethese orphaned works is still very hard. A tragicallyhigh proportion o our culture lies in this culturalcoma, including perhaps 95 per cent o commerciallypublished books, according to James Boyle:

We have locked up most o the twentieth century culture anddone it in a particularly inefcient and senseless way, creating vastcosts in order to convey proportionally tiny benets. Worst o all, wehave turned the system on its head. Copyright, intended to be the

servant o creativity, a means o promoting access to inormation, isbecoming an obstacle to both.52

Excessive intellectual property controls could be al lthe more damaging to emerging elds o knowledge,such as synthetic biology, i researchers nd that thebasic building blocks o the eld are legally tied up andbeyond their reach. This could prevent the developmento entirely new elds o knowledge and culture bypreventing the kind o borrowing and blending that is

at the heart o creativity.I content in the cloud becomes so entangled in

copyright and other orms o intellectual property thenit will become increasingly dicult to mingle, matchand collaborate. The creative potential o the web tocreate new mixes will be vastly reduced. To promotemore open cultural relations on the web the ollowingare important points o ocus:

Cloud Culture

Collaborative solutions need to be ound to the problem o Cloud Capitalists

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orphaned works, perhaps by allocating them to orms ocollective ownership, which would make it ar simpler orpeople seeking to enjoy or adapt the content to negotiaterights. The collective owners would own the rights andhold money or the original rights holders

Governments should resist attempts to extendcopyright terms

The copyright regime should increasingly put the onuson rights holders to justiy their need or copyright and topay or extensions. Any work not re-copyrighted ater theexpiry o its original term would automatically all intopublic ownership rather than being orphaned

The presumption should be that all cultural products are

in the public domain ater a basic period o copyright orintellectual protection has expired

New orms o creative licensing are required, modelled onopen access and creative commons, which are designedto allow sharing but also to clearly apportion credit tooriginal work and authors

Most media industries will need new business models,which are tailored to allow more interaction with content

and more peer-to-peer distribution. Countries thatexperiment successully with these models will lead thenext wave o cultural and creative industries

Ways need to be ound to create more Pro-Am culturalexchanges which will bring together the best oproessional and amateur content.

Just as traditional media companies are trying to resist theemergence o open cloud culture, so a new generation omedia companies, most created in the last decade, are tryingto prot rom its explosive growth. These are the cloudcapitalists Facebook, Google, Salesorce, Twitter that seekto make money by creating and managing clouds or us.

These cloud capitalists are the new powers behindglobal cultural relations. Their rise has sparked anincreasingly vicious civil war with the media old guard.In the autumn o 2009 Rupert Murdoch, the archetypalglobal media baron, unveiled plans to charge readersor his newspapers content online. It was virtuallyan admission that traditional newspapers would notremain commercially viable or much longer. It was alsoa broadside against Google. Murdoch accused Googleo giving people access to his newspapers content or

ree but reusing to share the advertising revenues thatGoogle garners rom its inormation search business.

This battle between old and new media powers,however, has distracted attention rom the question ohow these new global cultural platorms will seek toorganise cloud culture. Elements o their businessesresemble traditional public service culture, or exampleGoogles work with a consortium o libraries aroundthe world to digitise books that are out o copyright.However, these companies are also businesses: they

will want to organise the cloud to make money. Cloudculture will develop only i we trust remote, third-partyproviders o digital services to store our stuf or us andprovide us with platorms like YouTube, Facebook andTwitter on which we interact. There are ample reasonswhy people should not automatically trust the cloudsthese corporations are creating.

One is reliability: outages o Google servers havelet millions o Gmail users without a service and Twitter

Cloud Culture

can oten be overwhelmed by trac. Another is security: ensuring people have a diversity o potential suppliers o

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having your data, on your computer, in your oce, at leastgives the impression that it is under your control, ratherthan oating in the ether. Privacy is another issue: cloudservice providers will need to persuade people they can betrusted not to give away or lose sensitive data. There willbe disputes over who owns data: witness the recent urore

over whether Facebook owns pictures posted by its usersand members. Commercial providers o cloud services willhave strong incentives to manage their users to maximiserevenues and so to discourage them rom roaming romone service to another. We could nd that we are soenmeshed in Amazons cloud o services that transerringall our data and history to the Facebook cloud would betoo costly and troubling. Equally, we might nd the cloudproviders pushing services at us, compromising theneutrality we have come to associate with the net. Providers

o cloud services are bound to have preerred supplierso sotware and other services. Pretty soon we could ndthem managing most o our lives or us. Once again theofer o a more open collaborative culture may ironicallypave the way or more o the most intimate aspects o ourlives to be stored and controlled in vast data centres in theUS Midwest, delivering us into dependence on Google,Amazon and Facebook. To counter the threat o corporatecontrol o the cloud public policy should ocus on:

maintaining a diversity o unding or the developmento web platorms, so that some will be social and publicto complement the corporate platorms. Wikipedia is aprime example o a cloud unded by voluntary and socialcontributions. Open access science is promoting publiclyunded clouds o scientic inormation. Public unding oropen, shared cultural clouds, like the World Digital Library,will be vital as a counterpoint to more commercial services

cloud-based services; anti-monopoly legislation coveringsocial media and web platorms will be central. At somepoint Facebook will become an incumbent social network-ing platorm that stalls innovation rom new entrants

keeping open spaces or experimentation on the web,

rather than allowing incumbent media companies tooccupy emerging spaces

deending net neutrality rather than a system in whichthose that pay more large companies automaticallyget a much better service

ensuring people have reedom to move between supplierso net services and content, to avoid being locked in tocloud services provided by one supplier.

Traditional media companies are trying to stall and resistthe emergence o cloud culture. New media companiesare engaged in a battle with one another over who willcontrol which bits o the cloud. What is likely to get lostin all this are the interests o citizens and consumers.

Unequal Access to the Cloud

Cloud culture could become a new shared, common

cultural space, enabling people with diverse interests andvalues to come together. But it could also provide a way orelites to reassert themselves. In reality, despite cheaper,more powerul technologies, access to the culturalcommons is deeply unequal.

A case in point is the Arican state o Mali, one othe poorest in the world. Mali, a democracy with ewrestrictions on reedom o the press, has more than40 newspapers in several languages; more than 50

Cloud Culture

community and private radio stations; cable and publici l i i i i i d l i i

a plug to read a newspaper but you do to run mosth l h h

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service television stations; a privatised telecommunicationsutility and one o Aricas oldest internet service providers,as well as a wealth o ancient culture in Timbuktu. YetMalis poverty means that its population o just over 2million has just over one million mobile phones, 835,000landlines, 570,000 radios, 60,000 televisions and

perhaps only 30,000 regular web users. In principle Malishould be well placed to join the cloud but in practice its along way of.53

Nor is it alone. The World Bank estimated in2005 that there were still ten times as many mobilephone subscribers in rich countries as in low-incomecountries.54 In Burundi, Ethiopia and Sierra Leone lessthan three per cent o the population had a mobile phonein 2007. That year in the most developed countriesthere were 52 telephone subscriptions per 00 people,

compared with 3 per 00 in the poorest countries.Mobile phone users in the rich world are much morelikely to get the smartphones designed or creativity andweb access.55

There are similar discrepancies in the way peopleaccess and use the web. In 2006 ewer than ve per cento Aricans used the web compared with more than 50per cent in the G8 countries. Even within rich regionssuch as Europe there are huge disparities. In 2007 onlya th o Bulgarians and Romanians were connected

to the web, compared with more than 75 per cent inthe Nordic countries. Access to the net is growing astin some middle-income developing countries, such asSouth Korea and Brazil. But it is rising only very slowlyin low-income countries: 0.06 per cent o the populationin low-income countries had access to the web in 997,rising to six per cent ten years later. Underlying thisstory o unequal access to the cloud are other, equallyimportant actors. Electricity is one. You do not need

computers. In Ethiopia less than one per cent o therural population has access to electricity and only 3 percent o households have regular electricity supply. Moreimportant still, only hal the population can read. 56

When people rom the poorest countries arrivein the digital world, they will nd people in the rich

countries a long way ahead. Most o the protocols,sotware and platorms will have been created byorganisations rom the rich world, especially the US.For cloud culture to genuinely promote global culturalrelations, rather than more intense interactions amonghighly connected people in the developed world, weshould ocus on:

developing open source tools that will allow localsolutions to emerge and develop capabilities outside the

dominant regions

creating more initiatives like Wikipedia, a model withmany diferent applications in diferent cultures andlanguages. Wikipedia is public, shared and diverse

promoting more global exchanges such as Kiva, whichallows resources and skills in one place to be matchedwith need in another. Kiva was established in October2005 and in its rst our years it enabled more than

57,000 lenders to provide loans worth more than79 million to more than 00 eld partners in 46countries who have invested the money in thousandso entrepreneurs.57 There is huge potential to createmore o these social exchanges, not just to allow peopleto invest in entrepreneurs, but to exchange culturalresources as well. This could create new ways to undgrassroots cultural development just as Kiva is undinggrass roots entrepreneurial development.

Cloud Culture

Cloud culture will enable mass, real-time, sel-i ti d ll b ti t l t Thi h


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communication and collaboration, at low cost. This hashuge potential or promoting a vast array o culturalexchanges, many o them eeting and small scale.But the potential or a more cosmopolitan, open,cloud culture will be realised only i we tackle the ourmajor threats to it: increasingly intrusive government

censorship; controls over content by traditional copyrightholders; the power o the new global media companies toshape the cloud to their own ends; and the vastly unequalopportunities open to people in the poorest parts o theworld to inuence cloud culture.

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A Future of

Many Clouds

We are living at a time o huge cultural possibility. Wehave access to untold stores o culture in digital orm.We have more tools to allow us to search, modiy andamend the ingredients o these stores and to create ourown cultural products. We are more able than ever tond outlets or our cultural creativity and to connectwith people who share our interests, our culture.

The web is changing culture more quickly andprooundly than it is changing politics and evenbusiness. It is changing how we express ourselves,

how we communicate, how we share and nd what isimportant to us. Culture and media in the decade justgone was dominated by the rise o Web 2.0 and socialmedia. The decade to come will be made by the rise ocloud culture, a culture based on even more intensivecollaboration and connection. That will undamentallychange how we relate to one another through culture.

In the twentieth century cultural experience wasmainly associated with watching, listening and reading.The dominant mass culture television is engaging

without being too demanding. It ofers stimulationwhile people are at rest. As a result it is oten wonderulbut oddly hollow. The traditional a lternative to thismass culture o enjoyable watching was the moredemanding and educative high culture o intellectualinspiration and challenge. But now another alternativeis emerging, a mass cu lture which is more participativeand collaborative, which is about searching, doing,sharing, making, modiying. It is stimulating because

Cloud Culture A Future of Many Clouds

people become active part icipants, makers o culturenot simply receivers

to it rom governments and companies, new and old,seeking to control cloud culture or their own ends The


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not simply receivers.The optimists see in this shit great possibility, a

global platorm or cultural expression and exchange,which will be more open and connected, more diverseand plural. The optimists see vast new clouds o culturalexpression mushrooming across the landscape, in a

variety o wonderul shapes and sizes. The scepticswarn that these clouds a

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