‘Ten years ago the Cloud didn’t exist and now it inarguably constitutes the largest entity our species has ever created. But the Cloud isn’t a fluffy blob floating above Manhattan. The blob is made of an almost staggeringly boring and unimaginable complex assembly of wires, routers, switches, and storage devices spread around the planet, usually in big box-like structures in the dullest parts of the town you live in. There is no way to make the Cloud sexy: Brad Pitt will never star in the movie version of the Cloud. Nobody would star in the movie version. The movie version would be a twenty-four hour nannycam in the ceiling of Data Containment Vault Number Seven in Google’s data mothership in The Dalles, Oregon.’
- Douglas Coupland, Shopping in Jail: Ideas, Essays and Stories fro the Incerasingly Real Twenty-First Century, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2013, p.87.