In Which I Criticize The Cloud on a Cloud-Based Website

About and TOC

These are snips from a graduate essay I wrote... and then rewrote to be more casual.

What we save and where

The Cloud is Bad

Can The Cloud be Resisted?

Bibliography

Not all of these have links, unfortunately... the ones that do will open in a new tab.

• Belcic, I. (2021, October 21). The worst celebrity hacks.
• Duffy. (2006). A very personal possession: Eamon Duffy tells how a careful study of surviving medieval Books of Hours can tell us much about the spiritual and temporal life of their owners and much more besides. History Today, 56(11), 12.
• Duhigg. (2015). How Companies Learn Your Secrets. In The Best Business Writing 2013 (pp. 421–444). Columbia University Press.
• Johnson, E. (2017). Lost in the cloud: Cloud storage, privacy, and suggestions for protecting users' data. Stanford Law Review, 69(3), 867–909.
• Langos, C & Giancaspro, M. (2015). Does Cloud Storage Lend Itself to Cyberbullying? IEEE Cloud Computing, 2(5), 70–74.
• McGlynn, C., Rackley, E., & Houghton, R. (2017). Beyond ‘Revenge Porn’: The Continuum of Image-Based Sexual Abuse. Feminist Legal Studies, 25(1), 25–46.
• Rosato, D. (2020, January 28). What Your Period Tracker App Knows About You. Consumer Reports.
• Sanborn, V. (2010, November 24). 18th Century Cookery Books and the British Housewife. Jane Austen’s World.
• Smith, C. S. (2020). How the cloud has opened new doors for hackers. The Washington Post.

What we save and where

Based forms of storage

Medieval Books of Hours: identified marginalia include edits to the calendar and the insertion of favorite prayers (Duffy, 2006).

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Regency-era Women's Household Books: a catch-all for their favorite recipes, home remedies, quotations, and other miscellaneous bits of information, as well as journaled thoughts (Sanborn, 2010).

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Mattel Password Journal I WANTED ONE SO BADLY

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Your own hard drive and external formats That shit is yours

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Bad forms of storage

The Cloud.

The Cloud is Bad

The Cloud is so convenient, and also so inconvenient because:

1. Cyberbullying and hacking. Send your nudes via snail mail. Langos & Giancaspro, 2015, McGlynn et al., 2017, Belcic, 2021
2. Corporations know everything about you, and create an advertising data profile that can be used against you. Ever felt like getting life insurance denied because of your menstrual cycle app, or explaining to your dad why you suddenly started receiving Target ads for baby supplies? Rosato, 2020, Duhigg, 2015
3. When you are the commodity, you commodify yourself. You are not A Type of Girl, or an Influencer, or a list of psychiatric diagnoses. You were once a person; you are now an ouroboros, commodifing yourself so you can continue to consume.

Can The Cloud be Resisted?

Not really. Everything is on The Cloud now and it is impossible to navigate the Web without Amazon aws. The article I read about this was not in my essay and I can't remember what it was called, rats.

Can't we do SOMETHING?

Sure.

• Agitate for legislation that will hold corporations accountable for the way they violate our privacy. Johnson, 2017
• Become a person again. Stop commodifying yourself. I don't even do this, sorry.

It's not really your fault-- our social conditions create an environment where we are exhausted and willing to trade our privacy for convenience. But we at least need to talk about this.

Go back home!