Having taken the Water Wiennies and the Jarts out of the closet, now seems like an ideal time to put Rough Type on ice for the summer. Posts will be rare for a spell.

The rise of cloud computing raises a lot of legal issues, and one of the thorniest involves the variations in national laws governing the storage and use of personal and other information. Controls on data threaten, for instance, to prevent certain information from being stored in data centers outside a user’s home country, hence eroding some of the efficiencies promised by a global cloud.

And yet does the location of the data center really matter? I was listening recently to comments by an executive from Mozy, the online backup service. Noting that Mozy allows its customers to use a personal encryption key to encrypt the data that they store with the company (making it impossible for Mozy or anyone other than the owner to decipher it), he asked whether such encrypted information resides legally where the data is stored or where the encryption key is held. It’s an interesting and important question, as encryption promises to separate “information” from the bits of data that carry it.

Back in 1993, Eric Schmidt, then the Sun kid, now the Google dad, wrote in an email to the telecosmic George Gilder: “When the network becomes as fast as the processor, the computer hollows out and spreads across the network.”

The Economist closed its recent article on cloud computing by sketching out a picture of where this technological trend is leading:

In future the geography of the cloud is likely to get even more complex. “Virtualisation” technology already allows the software running on individual servers to be moved from one data centre to another, mainly for back-up reasons. One day soon, these “virtual machines” may migrate to wherever computing power is cheapest, or energy is greenest. Then computing will have become a true utility—and it will no longer be apt to talk of computing clouds, so much as of a computing atmosphere.

Bill Thompson has noted that, as governments and corporations become more aware of, and either more nervous or more excited about, the ability to shift data and data processing effortlessly across borders, the “computing atmosphere” may get very foggy very fast, with the cloud turning “into a miasma … heavy with menace.” Through the noxious mist, Thompson can even hear hounds baying.

James Urquhart describes how the idea of the itinerant computer – a feather of software code wafting from data center to data center – is rapidly becoming, at a technical level, a reality:

The concept of “moving” servers around the world was greatly enhanced by the live motion technologies offered by all of the major virtualization infrastructure players (e.g. VMotion). With these technologies (as you all probably know by now), moving a server from one piece of hardware to another is as simple as clicking a button. Today, most of that convenience is limited to within a single network, but with upcoming SLAuto federation architectures and standards that inter-LAN motion will be greatly simplified over the coming years.

Once you’re able to “move your complete processing state from place to place as processing requires, without losing a beat,” a kind of legal arbitrage becomes possible:

So, run your registration process in the USA, your banking steps in Switzerland, and your gambling algorithms in the Bahamas. Or, market your child-focused alternative reality game in the US, but collect personal information exclusively on servers in Madagascar. It may still be technically illegal from a US perspective, but who do they prosecute? … I know there are a million roadblocks here, but I also know both the corporate world and underworld have proven themselves determined and ingenious technologists when it comes to these kinds of problems.

Gregory Ness suggests that the world’s new spice trails may be computing trails:

Over the last thousand or so years we’ve seen spice trails generate massive wealth in the Middle East, shipping lanes open up sizable agricultural and mining projects in less-developed regions; and steam, factories and electricity generate yet another wave of disproportionate winners. The wealth of North America in the last two decades has increasingly come from information technology and energy as manufacturing has chased low cost labor to nations with lower standards of living.

When spice trade routes shifted to the ocean the overall Middle East economy went from optimism to despair, from science and enlightenment to xenophobia. Factories gradually replaced artisans around the world and agriculture went through a series of cycles depending on access to trade routes and distances from markets (in addition to weather and practices, etc). A coming shift to cloud computing could be as influential in wealth distribution as any previous shift in factors of production and access.

Ness concludes: “It may only be a matter of time before we hear a politician talk about the evils of ‘cloudsourcing.'” For the moment, though, they’re celebrating in Lenoir, under an almost cloudless sky.

Wikipedia has long promoted itself as “the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit.” But Jimmy Wales offers a new, circumscribed slogan in a column in today’s Observer. Wikipedia is now, according to Wales, “the online encyclopedia in which any reasonable person can join us in writing and editing entries on any encyclopedic topic.” The old slogan was the language of the bazaar. The new one is the language of the club.

(Disclosure: I’m on Encyclopedia Britannica’s editorial board of advisors.)

Alan Taylor’s photojournalism blog, The Big Picture, has been receiving some well-deserved praise. Check it out.

If supermarkets today decided to give away hot dogs for free, then more people would consume hot dogs at their cookouts this weekend and fewer people would consume hamburgers – even if people in general like hamburgers a bit more than hot dogs. Demand is elastic, and it tends to move in the opposite direction from price. Make something cheaper and people will buy more of it, often substituting it for something else they would have actually preferred to buy if the price hadn’t changed. Give something away, and the effect will be magnified. We turn into gluttons, stuffing free hot dogs into our mouths until nausea sets in.

The price elasticity of demand applies to information as well as meat products. Make information free, and we’ll become gluttons of information, as Rob Horning notes in an interesting post today:

As behavioral economists (most vociferously, Dan Ariely) have pointed out, we find the promise of free things hard to resist (even when a little thinking reveals that the free-ness is illusory). So when with very little effort we can accumulate massive amounts of “free” stuff from various places on the internet, we can easily end up with 46 days (and counting) worth of unplayed music on a hard drive. We end up with a permanent 1,000+ unread posts in our RSS reader, and a lingering, unshakable feeling that we’ll never catch up, never be truly informed, never feel comfortable with what we’ve managed to take in, which is always in the process of being undermined by the free information feeds we’ve set up for ourselves. We end up haunted by the potential of the free stuff we accumulate, and our enjoyment of any of it becomes severely impinged. The leisure and unparalleled bounty of a virtually unlimited access to culture ends up being an endless source of further stress, as we feel compelled to take it all in. Nothing sinks in as we try to rush through it all, and our rushing does nothing to keep us from falling further behind—often when I attempt to tackle the unread posts in my RSS reader, I end up finding new feeds to add, and so on, and I end up further behind than when I started.

Information may be free, but, as Horning explains, it exacts a price in the time required to collect, organize, and consume it. As we binge on the Net, the time available for other intellectual activities – like, say, thinking – shrinks. Eventually, we get bloated, mentally, and a kind of intellectual nausea sets in. But we can’t stop because – hey – it’s free.

And, yes, your brain does look fat.

Aphorism #1: To a man with a blog, everything looks like fodder.

Geert Lovink ends his 2006 essay Blogging, the nihilist impulse with this remarkable paragraph:

Can we talk of a “fear of media freedom”? It is too easy to say that there is freedom of speech and that blogs materialize this right. The aim of radical freedom, one could argue, is to create autonomy and overcome the dominance of media corporations and state control and to no longer be bothered by “their” channels. Most blogs show an opposite tendency. The obsession with news factoids borders [on] the extreme. Instead of selective appropriation, there is over-identification and straight out addiction, in particular to the speed of real-time reporting. Like Erich Fromm (author of Fear of Freedom), we could read this as “a psychological problem” because existing information is simply reproduced and in a public act of internalization. Lists of books that still have to be read, a common feature on blogs, lead in the same direction. According to Fromm, freedom has put us in an unbearable isolation. We thus feel anxious and powerless. Either we escape into new dependencies or realize a positive freedom that is based upon “the uniqueness and individuality of man”. “The right to express our thoughts means something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own.” The freedom from traditional media monopolies leads to new bondages, in this case to the blog paradigm, where there is little emphasis on positive freedom, on what to [do] with the overwhelming functionality and the void of the empty, white entry window. We do not hear enough about the tension between the individual self and the “community”, “swarms”, and “mobs” that are supposed to be part of the online environment. What we instead see happening on the software side are daily improvements of ever more sophisticated (quantitive) measuring and manipulation tools (in terms of inbound linking, traffic, climbing higher on the Google ladder, etc.). Isn’t the document that stands out the one that is not embedded in existing contexts? Doesn’t the truthness lie in the unlinkable?

From this perspective, the blogosphere, and indeed the entire link-denominated Web, is not a machine for exposing the truth but rather one for hiding it. For Google, and for its users, the unlinkable does not just lack value; it doesn’t exist. The overriding goal, for bloggers and other purveyors of online content, is the creation of the linkable, the link-worthy: that which will immediately attract approval or disapproval, that which is easily assimilated. Bloggers break the mass media bauble, then spend all day in the nursery playing with the shards. Lovink guotes Baudrillard: “If there was in the past an upward transcendence, there is today a downward one. This is, in a sense, the second Fall of Man Heidegger speaks of: the fall into banality, but this time without any possible redemption.”

A rephrasing: Does truth begin where the long tail ends?

Twitter is often referred to as a “micro-blogging platform,” but twittering seems more like antiblogging, or at least an escape – retreat? – from blogging. Blogging is the soapbox in the park, the shout in the street; Twitter is the whispering of a clique. You can easily see why it’s compelling, but you can just as easily see its essential creepiness. (At least it’s up-front about its creepiness, using the term “follower” in place of the popular euphemism “friend.”)

Aphorism #2: To a man with a Twitter account, every action is a pretext.

What are you doing? is the question Twitter asks you to answer. But in the world of Twitter, there can be only one honest answer: I am twittering. Any other answer is a fib, a fabrication – a production.

As with other media of the self, Twitter makes the act subservient to its expression. It turns us into observers of our own lives, and not in the traditional sense of self-consciousness (watching with the inner eye) but in the mass media sense (watching with the eye of the producer). As the Observer Effect tells us, the act of observing the act changes the act. So how does Twitter warp the lives of twitterers? If truth lies in the unlinkable, does life lie in the untweetable?

Yet if Nietzsche’s typewriter pushed him further into the aphoristic mode and set the stage for some of his greatest works, might not Twitter be an empty cage awaiting its resident genius? It’s worth remembering, in any case, one of Nietzsche’s aphorisms: “Talking about oneself can also be a means to conceal oneself.” That’s a tweet worth twittering.