Just so you can’t say I didn’t mention the clouds 103 while public services are increasingly delegated to artificial intelligence systems. The political distortions precipitated by an “authoritar- ian backlash” and the “libertarian use of cyberspace,” as Gilberto Gil has described (Cultura e Mercado, 2011), have led algorithms to evolve from mere “employees” of the apparatus (Flusser, 1984) to agents of political manipulation, exploiting the opaque logic of platforms, which remains inaccessible to most users. I draw attention here to the significance of the term “cloud” in the context of digital data. The data “cloud” is a marketing concept created by technology companies to sell data storage space on remote servers housed in data centers around the globe. These massive structures store and process data via the Internet, offering a service that is allegedly “flexible, reliable, secure, fast, and private,” according to providers, aiming for effi- ciency, automation, and data rationalization. There is a linguistic trick here: the natural element “cloud” is co-opted as a metaphor (Wisnik, 2018) for services that, like their atmospheric counter- part, are omnipresent but always physically out of reach—an element that inhabits an ever-distant and elusive horizon. The planet-image becomes even more eerie when we consider that planetary communication and data network has seen its greatest acceleration in the past ten years (since the mid-2010s), with predictions of tripling until 2030. During this period, thousands of data centers will have emerged on Earth’s surface, either within cities or in remote, high-security locations (Figure 4). The overwhelming majority of data centers are in the U.S. (5,375), while Germany has 522, the U.K. 517, and China 448, according to statistics (Statista, 2023a), indicating the geopoliti- cal imbalance of the Internet complex’s super infrastructure.
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