Just so you can’t say I didn’t mention the clouds 105 In 2023, a year after the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, this number has practically doubled, reaching 120 zettabytes, with a prediction of reaching 181 zettabytes until 2025, consid- ering mainly the required capacity of the applications of artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, cryptocurrencies and metaverse (Statista, 2023b). And all this is done without a public awareness that data is physical and that storing it has a direct environmental impact (Parikka, 2016). As Friedrich Kittler, one of the pioneers of media and information materialism, pointed out, the greater the digitality, the greater the materiality (Kittler, 1997), and, paradoxically, the greater the materiality, the more invisible it becomes in devices like smartphones, that we carry in the palm of our hand. This leads me to suggest that in the age of significant climate and planetary crises, materiality is the message. 2. The Empire of the Cloud This cloud, therefore, has nothing of those vaporous, nomadic, immaterial and evasive features, like the real clouds over our heads; the “cloud” is pure hardware, hardcore. Today, Zuckerberg, Gates, Bezos, and Musk possess the largest fortunes on the planet, with the latter two investing billions in space rockets for tourism or the colonization of Mars, the final frontier from which they hope to extract the next source of profit in a post-catastrophe scenario. The term “offshore,” so characteristic of the era of globalization, has now become “off-planet.”
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