One of the modern industry terms that never fails to get on my nerves is “the cloud.” And I can understand that, for many people, uploading their images to iCloud is just sort of a magical fluffy concept that looks plenty like this. The term actually developed from a common industry shorthand used to describe The Internet. In countless non-nondescript and most likely poorly lit offices some shabby network engineer was, at one point, tasked with creating a network diagram. While that engineer could succinctly describe all devices that he or she has control over, the Internet just defies pictographic description. It’s not really a word you would want to draw in a game of Pictionary. It’s so obviously complex that reducing it to a single object is hilarious.
Eventually all those network diagrams just included a sort of amorphous blob. This is the magic box of packet pushing into which you dump things and those things are (mostly) recreated out on the other side.
Arthur Clarke once stated that “Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The closer you get to the actual machinery that runs the magic, though, the more it starts to look like machinery. It’s power hungry, expensive, loud, and hot. The enormous amount of work that it takes to keep everything running is just sort of dismissed in a hand-wavey manner by calling this amazing thing “the cloud.” If every packet plumber took a lunch at the same time the entire operation would be a trainwreck without the added benefit of cool aerial photos of the carnage.
I’m not the only one that takes offense. A very popular extension makes the web a more amusing place. It’s much more amusing to read about people sending their very large RAW images up to their Cloud now.
So support your local network engineers. Without them, we wouldn’t be able to secretly hate but simultaneously be jealous of Rich kids of Instagram. If you are thinking there must be a German word for that feeling, I’m sure you can pull it out of the cloud.