There is no Cloud

The Cloud.
It sounds so serene. So elegant and tranquil.
So far removed from the cut and thrust of silicon valleys and snail mail lethargy of the National Broadband Rollout strategy.

So wrongly mis-named, The Cloud...

There were large format photographers like Minor White and Olive Cotton who spent many contemplative moments waiting for clouds to ready themselves to be exposed on big sheets of film, with not a hard drive, USB, thunderbolt, firewire or even a floppy disk in sight.

There are Cloud Appreciation Society's even.

But the way companies gush about The Cloud and cloud-based this or that is the epitome of spin.

It's just a dirty big warehouse somewhere with a gazilliion dirty big hard drives, that cross references your every geographical movement, purchase, fitbit update, hashtag and mouse click so that now when I look up the weather radar to see what the real clouds are unleashing, pop up adverts appear on the very model camera I'm looking to buy.

I love clouds, but I'm afraid of The Cloud.