The internet isn’t what we think. It is physical, subject to the vagaries of nature and time, just as our bodies are. Like us, it will flicker and fade. The internet’s fragility crops up everywhere: in the sudden disappearance of a relied-upon website, and in the endless thrum of posts, images, and videos.
This article has almost nothing to say. It’s a bit like writing an article saying: “The water that comes out of your tap doesn’t just magically appear through an interdimensional portal. It actually relies on a whole infrastructure of water treatment plants, reservoirs, pumps and pipes. Sometimes a pipe springs a leak and actual real living breathing people have to go and fix it.”
Yeah thanks, what are you actually trying to say? Nothing? Ok.
I upvoted because yes you are right to a degree, but communication is really important and shapes the relation the average consumer has with the product.
Your tap water comes through pipes, laid in the ground, some rusty some not, some you get warnings that they’re not safe to drink from. The systems around it are made to highlight its health risks if any.
Clouds though are clean, white, up in the sky, they’re a force of nature. using it as a metaphor almost makes it sound like we’ve harnessed something that was already there, it doesn’t instill the same image as stacks and stacks of computers in a heavily ventilated building that could be around the corner.
You could reasonably group this together with the abstraction of files and folders to apps for gen alpha and newer, now settings for your application aren’t in a readily accessible file, a program isn’t just an executable, it’s an ✨app✨ that has its own settings and folder structure hidden away from you. All the transparency of how things work is polished out of the experience, all in order to instill trust and increase profits. A layman won’t realise that the viruses his pc can get are also something that can happen to “the cloud”, similarly what files are there to worry about being stolen from a phone when they can’t even see them because the app has them in its own folders?