“a writer who doesn’t want her work to be read by everyone doesn’t deserve to be read by anyone”
While the question of cloud computing – is it a good thing? What are its benefits? How will it change the way we interact online? – sounds like it properly belongs in the province of geekdom, I’m of the view that it also deserves to be discussed as a social justice issue. The consequences of cloud computing need to be considered by non-technical activists. Why? Because as cloud computing goes mainstream, it will drive a further wedge between the rich and the poor.
Note that while my focus here is on text and publishing, the concerns I express apply more widely to the question of access to all digital culture.)
What is cloud computing?
The personal computer began as a stand-alone device. It was like a calculator with a bigger keyboard, or a typewriter that could remember things and check spelling. When I bought a Mac in 1984, I did everything locally. There was nothing on my machine that I didn’t put there myself by copying it from a floppy disk. I didn’t have an internet connection so there was nothing on my machine that came from anyone else’s machine via a remote server. Besides, in 1984, that would have been impossible because there was no such thing as an ISP yet.
For the most part, internet connectivity hasn’t changed things. Even though you may view content that resides on a remote server, that content is delivered to you by copying it to your local machine. When you view a web page, you are viewing content that has been copied from a server to your local machine’s cache. Ditto for YouTube videos. Ditto for emails. And so on.
Cloud computing refers to the situation where your content resides not on your local machine but on a remote server; you use your local machine simply as a point of access to that content. You probably have already encountered limited purpose examples of cloud computing. Online banking is the most obvious example. You access the bank’s servers to obtain your account information and to perform financial transactions. None of this happens on your local machine; all you see on your local machine is the result of your transactions. Another obvious example is pay-per-view TV where your media provider delivers digital content from its servers to your local computer (a PVR box) for temporary storage. After viewing, the program is automatically deleted from your PVR and the only way you can view it again is to access the media provider’s servers.
Kobo introduced cloud computing to online book selling. It learned from the complaints leveled against its competitor, Amazon, that when you lose or break a Kindle, you lose all the books stored on it. Kobo answered this problem by designing a different kind of service. When you buy a book from Kobo, you are buying a particular kind of license. You access your books through the Kobo site. If you lose or break your Kobo eReader, you haven’t lost any of your purchases. Simply access the Kobo site and download your purchases to a replacement device. When you buy an ebook from Kobo, what you buy isn’t a file, but the right to access a file.
Kobo is not a “pure” instance of cloud computing. It still downloads a file to your local eReader. You can’t do anything with the file (apart from read the text) because it’s protected by DRM, but the file resides on your device.
It looks like Google editions is about to change all that by introducing “pure” cloud computing to the publishing industry. While Google has been tight-lipped about its plans, it appears that it will be rolling out a service that feeds content to local devices for consumption without copying files to the local devices.
Why a justice issue?
As literacy goes digital, the barriers to the tools of literacy will increase.
There is a danger that cloud computing will produce a divide in the quality of experience that people have when they engage text. We already encounter this divide in traditional computing. NGO’s have viewed access to hardware and internet connections as a vital part of any effort to promote development. The rise of computer literacy in India, for example, has figured large in the country’s economic boom.
But what good is some hardware and a fast internet connection if you need a credit card to access content? We don’t have to go half way around the world to pose this question. We could ask the same question on behalf of a homeless man in Toronto who keeps himself informed by sitting at a computer terminal at the Toronto Reference Library.
Barrier #1: Access to Credit
Cloud computing makes its money through micro-transactions. People purchase information as a consumable and the purchase is financed by debt i.e. paid by credit card. (Even downloading a free ebook from Apple’s iBook service requires a credit card.)
Marginalized people don’t have access to debt. Or they have so much of it they can’t get any more.
As the meltdown of ’08 demonstrated, many lower-middle income earners were marketed access to debt in the guise of financial “products”. This was an exercise in exploitation that was allowed to happen because of an absence of market regulation. Yet the marketing reach of Google far exceeds that of financial institutions, and there is no reason to suppose that people who cannot afford a subprime mortgage are better equipped to resist the enticements Google offers in the purely unregulated marketplace it occupies.
In traditional transactions, the delivery of goods on credit has often given rise to an exploitative relationship. Why do we think this will change as more of our activities shift to the cloud?
There is enormous cultural pressure to engage media delivered from the cloud. Those who cannot afford it will be left out, or more likely, will participate beyond the reach of mainstream media.
Barrier #2: Inability to Lend
The lifeblood of cloud computing, at least as practised by Kobo and perhaps also by Google, is DRM. Locked files are temporarily copied to local devices. But a locked file can’t be loaned.
There are many circumstances when it seems natural to lend text:
• sharing a newspaper at breakfast or picking up a discarded newspaper on the subway
• buying a used book
• borrowing a book from a friend
• donating old books for a fundraiser
• libraries
And yet even producers of DRM-free ebooks discourage lending. Smashwords includes this notice with each ebook sold on its site:
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Like recycling, lending is naturally antagonistic to the cloud economy. Lending can be viewed as an act of resistance. But a system that makes lending impossible narrows the avenues for resistance.
Resistance
For the first time in human history, the written word may be deployed as an instrument of enslavement.
This won’t happen because of anything intrinsic to the words, but because of the system by which words are delivered to their readers. As book retailing (and all digital culture) becomes a creature of the cloud, this will foster a dependency based on debt. Those who can afford debt will be unaffected. Those who can’t will pay dearly to participate. And those with no access to debt will be shut out. There won’t be any blurring of the lines as there is now when a man can pull a discarded newspaper from the recycling bin or pass an hour in a library’s reading room.
Although the scenario I present seems alarmist because it presupposes the extinction of print text, nevertheless such an extinction is precisely what large media providers like Google aim to achieve. And while some scoff at the idea that physical books will cease to exist, it is fair to suppose that as more resources drift to the clouds, this will impoverish the catalogs of print providers. While I don’t think we need to resist this trend (after all, a cultural change is, of itself, a neutral event), I do think we need to resist the way this cultural change may be exploited to exclude the marginalized. So here are a couple thoughts about how we might resist these marginalizing tendencies:
1. Writers have power.
There is a venerable tradition that sees the writer as allied with the underclass. Unfortunately, most writers are ignoramuses when it comes to the brave new world of text-in-the-clouds. If authors knew how much they were giving away to publishers and retailers at the expense of their readers, they might negotiate terms differently, or simply circumvent the usual players in the book industry.
I am of the belief that a writer who doesn’t want her work to be read by everyone doesn’t deserve to be read by anyone. Or, to be more blunt: it’s about the reader, stupid.
A writer can better serve the reader by making sure cloud-free copies of her work are available e.g. via personal web space or alternative portals.
2. Libraries matter.
Ideologically, cloud computing fits nicely with libertarianism. There is no such thing as a publicly funded and publicly accessible cloud. A real threat exists that within a short time all literary output will be surrendered to private interests. Conservative interests in the U.S. see no need for public libraries. See for example the on-again-off-again relationship Florida’s libraries have enjoyed with the State legislature. But Americans can’t hold a candle to Alberta, where Ralph Klein’s conservatives instituted library user fees in the 1980’s, the only jurisdiction in North America ever to have done so. The cloud, entirely a creature of private interests, will only work to further erode the position of libraries.
And yet a publicly funded cloud for access to all forms of media seems a natural extension of the public library – an institution dedicated to fostering learning and preserving culture for the benefit of everyone. Imagine what that would look like. Imagine what it would mean for average families trying to make ends meet.
Such an institution might serve as an important counterweight to the overwhelming power of monopolistic global media providers like Google.
Afterword: I note that libraries currently lend ebooks which, thanks to DRM controls, expire after a limited period. However, these assume ownership of an eReader, and so this form of lending can hardly be viewed as egalitarian in the sense of traditional library lending.