
Cloud and Field: On the resurgence of “field guides” in a networked age - Petiver
https://placesjournal.org/article/cloud-and-field/
======
danielvf
Warning - this article is in the academic literary genre in which you score
points for name dropping, making "connections", asking "questions", and using
as many words as possible. I was unable to find the point of the article.

Sample:

> ...we seek once again to “make visible the invisible,” to open the “black
> box,” while also, paradoxically, aestheticizing the wires and algorithms
> themselves. We have accelerated the cycles of making-visible and making-
> invisible that are so entangled with Western urban planning and its
> ideologies. How do we reconcile our competing aspirations for ordered
> knowledge about how the world works with our desire to believe in its magic?

~~~
beachstartup
yeah, i hate this style of writing. it's designed to make people feel dumb,
but if you're smart enough to actually parse the language, you realize they're
not saying anything.

also, they just draw the wrong conclusions.

 _The Cloud is composed of multiple levels of code, and no one person can see,
let alone interpret, the full stack._

this isn't true. i've worked with a handful of people throughout my career
that could tell you exactly how the entire thing works, from x86 registers all
the way to javascript running in the browser and everything in between,
including details of the content addressable memory on the layer 2 switches!
certainly not literally everything that exists, but they understand the entire
stack for sure. i suspect there are at least one of these types that exist at
every 'cloud' company actually building products.

i think to a lay person technology just seems impossible to fully understand
because they do not understand even the most basic things. it's just
projection.

~~~
fleitz
I hear these people are called 'full stack developers' even. Though I wouldn't
want to use the colonial methods of 'looking, collecting, and record-keeping.'
I've heard that doing these things is how you understand systems from front to
back.

I wonder what will happen when she finds out about the master/slave
relationship inherent in replicated datasets. Is Cassandra transgressing the
boundaries of colonial data replication?

~~~
Kalium
Towards a transgressive hermaneutics of colonial replication in postmodern
data storage?

------
fleitz
Interesting paper, I wonder what her thoughts on the hermeneutics of quantum
gravity are.

~~~
drewda
Ha! I got a good laugh out of this comment.

For those wanting the "inside baseball" reference:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair)

------
slr555
I am reminded of Foucault's referencing of Borges' fictional Chinese
encyclopedia, Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. Which divides
animals into 14 categories:

    
    
        Those that belong to the emperor
        Embalmed ones
        Those that are trained
        Sucking pigs
        Mermaids (or Sirens)
        Fabulous ones
        Stray dogs
        Those that are included in this classification
        Those that tremble as if they were mad
        Innumerable ones
        Those drawn with a very fine camel hair brush 
        Et cetera
        Those that have just broken the flower vase
        Those that, at a distance, resemble flies
    

I think people have realized for some time that all efforts at cataloging
carry the baggage of ethnocentrism and cultural biases.

PS I am agreeing with danielvf.

------
fl0wenol
The "cloud" is not organized in such a way as the article wishes it to be, to
have ecologies to be explored, such that a field guide or niche study is
appropriate.

Lots of assumptions required to back the parallels, most of them off-base, and
so the article kind of just confuses like urban exploration and eco/techno-
tourism as some kind of like 21st Darwinian voyage stuff that will tell us the
hidden structures we're creating and unintentionally relying on as a new
networked, data-laden society.

At least I think that's what they're getting at.

The linked videos are cool though on their own merits.

~~~
sp332
The central sentence is a few paragraphs in: "And again we are searching for
the right metaphors and models to guide our investigation." That's what the
whole article is about. People are looking for a useful way to describe the
masses of new infrastructure, and this article lists some of them. It also
calls out past and present ways of looking at the world, for context.

