Trask Avenue

All buzz centers on “the cloud.” You no longer need to download songs or movies or books to your gizmo of choice. You no longer need to worry about computer storage for your photos and personal files. Those productivity applications you use, you don’t need to run them from your PC. Everything can be forever accessed, run and stored in and from “the cloud.”

I’m sure this is a gross oversimplification, but my understanding of “the cloud” is all your data – from movies to songs to Word files to photos to applications and beyond – resides on servers found elsewhere and is fetched wirelessly by you. When I say “elsewhere” I mean elsewhere on the planet Earth, not literally in a cloud. I’m sure the facilities storing all this digital content are super secret and located eight stories underground in nuclear-safe bunkers. Retrieval occurs through some sort of amazing wireless communication protocol that literally sends messages to outer space from your device, shoots them back to Earth, communicates with the super secret servers, finds and gets your stuff, blasts it back to outer space and then funnels it down to you in a matter of seconds. In many ways it sounds similar to a hard-wired network where files are centrally located on servers and retrieved as needed by those connected to the network. Only now there are no hard wires and the network consists of everyone everywhere. This is all packaged neatly under the nifty moniker “the cloud.”

Although the cloud concept is rather mind-blowing, it makes me feel old and very fogeyish. I do not like the idea of my stuff being stored somewhere other than my house. There’s something very reassuring about knowing your things are maintained by you and accessible only by you. As one example, I own an iPod. I love that spectacular little piece of artistry. Adore it. Nonetheless, I’m the guy who still purchases CDs. When I bring home a new CD it is immediately ripped into my iTunes library. Do I actually pull out the CD and listen to it as I did in the pre-iPod days? Yes, but just in the car and only because I don’t have the doohickey connector which hooks the iPod into the car’s sound system. Other than the car exception my CDs sit unplayed, only to emerge if I have a hankering to listen to something specific while driving. Obviously, that hankering has to hit before I leave the house. I realize it’s much easier (and cheaper) to download new music directly from the iTunes store. No muss, no fuss. That’s how Red gets all her music. I would never buy her a CD because she’d never listen to it. For one thing, she doesn’t have a CD player. Hmmm, maybe I should give her my old (and perfectly functional) Discman. It would be worth it to see the “my dad is so out of it” look fill her face.

So why do I insist on buying the CD and going through all that rigmarole? If I only listen to CDs in the car, wouldn’t it be more cost and time effective to buy the iPod connector thingy? Yes, it probably would be, but if I stopped buying CDs I’d lose one essential element: Peace of mind.

Right now my entire iTunes library (about 10,000 songs) sits on an external hard drive connected to the home’s main PC. If that hard drive crashed or became otherwise compromised I could lose my entire digital music library. (I really need to create a backup of these files. It’s one of those things I keep putting off until the day when I will regret not having done it.) So in a sense I am playing with fire. In another sense, I’m not. If all else fails I still have the CDs. They provide a level of comfort that the music is always within reach. Yes, it would be a major project, not to mention royal pain in the ass, to rip everything into a new iTunes library. (The initial ripping took many months. Doesn’t that sound painful?) But at least I know in a musical emergency most of my music is immediately available and accessible on CD. Unfortunately Red’s 400 or so songs would be lost since they were all downloaded, so I really should back up that sucker.

The reassuring pleasure of holding something in your hand and knowing it’s there for you when you need it. Even the fanciest of clouds can’t provide that, no matter how safe and secure they claim to be. I don’t care if the companies offering cloud services appear indestructible. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Verizon, doesn’t matter. They can fail. Remember when AT&T was as blue chip as they came? Can anyone say Enron?

But truthfully, long term file security is a minor concern. The core issue is more than that.

Thanks to technology we’re losing jurisdiction over our lives, bit by bit. Think about how it is used by the government, banks and credit agencies alone. When we start letting other people manage everything which is important to us, even things as insignificant as a music file or movie, we lose more and more control. This is probably an inevitable, though not very desirable, step in the evolution of technology. It’s quite likely in 50 years people won’t think twice about not having the physical object in their possession. But this is not 2061, not yet. It’s 2011. And while I still can I will continue to look through my CD collection with its booklets and liner notes, hold a book in my hands, and keep my personal files where they belong – snug in my house and under my control, not flying through the chaotic atmosphere to and from the amorphous cloud.