The Cloud of Unknowing

Web 3.0, Cloud Computing and the Future of the Internet

(Note: This article is almost two years old — the details and some of my use of terms – like calling all of Web 3.0 the "cloud" – are out of date, but the fundamental ideas are still solid, I suspect.)

There is a single point glowing on the screen in your hand. Touch it and it expands to unveil the universe.

This is what the Internet is now. Within this single point, on this mobile phone, is the entirety of human knowledge and communication. Zoom in and the point becomes an inﬁnitely complex cloud of data. Clouds of pictures and text condense and dissipate, ﬂy by as you explore. It's all here. Where would you like to go ﬁrst?

Select the Golf cloud and it zooms in a thousand times, past layers and layers of data
classiﬁcation, to the quadrant that holds golf. As you zoom further and further in, you see a
three-dimensional cloud of links rushing past, all to Web pages, books, videos and audio
discussing the inner game of golf. The best, most popular links are highlighted and glow
brightest, neon signposts so that you don't get lost in the maze of information. You ﬁnd
highlights from a Jack Nicklaus video, excerpts from three books on the subject, and
interviews with golf greats from the last hundred years. In a few minutes you've absorbed
what you need to know about the subject. Zoom to the Green cloud to ﬁnd networked artiﬁcial
intelligence applications which will walk you through a more environmentally friendly day,
tracking the environmental impact of each of your actions based on how they register with the
Cloud-networked technology that surrounds you in the physical world. Zoom in thousands of
times, to further and further speciﬁcity. Read the contents of the Library of Congress—or just
a book or two selected for you by adaptive AI. Now zoom back out to the point.

You're holding the whole of culture in your hand—more information than a million Libraries of
Alexandria ever did; more than anybody could process in a lifetime. The ability to read any
book ever published, watch any movie or television show ever ﬁlmed, listen to any album—
instantaneously. See all of that as one pulsating, growing object—not so much a library as an
emergent artiﬁcial intelligence.

Welcome to the Cloud—the Grand Uniﬁcation of the Internet.

Web 3.0 and Cloud Computing—catch-all terms for the next developmental stage of the
Internet, from 2010-2020—are poised to change our lives at the most fundamental levels. The
Internet up this point has been the warm-up. We're about to see the promise of inﬁnite
information fulﬁlled—when the Internet becomes a consciousness ﬁeld of such complexity
that it will outstrip anything we can currently imagine, an endless, rippling ﬁeld of data that will
bring you everything you ever wanted to know about... everything.

I have used the phrase “The Cloud” as shorthand for this coming decade of Internet
development. The Cloud technically refers to computers clustered and sharing information on
the Internet, and when almost all software functionality moves to the Internet—think Google's
range of applications (Google Docs, Google Calendar), all of which you run off the Web and
which store their data elsewhere in the net. As Cloud Computing technology improves, all of
the computers attached to the Internet will essentially be sharing their processor time with
each other, creating one gigantic supercomputer—the Cloud. However, the Cloud is not only
an apt metaphor for the technical progression of the Internet, but also for the visual changes
in the Internet experience itself—from ﬂat Web pages to massive, three-dimensional clouds of
data.

As it currently exists, the Internet is a ﬂat, two-dimensional medium, like reading a gigantic,
animated magazine. It started as Web 1.0—the original version of the World Wide Web, the
HTML-designed home page. Web 2.0 was the next evolution—social media and webpages-
as-applications (i.e. Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc). Yet for all of the epochal advances in
connectivity of Web 1.0 and 2.0, the Web is still incredibly inefﬁcient, a chaotic space where
billions of Web pages are linked together by only the most ephemeral hypertext trails. There
is no comprehensive overview. We have the dots, but we have yet to connect them.

In a way, the “age of connectivity” is a misnomer; there is far more information than there are
meaningful connections—and if, as neuropsychology might argue, intelligence is measured
not by the number of facts we know but by the number of meaningful connections we can
draw between those facts, then the Web is not very smart at all.

Web 3.0 is where that begins to change—where the promise of “connectivity” pays off. Where
we not only get a top-down overview of the whole Web, but when it all begins to link up in an
intuitive interface, and the Internet ﬁnally becomes three-dimensional. “Data clouds,” a phrase
often used to describe the nascent technology, is likely how Web 3.0 technology will begin to
appear. (Ironically, early prototypes of Web 3.0 browsers and hardware—such as Adaptive
Path's Aurora—look close to how science ﬁction has often sensationally portrayed the
Internet.)

When we can literally access any and all information available to the human race at the click
of a screen, when we're literally able to hold the whole of civilization in our palm, things get
interesting. But when things get even more interesting is when we have the technology that
gives us a perspective from which we can begin linking all of that information together and
ﬁling it—when we begin processing so much information at once that we have to begin to see
it from a much, much wider angle in order to make sense of it.

The connective stitching between this unprecedented overload of information is what early
researchers are calling the Semantic Web—intelligent software for analyzing, making sense
of, and ultimately clustering large sets of data into clouds. The Semantic web is the
technology necessary for the Internet to begin to curate itself.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, described the Semantic Web thusly
in 1999: “I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all
the data on the Web—the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A
‘Semantic Web,’ which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the
day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines
talking to machines.”

At present, it takes a human being to make sense of the chaos of information present on the
Internet and assemble meaningful patterns from it—in fact, making sense of Internet mayhem
is a job so necessary to society at present, and so prestigious, that millions of people do it for
free—bloggers, Wikipedia moderators and link-ﬁnders who use services like Digg, for
instance. Human beings are pattern-recognition machines, and the Internet is where pattern-
recognition can translate, in real time, into real-world social status (think of the curators of
high-trafﬁc blogs like the Drudge Report or Boing Boing, who have attained something
approaching “real-world” celebrity status based on their ability to sort legitimately interesting
material from the Web's endless daily data feed). Link-sorting is a nascent early Twenty-First
Century art form (every blogger simultaneously creates and shares their own universe,
encapsulating how they see the world, even if for an audience of only a handful).

At present, this pattern-recognition is what drives the Internet as a creative space. As
Semantic web technologies begin to be implemented, this meaningful pattern-recognition
becomes more and more a game that computers can play too. This makes for a more
connected, more evolved, more whole Web, or Cloud; and it also means that the ways
humans interact with the Cloud begin to evolve as well. The more complex the Internet
becomes, and the better connected, the more patterns will begin to emerge. It is that
emergent awareness that is the most interesting application of Web 3.0 technology and
beyond.

The more order that is brought to the chaos of the Cloud by both humans and computers, the
more meaning is created, the more that the entirety of information represented is stitched and
woven together, the better we will understand what it means as a whole—and, ultimately, the
better we will understand ourselves. As the Internet becomes more self-aware, so will we. It is
an externalization of ourselves, our mirror.

It's that big-picture “zooming out” that will hold the most potential for revolutionizing not only
how we use the Internet, but how we see the world. The Cloud era will require two things of
technology: the ability to categorize and make sense of Herculean amounts of data, and the
ability to represent that data simply and intuitively. Ultimately what we may begin to see is that
the Web begins to get more simple than it does complicated. We will see the forest instead of
the trees.

This book argues two things: that Cloud and post-Cloud technologies will both fulﬁll the
“inﬁnite complexity” promise of the Internet, and that they will reveal the simplicity that lies
underneath that complexity. In this way, we will be able to see our own minds laid out before
us, in all their inﬁnite complexity and inﬁnite simplicity.

Imagine seeing the whole of human thought reduced to a simple equation. That's the promise
that Cloud technology holds. Once we have access to all of the information in the world in one
digital environment, it's not hard to see how computer technology could begin to simplify that
information to the point that we see it for what it is. The information may be inﬁnite, but
chances are, the number of ﬁling cabinets it could ﬁt in might well be very, very ﬁnite.

When we see how everything connects, we see everything. And we see the end of what we
think we know. Because of this, the Cloud has an even greater potential to change the way
we see the world than even the original Web did.

Information is a space, and we are about to get the map. Consider the moment that the globe
was fully mapped and pieced together as one coherent whole—or even when it was
photographed from space. Consider the leap in perspective when we realized that this was all
one thing. Consider that the same thing is about to happen for the realm of information.
Imagine having a visual map to the collected thoughts of the entire world, in real time.
Imagine the thoughts of the human race becoming visualized, for anybody who cares to look,
a solidiﬁcation and crystallization of the datasphere to the point of total visibility. How would
that affect how we saw ourselves? How would we see the boundaries of nation-states and
tribal groups?

During the Age of Exploration and earlier, before Europe had fully comprehended the
dimensions of the physical world, monsters guarded the edges of maps. There is perhaps an
ultimately even more frightening—and liberating—thing to discover at the edges of dataspace
than monsters: the limitations of our own perceptions.

This book is a look at the social changes ahead as the Cloud changes our perceptions and
our world in completely unpredictable ways—including at the social, cultural and even spiritual
levels.

The Cloud, of course, opens up a tremendous realm of business opportunities—and
challenges. Online advertising will have to radically adjust itself to new ways of catching
attention. Content delivery systems for media will have to be re-imagined. The old game of
getting attention and “mindshare” may ﬁnd its rulebook radically altered if not missing entirely.
As the Cloud heats up, we will see a collapse, or rather an engulﬁng, of all traditional media.
This, again, has both liberatory and problematic potential. On the positive side, we get to
watch as all of our communication potential collides and produces new mediums that will be
as radical to us as MySpace would have been to a Victrola user 100 years ago—and in far
less the time. On the negative side, what we gain in comprehensiveness we may lose in
depth. Thousands of blogs run from people's basements may offer a wider look at what is
going on in the world than traditional newspapers, for instance, but without people with
journalistic training, backed by salaries, it can become so much idle chatter. The same can be
said of entertainment. In a world where all media is digital and can be immediately pirated
and distributed across the planet by even one person, who's going to put the effort into
making quality product if they can't get paid?

These are fundamental questions that are currently rocking the underlying assumptions of
how business is done in a capitalistic system. Pirates rest assured in the fact that they are
only exposing basic ﬂaws and errors in the distribution models themselves, long considered
unjust. Take music—a crumbling industry which major studios and recording artists alike have
blamed pirates for the fate of, instead of their own short-sighted policies. But what often goes
unreported is the extent to which major studios have stolen from and exploited the talents of
recording artists, practically since recording was invented—and how distributing music
directly on the Internet, if done right, can liberate artists from this old predatory loop, bringing
them both greater creative freedom and greater and swifter proﬁt.

Part of the reason for the success stories of companies like Apple in the 00's, and the not-so-
successful stories of, say, the recording industry, is that content delivery systems like the iPod
and the iPhone were perfectly positioned to capitalize on (as well as help create) the peer-to-
peer ﬁle-sharing boom that was the ﬁrst phase of the shift to Cloud Computing.
Along with this comprehensive, one-big-Internet omnivision, expect comprehensive web
accessibility. Cell phones were once a luxury (remember the giant, clunky boxes that only
organized crime people and Wall Street traders seemed to have in 1980s movies?); now they
are mandatory even for very young children. So what happens when everybody, especially in
the developing world, has a mass-produced iPhone equivalent? When everybody has access
to the Cloud from their iPhone successor device? This is a more literal version of global democracy than any ancient Greek, Founding Father or neoconservative strategist could have ever conceived.
This is the human component of the Cloud. Comprehensive data goes with comprehensive
human access. Dataspace, the noosphere, is a layer on top of the human realm, which shows
as much as people put into it (or as much as surveillance technology puts into it). Once a
privileged realm, dataspace is becoming more and more accessible to the entire world, not
just the ﬁrst. A Cloud owned and operated only by the wealthy would only amplify the myopia
of the current Internet. Luckily, we can look forward to cheap laptop technology and mobile
web applications opening the developing world to the Cloud. The Cloud must be accessible to
all to live up to its potential, and the initial potential of the Internet itself.

Consider this statistic from Kenyan blogger Juliana Rotich: “According to the EPROM Project
at MIT, there are approximately 1.4 billion mobile phone users in the developing world, and in
the continent of Africa, mobile phone use has increased 65 percent per year. This is twice the
global average. These statistics are instructive, as mobile phones have had a transformative
effect in Africa, and will continue to be the platform for communication. The future of Africa
and the developing world centers around the mobile phone.”

Another major issue is privacy, and the issues of identity that this will raise. There is no hiding
in a world of inﬁnite information. Everything will be known—everything is known. How identity
changes, breaks down and re-coagulates under such intensive visibility is another theme that
will be explored extensively in this book.

Like it or not, you are connected to everybody and everything on this planet at the molecular
level. You're made of the same organic material. You share the same DNA (DNA is the same
for all living beings—it's only the order of the genetic code that's different). You breathe the
same air, drink the same water, and ultimately have to deal with the fact that you share this
planet with everybody else. The Internet—albeit in embryonic and crude form—is only making
that level of perception more concrete.

The Internet has changed not only the bedrock of how business is done in the world, but also
life itself. I argue that this is only a side-effect of the actual technology. Computers, and the
web, are only mirrors of ourselves. Marshall McLuhan might have argued that electronic
media are artiﬁcial extensions of our sense organs, but I would argue that what they actually
do is reveal what is already there in our collective consciousness—group connectivity.

Here is the ultimate message of Web 3.0: It's all one thing. We're all one thing. What we know
is all one thing. It's all the same. We're all in this together. And we're much bigger than we
think.

The Cloud is us and we are it.

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