Cloud Time: The Inception of the Future

The 'Cloud', hailed as a new digital commons, a utopia of collaborative expression and constant connection, actually constitutes a strategy of vitalist post-hegemonic power, which moves to dominate immanently and intensively, organizing our affective political involvements, instituting new modes of enclosure, and, crucially, colonizing the future through a new temporality of control. The virtual is often claimed as a realm of invention through which capitalism might be cracked, but it is precisely here that power now thrives. Cloud time, in service of security and profit, assumes all is knowable. We bear witness to the collapse of both past and future virtuals into a present dedicated to the exploitation of the spectres of both.

Rob Coley is a Doctoral research student at the University of Lincoln, UK. Dean Lockwood is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Media, University of Lincoln, UK.