[MD] The Cloud

[John Carl]

*http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/peter-sloterdijk-man-machine-interview_55e37927e4b0aec9f3539a06
<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/peter-sloterdijk-man-machine-interview_55e37927e4b0aec9f3539a06>*


*Kurzweil argues that expanding our minds into the cloud and vice versa
will create more diversity and less uniformity because we will have access
to almost infinite information with which to fertilize our imagination and
construct our personality. Do you agree with this line of thinking?*

In speaking of the “cloud,” Kurzweil positions himself in a field that is
preformatted by traditional philosophy. With his concept of the “objective
spirit,” Hegel outlined the formal premise of a “cloud”: these consist in
the “expressions” of the spirit, which have solidified into institutions.
Institutions are programs for cultural transmission handed down to future
generations.

It should not be especially difficult to develop the concepts of “spirit”
and “institution” into the concept of the cloud. Clouds are liquidized
institutions, as it were, in which the mass of prior experience that is
capable and worthy of transmission is made available for later interested
parties.

The difference between a cloud and a school reveals itself in the fact that
in the former, the autodidactic (and *eo ipso *auto-domesticative) factor
increases -- whereas schools, as prototypes of formal institutions, are
principally heterodidactic (authoritative) and conservative
(hetero-domesticative) in their structures.

What clouds and schools have in common is that both wrestle with a nonsense
problem: schools can never be entirely sure of passing on what is worth
knowing, and cloud visitors are all the more incapable of distinguishing
with certainty between nonsense and no nonsense. One part of the
modern-postmodern situation is the instability of the difference between
institutionalized and de-institutionalized knowledge.

 In this respect, one must take the cloud metaphor seriously in a literal
sense: clouds cover up the clear sky. The current infospheric encasement of
the human field is the continuation of the “objective spirit” by other
means -- and today, those are digital means.

It had already become evident in the 19th century how far the “objective
spirit” can transform into an ideology and communicative plague
(propaganda). The first half of the 20th century belonged entirely to the
conflict among (pre-digital) ideological clouds. The second half of
the 20th century
brought -- in the form of the Cold War -- a form of ceasefire in the war of
clouds.

It is unforeseeable whether the hyper-cloud of the 21st century will end
the regional immersion in institutionalized untruths that was typical of
the 20th century. Nor do we know today whether the clear sky, or the cloud
that covers it, is the information.

Anyone who uses the word “cloud” in the singular risks falling prey to
mystification. At present, once more, there are several cloud systems, and
what we once called the Cold War now returns as the war of clouds. One of
the nasty surprises of the incipient 21st century is that the demons of
propaganda have returned in a digitally updated form. To counter the new
empires of lie and perspectival distortion, a renewal of the idea of
enlightenment is indispensable.