The Cloud: It Was a Dark and Stormy Night

9 min read

The forecast for the cloud is dark, stormy, and ridiculously expensive. Retired lawyer Murray Gottheil returns with a sharp warning about the digital age’s quietest revolution: the death of ownership. From forced backups to inescapable monthly fees, he explores how we lost control of our own creations, the massive privacy risks of floating data, and what happens when the tech monopolies finally decide to rain on our parade.

Does anyone remember the old stories about mining employees who were forced to rent their houses from their employer and shop at the company store? In the old days in the mining towns, your employer owned your house and operated the only store in town, and they paid you just enough so that you could stay alive, remain in debt, and be healthy enough to keep working for them.  

Those were the days before we had a vibrant middle class who could afford to own their own stuff. Of course, this old economic system has been relegated to the recycle bin of history. Or has it?  

Might it be making a comeback?  

I first started ruminating on this question when I observed that corporations are buying up single family dwellings. Housing prices are rising, and young people cannot afford to buy their own place. Is there a future beckoning in which working folks will, once again, own nothing and have only the hope that they will continue to be able to afford to rent? 

As I pondered what is happening to the real estate industry, I started to think about the technology industry, and I suddenly had an epiphany. It is the tech giants who are going to perfect this social re-engineering, and they are already most of the way there. If they have their way, the rich folks will indeed own everything (including the things that working people create), and the rest of us will have to pay to use many of the things that we need in daily life. 

Let me lay it all out for you. I will start with some historical context. 

I am old. My technology journey has been long, which allows me to see where the evil billionaires have been leading us. I will catch you up on exactly where I have been, where we are all headed, and why I am mad as hell about it. 

My first computer had two floppy drives, and no hard drive. I knew where my data was. It was on the floppy drives. I could hold them in my hand. The things that I created belonged to me and I could easily access them. 

After a while, I had that computer upgraded to include a hard drive. I still knew where my data was. It was in a box inside my computer. I may not have been able to hold it, but I could unscrew the cover and look at it. 

Soon my computer was networked with a whole bunch of other computers at my office. There was a server somewhere in my office. My data was there. It was also in a safety deposit box at the Bank where we put our back-up drives. 

And then the Cloud came. People do not talk about this much, but you do not see many clouds on sunny days when everything is bright and cheerful. No, you see the most clouds when things are dark and stormy. The more clouds that you have, the worse the weather. Too many clouds are a harbinger of doom. The tech companies have brought us to the time in history when there are way too many clouds. 

Because I want to avoid the Cloud raining on the parade which is my life, I try to avoid having my data float up there. Whenever I save a document, I endeavour to save it to my local hard drive. Of course, my computer defaults to saving it to the Cloud, and sometimes if I am not careful it ends up there without me realizing it. 

I turn off automatic back-ups and try to back up my computer to an external storage device, but my computer keeps prompting me to back up to the Cloud instead. My computer is clear about where it thinks that my data should reside. I must always scroll down past its Cloud default before I can choose to save to my own hard drive. I am constantly fighting with my own machine to allow me to keep my data here, at my house in the forest near the lake. 

I fear that someday my data will be in the Cloud whether I like it or not, because the folks who build the machines will insist that it be that way, all the while telling me that it is for my own good. I have no idea exactly where that Cloud is. I hope that it is in Canada because I trust the Canadian authorities a bit more than I trust the government folks in some other countries. But let’s not even get into the legal risks inherent in my data floating around where government agencies can get their hands on it. No, let’s see if the Cloud is going to dump rain on me in other ways. 

Allow me to sum up what the tech companies tell me, which sounds something like what I learned in Sunday school:  

“The Cloud is safe. This I know, because my computer tells me so.” 

But I do not believe it. I am pretty sure that the “terms of use” which I scroll through to click on “I agree” say that in the case of a data leak, I have no recourse against the angels who live in the Cloud, or anyone else, for that matter. 

So, if there are potentially dangerous privacy law issues with uploading my data to the Cloud, why does the technology industry seem so hell-bent on having me store my data there?  

Is it because they truly and deeply care about me and want to be sure that my data is somewhere safe?  

Is it because they want me to have the convenience of accessing my data from anywhere in the world, as long as I pay the ever-increasing monthly storage fee for an ever-increasing amount of data? 

Or is there the slightest possibility that this business model is good for them and awful for me? 

To answer that question, let’s look at some other technology. 

We can start with Netflix. Streaming is fantastic. So good, in fact, that Netflix convinced me to throw away my DVD player and all my DVD’s, and sign on to watch movies without advertisements, for a pittance. Then, low and behold, once I did not have any other options, they put in advertisements and then offered to take the advertisements away for an additional fee.  

And how about my financial software? In the old days, I would buy a copy and use it for years. Now they (and the rest of the world) have moved to a “subscription model” which basically means that I don’t own anything, and they can charge me more money every year to continue to use it. Microsoft Office is the same. I can no longer own it. I must rent it at whatever price they stipulate. 

So, with those instructive examples, what do we think the tech providers are going to do to us once all our data is in the Cloud? 

I am guessing that they will do at least two things. First, (and I know that I am a genius for even guessing at this one) I suspect that they will raise the prices. And second, I predict that they will make it at least difficult, and more likely, impossible, for me to retrieve my data if I give up my subscription. (It is already difficult to move or delete files that have wound up in their mysterious data centres.) 

Do you remember when the Telco companies were allowed to “lock” our phones so we could not easily change providers? Or when they had no obligation to port our phone numbers if we changed suppliers? They had to be legislated into being nice. They did not come to it voluntarily, and neither, I suspect, will the tech companies. 

As was the case for those poor miners of yesteryear, it looks like one day the option of owning any of our own stuff will be taken away from us. We will, once again, be renting everything we need from the rich folks and expected to thank them for allowing us to do so. 

But will the nightmare end there? I think not!  

Once the tech companies have control over all of our data, they will have the clout to stipulate whatever terms their little hearts desire as to what they can do with it. I figure that they will reserve the right to use our data to train their AI platforms. Soon that amazing concept that I developed for my favourite client will show up in a document that Joe Bottomfeeder prompted AI to create for him.  

And will the master of the Cloud take responsibility when there is a data breach and my secret information, as William Shakespeare said in a slightly different context, “droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath?’”  

Dream on. They will take just as much responsibility as the Banks take when a scammer gets into my account on the web that they encouraged me to use and promised me was safe. They will fight tooth and nail before they cough up some compensation. 

So, there you have it. The billionaire class wants to take us back to the days when the corporations owned everything and the workers had to rent it. Only now, we will also have the option of licensing it or subscribing for it. 

“They” may tell us that the Cloud is going to make things better, but I am not so sure. It seems to me that if not owning things was really such a great idea, the rich people would not be so dead set on owning everything that they can get their hands on. 

Most of us have played Monopoly at some time or other and found out the hard way that the player with all of the houses and hotels did pretty well, and the renters not so much. 

We really all need to start fighting back and demanding that we be allowed to own stuff. And, if the politicians ever kick the people with the money out of their beds, maybe we will have a chance. If they do not, I fear that we will once again be singing the famous (slightly modified) lyrics of Merle Travis from the song “Sixteen Tons”: 

“You upload sixteen gigs, what do you get 
Another day older and deeper in debt 
Saint Peter don’t you call me ’cause I can’t go 
I owe my soul to the company store.” 

💚 A note from the Appara team: At Appara, we love our customers and share this post’s frustration with traditional, inflexible subscriptions. That’s exactly why our lawyer-founded Platform uses a transparent, flexible billing model based on your actual usage – so your costs scale fairly per entity or transaction. We’re on a mission to transform the legal industry with an all-in-one ecosystem you can trust; check out our FAQs for the more details.