Notes Toward a Meteorology of the Cloud

Abstract

The premise of detailed forecasts is meteorological observation. An ominous cloud has eclipsed the global horizon of neoliberal capitalist realism. Researching cloud formations, I queried Google with the search term “clouds.” However, when using the term “cloud,” I only received results about server-based computing. Thus the cloud is singular, not plural: 100% cloud cover, blanketing the sky with grey. This is not a marketing-friendly cumulus cloud, but rather a dark, sheetlike formation—what meteorologists call a pallium. Whereas curative approaches require consideration and cogitation—care—what the pallium offers instead is palliation; alleviation of symptoms without any real remedy. In accordance with the techno-utopian walled garden, opposing or divergent views are eradicated under the pallium, leaving us with an AstroTurfed landscape that is paralyzing in its uniformity. Luke Howard’s categories of tropospheric clouds parallel the multifarious manifestations of the contemporary cloud: in commercial data collection for targeted marketing, as well as in government surveillance for preemptive law enforcement. A digital meteorology of these formations—the benign cumuliform, appearing in the logos of corporate cloud-computing services; the grey, ominous stratiform; and the striated, interstellar cirriform—must be considered, in order to predict and prepare for the imminent approach of the panoptic pharmakon of the pallium, as it arrives under the guise of a swarm of cutesy cumulus clouds. Drawing from studies of panopticism, contemporary marketing practices, and the effluence tapped by Edward Snowden, this essay deploys hydrous analogies to forecast whether anything but AstroTurf can survive in the current climate.