Thanks for posting, Patrice.
This op ed got me thinking, so I wrote a reply:
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Ece Temelkuran warns that "cloud fascism" drifts "here then there with
absolute randomness," producing a kind of spectral or ephemeral
authoritarianism that can only be dodged with burner phones and
umbrellas. The metaphor falls into a similar trap as the past decade of
Europe's attempts to grapple with this apparatus: it flatters the tech
giants it critiques. Clouds feel untouchable, ungraspable, indefatigable.
But machines break.
Strip away the marketing abstraction and today's "cloud" resolves into a
brutally material stack that comes down to, essentially, a collection of
massive data-centres clustered with back-room planning code deals to
ensure proximity access to cheap energy, a handful of transit backbones,
and about two dozen corporations whose executives sign the maintenance
cheques.
These bottlenecks are not hard to name: Amazon us-east-1, Microsoft
Azure North Europe, Google Belgium region, Alibaba Zhangbei, Oracle
Phoenix. Each facility is a concrete address protected less by
metaphysics than by key-cards and fire-suppression systems. When things
go wrong the whole edifice shudders, and it goes wrong more often than
the industry admits: In February 2025 a mis-pushed configuration in
Azure knocked out Norwegian government services for hours, paralyzing
everything from tax filings to health portals. Or how about those data
center fires in France circa 2022 that took tens of thousands of
European infrastructure offline, including backups? Even as accidents,
they demonstrate pronounced single points of failure and this is the
opposite of a cloud.
I am tired of hearing about Varoufakis' fiefdoms. We do *not* live in a
kingdom of silicon, the digital absolutely bends the knee to the state.
To consider otherwise is to elevate a shaky but nevertheless
opportunistic and vicious power: Do you think Apple chartering 474
aeroplanes full of product to skirt a trade war is the work of the
almighty and the powerful? Why does it take a sitting president making
overt threats for any real work to get done around here, while the
tanned beasts of Palo Alto huddle behind him, waiting for father's
discipline?
Temelkuran's "absolute randomness" is less an emergent property of
fascism than a deliberate governance strategy. Cloud operators cultivate
opacity (proprietary routing, NDAs, secret Service Level Agreements) to
discourage transparency, collective bargaining or regulatory scrutiny,
but randomness collapses into traceability every time a TCP packet
traverses an autonomous system: each hop is logged, bills are issued,
energy is consumed. We know this. The whole of Europe has grappled with
this as a surveillance structure. The cloud's footprint is as legible as
any railroad manifest. And I once again remain utterly confused as to
the desire to name it as anything other than that: a railroad manifest.
But what to do about it all? I think we already know the answer to this
- at least we should. At risk of being accused by 90s-era Nettimers of
being authoritarian (very brave, please try again with me) - because
machines break, because the cloud is not absolute randomness, because
there is a manifest, and - perhaps most importantly - because of such
monopoly, legal and kinetic interventions scale unusually well. Law
enforcement already exploits this (and are very good at it): in January
2025 the FBI and international partners seized more than 100 servers
hosting the Cracked and Nulled cybercrime forums, indicting four
operators and black-holing their domains in a single sweep. A month
later another coordinated action dismantled the 8Base ransomware
infrastructure, arresting four administrators and confiscating
twenty-seven servers. None of these operations required new technology!
Just warrants, bolt-cutters, and subpoenas to the colo landlords.
Instead of the DSA sending yet another strongly worded letter to Musk to
wipe his ass with, imagine applying the same playbook to state-aligned
data-colonialism! Subpoena the S-3 buckets storing biometric data
extracted from Gaza; indict the executives overseeing the contracts;
physically seize mirrors that replicate that data into U.S.
jurisdictions. The legal theories already exist: aiding and abetting
torture, complicity in war crimes, trafficking in stolen personal
information. What is missing is political will, not operational feasibility.
The real chokepoint is about 500 people: C-suite leadership, senior
site-reliability engineers, network-operations directors, all of whom
who hold power-of-access to the "cloud". They sign privileged SSH
certificates, do deals with the grossest people to walk the earth, and
green-light data migration requests. You establish material harm through
any (or all) of the abuses just within the last months alone - from
border abuses in the US, to abuses of data in Ukraine and Gaza, to even
simple things, like how Twitter is nothing more than a giant financial
scam platform that would be super illegal 10 years ago. Establish all of
this as harm. Establish the US electioneering as harm. Link border-phone
searches and predictive-policing dragnets to specific datasets stored on
cloud providers. The chain of custody can be documented with routine
cloud-forensics: object-lifecycle logs, IAM audits, contract appendices.
You don't even need to make new laws. Under universal-jurisdiction
principles (e.g., Germany's Code of Crimes against International Law),
executives who knowingly facilitate unlawful surveillance can be
indicted abroad. U.S. prosecutors already treat ransomware
infrastructure as an "instrumentality of crime" and the same logic
applies to mass-surveillance infrastructure once the underlying rights
violations are proven.
Temelkuran calls for a "cloud of resistance … as random, fluid and
unpredictable as cloud fascism." No, what we need is something way more
methodical and delicate, like picking leeches from a struggling animal
with absolute and total care. Randomness is overrated; precision is
underrated. Effective resistance combines forensic counter-mapping of
the network (one of the things Europe is good at, I guess, since we
never stop talking about the network), followed by legal test cases with
political parties whose members do not wish for their children to grow
up and live as adults, naked and strangled under the heel of the United
States. Any successes should include exit ramps, local first
infrastructure, peer-to-peer systems mesh storage, edge compute
clusters; so that public institutions can just walk away from the
landlords once the liability becomes visible and real. Even with a just
a few little cases, the right targets would make these people think
twice before they FAFO.
I am not a lawyer, and I am definitely not pro police. And yes, this is
a fantasy that I don't expect the EU to deploy. But a big part of that
is because of what we choose to talk about. I'm so fucking sick of
people talking about all of this in abstract terms while the harms are
here, baying at the door. My anger lies in my empathy with Temelkuran,
and the culture and lexicon we have slipped into that unwittingly
retards our chances before we can even begin to properly respond.
Calling our predicament "cloud fascism" does similar damage as Metahaven
or Holly Herndon or Trevor Paglen, it conjures the omniscient and
insurmountable enemy... it has never been like that, only in our heads.
Clouds are sublime; datacentres stink of diesel, lithium fire
suppressants, and non-union night labour. Once we dare to re-materialise
the stack, its weaknesses glare back at us.
On 12.05.25 02:41, Patrice Riemens via nettime-l wrote:
Original to:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/may/10/cloud-fascism-understand-resist-hard-right
Can the term ‘cloud fascism’ help us understand – and resist – the hard right?
Like clouds, far-right ideology moves here then there with absolute randomness.
The danger is that those who can, shrink under their umbrellas
Ece Temelkuran, The Guardian, Sat 10 May 2025
Last month, a few weeks into the random detentions and denied entries at the US
border, I was supposed to go to Princeton University as a guest lecturer to
discuss global fascism. I asked the professors who invited me whether they
thought it was safe to come. When I was in Turkey, European journalist friends
once similarly asked me whether they’d be detained. And just as I did then, the
American professors hesitated with half sentences: “Well, you know … ” It was
decided that a law firm should be involved. After some back and forth, the
final assessment remained unsettlingly ambiguous: “A detention is unlikely, but
we cannot be sure.” Eventually, to be on the safe side, we choose the online
option.
In the end all was fine on the surface, but I know from being on the other side
of this story that the silk thread-like connection between us humans had been
cut. They felt their land a shade darker, and I felt like giving up on the
unfortunate in dire times. After all, I should know: this is how a country
drifts into darkness – not by a dictator’s orders but rather by the outside
world abandoning its people to their own means, by cutting millions of the
threads that hold us as humanity together.
Meanwhile, what began as a shocking absurdity – academics, intellectuals and
ordinary people with ideas being denied entry or sent to prison for weeks based
on the search of their phone – quickly became ordinary. The unacceptable was
normalised at such speed that, only a few weeks into the border crisis, the EU
began issuing burner phones to its staff bound for the US. Some European
countries warned their LGBTQ+ citizens to be cautious visiting the US in a tone
akin to Tripadvisor travel tips. The charade began without warning and
continues with absolute randomness. Trouble finds people as described in the
assessment of my likely difficulties: “unlikely but not for sure”. And in that
unsettling ambiguity lies the unique feature of today’s fascism.
Many of us – writers, thinkers and politicians – try to come up with a catchy
term for today’s fascism. At the heart of it, I have come to think, lies not
only the desire to analyse but also the urge to attract people’s attention so
they are adequately alarmed. It may be an all too human urge to think: “If only
we could find the right word, people would stop and listen. Perhaps then
they’ll do something.” In fact, it is good old fascism, only with many new
spectacles and glamorous gadgets, like an updated app with new features. One of
these new features of 21st-century fascism is being cloud-like. After all, it
is the political child of cloud capitalism.
The term was coined by the Greek economist and politician Yanis Varoufakis. He
says there is a new economic system where big tech companies, particularly
those operating in the cloud, have replaced traditional capitalist pillars like
markets and profit with platforms and rents. This system is characterised by
the creation of digital fiefdoms in which individuals, or fiefs, labour for
these platforms. It is like in medieval times, but a techno version. Nobody, of
course, throws themselves into this new form of slavery, yet things seemingly
happen as if ordained by the natural order.
The term “cloud” reveals a lot about the world’s current reality. The cloudlike
vagueness, fluidity and slipperiness of the system – its everywhereness but at
the same time nowhereness – are quite like moving storm clouds. Right now it is
in Turkey, operating through the imprisonment of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s
political rivals; now it is in Israel, starving Palestinian children. After
appearing on the Italian shores to push back refugees to the sea, it suddenly
shows up in the US, raining on a new land through the border police. Cloud
fascism has infinite hands committing unpredictable crimes with the randomness
that we all try to catch up with and adapt to. Like the cloud fiefs, we get on
with it. And after a short while we lose our ability to be shocked, unwillingly
normalising the cloud, as if now it is a natural phenomenon we must live with.
As if the cloud simply is. Just don’t take your phone with you to the US. Buy a
burner. No big deal. If there is a cloud, get an umbrella and walk faster past
those who do not have one.
The late Pope Francis called this umbrella attitude “global indifference”. He
often referred to human dignity as the last defence line of human morality
against the indignities of our present political and economic reality. As I
perceive it, he didn’t mean only the dignity of the poor being broken by
inequality. Dignity, as a central human value that unifies all of us, can be
damaged in several other ways. Those who can afford the umbrellas to protect
themselves from cloud fascism, who without any protest buy the burner phone,
have their dignity broken too, even if they numb their heart not to feel it.
The late pope didn’t stop at pointing out the wounded dignity of humanity; he
alluded to civil resistance when he said that when the laws are not good
enough, one can go against them to be on the side of the greater good.
Finally, in Wim Wenders’s documentary about him, he said: “Revolution. Don’t be
afraid of the word.” A word that for a while has been accompanied by a smirk or
a sarcastic air-quote hand gesture even in progressive intellectual circles.
That smirk is the sign of our loss of faith in humanity and the beginning of
our submission to the darkest cloud. Whereas the pope smiled when uttering the
word – big difference.
This cloud of ours, this cloud fascism, is travelling the planet, showering us
with acid rain. Yet each time it appears in a country, the citizens of the land
behave as if it is the first time and only happening to them. The repeating
astonishment marks the beginning of our retreat – and believing that a big
enough umbrella, made solely for our nation, can save us is the dawn of our
defeat. The question is whether we will blow away the cloud before the ultimate
surrender. What stands between us, humanity and the dark cloud is the question
of faith. Not in God, perhaps, but in the divinely joyous entity that
materialises when people come together to defend their dignity. A cloud of
resistance that is as random, fluid and unpredictable as cloud fascism. What
can stop this acid rain is the everywhereness of the cloud resistance of human
dignity. I am not saying revolution – well, after all, I am not the pope. May
he rest in joy of dignity.
Ece Temelkuran is a Turkish journalist and political commentator, and author of
How to Lose a Country: The 7 Steps from Democracy to Dictatorship
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