Cloud Control
103rd Edition
Happy Spiritual Monday!
This past weekend was marked by a public holiday here in Australia, giving a long weekend with nobody working on Friday. This day has been established, questioned, revised as well as celebrated, protested, contested. Australia Day is a controversial day for many humans with a heart and a set of morals, as it commemorates the first landing of the First Fleet in the Sydney Harbour. This incidentally marked the beginning of a long story of liberation for some convicts, but also the invasion of a long standing group of sovereign countries living in harmony with the land.
Today, the roots of country in this land are much more spread thin, with many elders passing and not so many young ones keen to receive the stories and teachings of this long thriving culture. I can’t begin to speak as if I k now the whole story, if there ever even is a “whole story”, but I feel that it’s worth mentioning as this was my first time as an Australian Citizen experiencing this day.
At my ceremony last August, apart from the now compulsory acknowledgement of those elders who have been custodians of this land before we were even a concept, there was really no connection to country, no indigenous representation and for some reason it just felt a bit lack for depth.
In recent years, I have begun the long dive into the indigenous of this beautiful island but it has proved tricky, as anything written, has usually been translated through the modern “White Fella’s” experience since the indigenous of this land kept their wisdom in the art of storytelling and the dreaming and sharing therein. It was a spoken history, orally preserved vs our written his-story.
It can be challenging to unearth any information of substance without sitting with elders, the Aunties and Uncles of the country, but it is the searching for the information that actually fascinates me a bit more.
Cloud vs Local
In 2024, we are all familiar with the terms that go along with “the cloud.” We reference it as this ethereal nebula of storage wherein lies all the information, stories, intelligence of our human history and more.
Cloud storage has become very popular, and, in some ways, the most convenient thing ever. I’m having a flashback to the early 1990s when I had to back up my Power Macintosh by inserting a series of 32 floppy disks in sequence which would record all of the data on my hard drive. This physical backup was kept in a floppy disk case which took up the space of 6 books on the shelf and was heavy.
This was a cumbersome task, and it’s easy to appreciate and see the appeal in simply clicking a button, watching the progress bar, or walking away, then coming back to a fully backed up computer, with no physical tools to lug around. It is very convenient.
Most all of us use cloud storage in some form, whether it be streaming music or videos, social media content, sharing data and files… The world runs on a cloud. Now, what we refer to a cloud is actually a collection of global server rooms where incalculable amounts of storage devices are installed to hold the ever increasing amount of data, content, messages, information and whatever else we are storing and creating daily. But it is out of sight, out of mind for most of us.
I still use physical hard drives at home, small portable drives on which I can keep my important files, documents and the like. One of the reasons I still use these comes from DJng. Since I was 17 I have DJ’d in some form or another. When I got started, it was vinyl - records. We had to carry around 3-5 crates of records with us if we wanted to play a show, and they were not light!
It was a cumbersome act, but the only way at the time. We would bring 2 turntables, a mixer, our records, speakers, more.
Now, mot venues have all the gear setup, and a DJ needs only a tiny thumb drive to access thousands of songs instantaneously. All arranged, tagged, organised and explicitly detailed with regards to tempo, key, length, genre and more. I am grateful to have come from the hard days of records, and still appreciate the today, but the convenience is again undeniable in the fact that digital tracks can be brought in a small delivery vehicle.
Even beyond this, one can now pay for a DJ streaming service, where no physical collection is needed, you would just stream the tracks you wish to play via… the cloud.
Local storage is no longer a necessity, for everything is kindly held in the cloud, open to access for all!
Cloud Control
Over time, I have come to feel it necessary to investigate when something is too convenient, as it often has a face value benefit, but a potentially more detrimental deficit with regard to our skillsets or abilities.
There are pros and cons to everything. The cloud is no different.
The pros: No physical storage needed, simply access data at the rather quick speed of your internet. I’m feeling nostalgic, but just heard the sound of a dial up modem connecting to the internet via our fax line in the 90s… Those who know, know…
All information is there, so we are free to not hold onto it in our minds anymore, freeing up space. When presented with a challenging question nowadays, we don’t even take a moment to think. Immediately we act on the verb that has overcome most western users of the internet as a substitute for research: we Google it.
Google can tell you pretty much anything - Details of the war of 1812, the weight in any measurement of a newborn puppy, directions to anywhere in the world… We no longer need to hold onto any info, we can just outsource it to Google and the like!
This is an incredible resource, as the answer we may be looking for would have taken long to explore in more traditional, book based manners of research when that was the only option.
However, there are a few things that come to mind as a warning.
I’ve never been a huge cloud fan for certain things. It’s all well and good to have access to data whenever you wish to, but what if internet goes down, or just weak signal? What if your subscription runs out, you miss a payment, the servers crash, or you upset the host and they tamper with your information?
The last one is what interests me the most interesting, as many people over recent years have been citing the Mandela Effect as a potential psychological operation targeted at washing our memories.
For those unfamiliar, the Mandela Effect is when a large group of people remember, as in have explicit memories of an event but the event didn’t occur. It’s named after a group of people sharing their memories from Nelson Mandela’s Death in the 80s learned that he was, in fact, still alive (it was 2009).
A collective grouping of the same memories which were false. Interesting.
Why this is curious, is that we may know something inherently, but once we give the custodianship of that information to a third party - a cloud - the operators can do what they please while we aren’t looking. A movie could be changed, a song altered, numbers switched. While we may feel like the document we retrieve from the cloud seems off, we install our trust in the data age and so forego our initial concerns that the data has been altered or tampered with.
In this way, we could start to forget memories, stories of the past and future if we don’t stay connected to them. Let’s say that a story, a digital journal entry - maybe even this letter - came from a stream of consciousness and were translated to a digital medium. Once committed to digital, we no longer have to hold mental bandwidth to remember what we wrote, we can simply trust it is safe in the clouds….
But someone could easily alter this letter, even after it is published, the cloud controllers doing what they wish to change a narrative in their favour - for fun or for benefit. Information is subject to being tainted, and all the security measures in the world can’t really change this, for those who control the storage ultimately, with loosened morals, could have their way with history even.
Napoleon was famous for recounting that History is a set of lies agreed upon. Or maybe he didn’t! There are those who research to assess validity for even whom we attribute sayings to. It’s even possible that Napoleon never existed, but was written into books and here we are! OR everything written is perfect and unflawed… Improbable, but possible.
Why Do We Care About the Cloud?
Those who control the narrative control the ship in a way. So, when we surrender our trust in self for trust in an external governing system of our information, we lose the connection to the source. We get second hand whispers, and information deteriorates, or is remade on the spot.
We have seen a lot of this in recent history, the past decade with politics, disease and death, drugs, businesses… There is controversy in remembering what happened, we even have the court of law to determine what actually happened in most cases.
There are some who have the power to alter the narrative of human history, life, culture in their favour, and possibly it has been done since time immemorial.
With many, if not most, indigenous peoples of the world, history has written them into the lower categories - primitive, less advanced, simple, pick any other non inspiring descriptors. In this way, we can easily justify how the more advanced among us came in to save the day, so to speak, and evolve their culture to match ours, eliminating the primitive nature from the land, and making the culture more clinical.
This is a horrible thing to consider, as most history books will tell you the current inhabitants of any area are the heroes, but what if the previous cultures books/ information claimed the same? What if we have actually lost connection to those elements that matter most in the search for more notoriety, power, control?
The dreaming and the story are continuing perpetually, eternally, infinitely. Each moment we rewrite a piece of the story, and each moment certain elements are erased. Certain elements are rewritten, revised or removed, often as a way of detaching us from our true source power.
I am grateful to live in these lands where I do now, and though my family’s bloodline is new here, and I can’t connect it with the untold and told atrocities which occurred here hundreds of years ago and still today to the true locals, I’m sure somewhere in my bloodline there were bad things perpetrated against a more connected people. I feel sadness for the fact that this has occurred, and yet I feel gratitude that I am able to exist here and now to share my thoughts on the matter.
It is a blessing to be here, and while the world is in a state of easy mental malleability I feel it important to remember that we are really all on the same side - life. We are becoming more and more divided, and this makes us weaker in our culture and our roots. This makes us more controllable, docile, sedated.
So my suggestion is to get onto the land wherever you are, connect with it, feel the current of life flowing through you. Connect with your fellow man, converse, yarn, acknowledge each other, lookout for one another. Life is richer with the stories and cultural elements that add color, that make art of our simple existence.
Remember that local storage can be like a rock of solidity of will, an anchor in your truth and it cannot be taken from you in the same way cloud information can. Hold onto your loved ones, share quality time with each other, be present.
I am truly grateful and indebted to those custodians who have tended to these lands and all lands I have walked thus far. I’m grateful for the opportunity to grow and learn to be a better addition to the list of custodians of present, and I am grateful for the opportunity to hopefully have a positive impact on the future generations who will continue to tend to these lands.
My you find your grounding stone and stay connected to it.
And so it is, with love.
Cloud Control