{"id":2082,"date":"2014-04-23T08:02:11","date_gmt":"2014-04-23T08:02:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2014\/04\/23\/structurally-then-the-american-cloud-is-an\/"},"modified":"2015-01-04T17:06:48","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T16:06:48","slug":"structurally-then-the-american-cloud-is-an","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2014\/04\/23\/structurally-then-the-american-cloud-is-an\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote>Structurally then, the American cloud is an assemblage of interconnected Hamiltonian cathedrals, artfully concealed behind a Jeffersonian bazaar. The spatial structure of this American edifice is surprisingly simple: a bicoastal surface that is mostly human-habitable bazaar, and a heartland that is mostly highly automated infrastructure cathedrals. In this world, the bazaars are the interiors of cities, forming a user-interface layer over the complex tangle of pipes, cables, dumpsters and loading docks that engineers call the last mile \u2014 the part that actually reaches the customer. The cities themselves are cathedrals crafted for human habitation out of steel and concrete. The bazaar is merely a thin fiction lining it. Between the two worlds there is a veil of manufactured normalcy \u2014 a studiously maintained aura of the small-town Jeffersonian ideal.<\/blockquote>\n<div class=\"attribution\"><p><a href=\"http:\/\/aeon.co\/magazine\/living-together\/americas-artificial-heartland\/\">America\u2019s artificial heartland\u2013 Venkatesh Rao \u2013 Aeon<\/a><\/p>\n\n<p>For some reason this time around I was less entertained by Rao\u2019s choice of metaphors. Perhaps because this is yet another dichotomy, and because as opposed to previous attempts at illuminating today\u2019s world, I didn\u2019t learn much new from them. I could not think with these metaphors as tools.<\/p><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Structurally then, the American cloud is an assemblage of interconnected Hamiltonian cathedrals, artfully concealed behind a Jeffersonian bazaar. The spatial structure of this American edifice is surprisingly simple: a bicoastal surface that is mostly human-habitable bazaar, and a heartland that is mostly highly automated infrastructure cathedrals. In this world, the bazaars are the interiors of &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/archives\/2014\/04\/23\/structurally-then-the-american-cloud-is-an\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\"><\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[983],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2082","post","type-post","status-publish","format-quote","hentry","category-tumblr","post_format-post-format-quote"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2442,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2082\/revisions\/2442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/leapfrog.nl\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}