Twinned power: formations of cloud-edge control

ABSTRACT

From smart vehicles to smart city sensors, the millions of new devices connected over the next few years will generate huge amounts of highly personal data that needs to be processed in real time. Transmitting this data to the cloud, with its centralized data centers and high latency, is both economically and technically unviable. As a result, the industry is moving towards processing data closer to the source, a major shift from the cloud to the so-called edge. This new architecture is understood as a necessary augmentation to the cloud. Indeed, in many ways, the edge is the polar opposite of the cloud: ad hoc networks, composed of resource-poor devices, that function at the hyperlocal level of the home, office, or neighborhood. However, this article argues that such technical supplementation is also about control, filling a critical void in contemporary formations of power. Coupled together, this cloud-edge formation is both centralized and decentralized, resource intense yet geographically dispersed. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, such power augments heavy, situated force with a more flexible, economic architecture – conforming to a trajectory of ‘intensification’ while also complicating it. While each mode of power has certain strengths and weaknesses, combining their operations forms a twinned power with new capacities for subjectivation and governance.

KEYWORDS:

• Cloud
• edge
• Fog
• power
• control

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [Grant number DP160103307].

Notes on contributors

Luke Munn

Luke Munn is an emerging researcher interested in the darker impacts of digital cultures, including race, politics, power, and violence. His work has ranged from the algorithmic power of Uber to censorship technologies in Hong Kong, technical infrastructures in Singapore, and alt-right radicalisation online.