The cloud the trash and the wasted technology

I have in my hands a quad core monster pc, making billions operations in a second, and I can use it just now for processing pictures, video, audio, music, texts and graphics and a lot of other different data at the same time… But today something’s wrong with the driver of the wireless card, so that for a while I’m missing Internet and I cannot connect to Facebook. I feel as my machine were completely out of use… There something deeply wrong in this!


I am browsing my Flickr camera roll, that’s very useful, showing all my pictures in the right day I got them. But amidst the 401 I consciously loaded till now, chosen and selected, I found some pictures that have nothing to do: screenshots of my notes on a tablet, the photo of a woman from a filing for work… Why and how they got into my space? They were only a few, thankfully, and I deleted them!

I realize that I go on every day responding “no” to a lot of requests: “Do you want to upload your pictures here, you videos there? Do you want backup on the cloud? Do you want this or that app that automatically puts somewhere everything you do? Not only single requests, as I use, as it’s normal, different software for dealing with the same type of data.
I am actually, like many, a pc, tablet pc, smartphone and multi smart devices user! So I guess, if I’d answered “yes” only sometimes, I could have now not one, but many loads of the same data stored in the cloud, cared by Google, Apple, Real Player, Microsoft, Dropbox and all the others, as quite all providers nowadays offer a free space for storing on line!

"I saw some pictures on the pen drive. Do you want to put them on the cloud?”
“Be quiet, fellow! I have dozens of pictures on that drive, the most of them wrong and horrible! Let me the time to look at them, at least, so that I may choose which ones to take or to delete forever. And later, I could make up my mind to share some of them!”
Regarding then a general online backup of my data, why should I chose a remote and slow solution, since I can put then in external hard drives, huge cheap and always at hand, even when the wi-fi does not work?"

I suppose I am a rather advanced user, able not to answer always yes and aware that there’s no sense in letting everything in other hands. But the majority of pc owners are not exactly advanced, and many tablet pc’s and smartphones users do not even know what a directory is, as they simple do not need to know! Nevertheless, they probably have loads of data stored on line, simply accepting their providers proposes.

How many hard disks in servers all over the world are literally full of rubbish? How much electric energy is wasted to keep them?

Today digital market is based on a frantic consumption of devices, which are to be thrown away every few months. And, if we think that the iPhone was called the God machine already in 2007, we have to presume that God himself is intended to be at risk for obsolescence for the marketing! Actually, many seem to see the paradox of all that.

But few - at least in my relationships - appear to talk about the huge energetic waste for a meaningless use of the cloud. Or it is only a weird idea of mine?


photo credit: <ahref="http://www.flickr.com/photos/86530412@N02/14796090251">3D Cloud Computing</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/">(license)</a>