Those Cloud economics are predicated on efficiencies of centralization made possible by simultaneous and exponential price drops in data computation, storage, and transmission, which are driven in turn by increases in the amount of data produced by the billions of devices that continuously pump information into these platform services. <sup>24</sup> This virtuous cycle of devices in the field uploading data to cheap central storage, for processing in datacenters and redistribution to other users and devices, fuels the rapid centripetal centralization of information toward a small number of global Cloud platforms capable of supporting and leveraging service infrastructures at such a massive scale. At the edges of this network, the merger of data processing, storage, and distribution into a composite platform makes possible the generic provision of computational capacity into an on-tap service utility for large organizations and individual Users (e.g., people, sensors, devices). In many cases, individual applications are provided free of immediate charge and monetized through the capitalization of User cognition by advertising. In other cases, Cloud application interfaces charge based on per unit of use as defined by different combinations of number of Users and total amount of data processed, stored, and transmitted. The ultimate effect of the centralization of Cloud services, paired with faster wired and wireless bandwidth to end devices, is to link almost any person, thing, animal, building, car, plant, or smart mote into supercomputing platforms. This allows each such end User to perform or contribute to otherwise impossible calculations, all of which further centralize the platform ’ s economy of uses, effects, and profits. Access to live data and peer-to-peer communication streams means that aggregate responses to individual interactions can be calculated in remote data centers and relayed back to the User almost instantaneously, as if the computation and all the data it is based on were happening in the palm of her hand. Dumb devices are infused with seemingly cosmic omnipotence. Servicing generic supercomputation draws any thing and any place into a formal interrelation and interdependency, flattening both hierarchies and nuances. Today ’ s end user Cloud apps will grow in complexity and capability only as exponentially larger pools of data are aggregated, analyzed, optimized, and made available through networks of application programming interfaces (APIs) with which developers can link oceanic reservoirs of information into smart services that learn as they are put to greater use. Cloud services will include greater artificial intelligence streamed into graphical, voice, or object interfaces with which we interact in naturalistic ways. Most likely, however, they won ’ t do this primarily over the open Internet as we know it, but through more narrowly designed and owned networks in which competitive advantages (drawn from physical infrastructure to data optimization to energy efficiency to format lock-in) will drive and delimit everyday computational economics.
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Cloud Layer