Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic Is Hiding Something?
20th July 2025
Somewhere between the death of our favorite aggregator websites and the world surviving a pandemic, the modern internet was reduced to four companies in a trench coat. On the breast pocket of that trenchcoat is a name tag that reads “The Cloud.” Under that name tag is an older name tag that reads “The Internet.” And under that name tag is a frayed embroidery that reads, “ARPANET (non-commercial use only, motherfuckers),” in a lovely script typeface and craftsmanship you just don’t see nowadays.
Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta (GAMM) now own most of the steel and glass that makes the internet go vroom. Google, Amazon, and Microsoft control seventy-five percent of the cloud computing market[1]. Meta and Google own half of the fiber optic cables supplying internet services across continents[2]. Most of our favorite productivity apps, retail websites, and social media platforms are beholden to proprietary infrastructure controlled by these four corporations. They own the most heavily trafficked server networks, all the GPUs, and gigawatts, and whatever.
They call it the cloud, but really, that’s just the internet.
So, what we know as the cloud doesn’t actually exist. It’s a euphemism that obfuscates the consolidation of critical infrastructure. The cloud is metaphysical porn for wild-eyed technocrats in Allbirds who say things like, “I’m making a dent in the universe” without a whisper of irony. It’s bullshit. It’s fugazi. There is no spoon, Neo.
The cloud is a lie.
Proglodytes live in desperate fear of any situation in which the biggest players are anything beyond two people banging rocks together.