Essay: With our heads on the clouds

According to the Book of Exodus, it all began with the cloud.

First the vaporous mass appeared over Mt. Sinai, heralded by trumpet blasts. Then God descended in the form of fire and gave Moses stone tablets engraved with the Ten Commandments to present to the Israelites.

Today, ever-bemused mankind is turning for answers to the digital cloud, the name given to the growing constellation of Internet-based virtual servers that can store thousands of song files and other documents, filter spam, seal off valuable subscription-based content from the hoi polloi.

But this new cloud conceals as much as it reveals. Put another way, the cloud is the medium — a vast, dazzling intellectual white space, an invisible tabula rasa floating along in benign, majestic splendor. But what’s the cloud’s message?

All year, across the firmament of American culture, there seemed to be a disconnect, a conceptual hiccup, between medium and message, form and function. It was a year in which Americans grew more tightly tethered to ever sleeker new transmitters of content. But the content itself sometimes came across as confused, banal or simply insufficient.

Cloud-based music stream services, such as those offered by Google, Apple, Amazon and Spotify, let listeners stockpile tunes, films and TV shows in the proliferating arms race that has become home entertainment. The cloud can vouchsafe you 100,000 songs, 10,000 films, TV reruns ad infinitum. But how many of those will you ever want to see again?

In politics, the Occupy movement and the tea party grabbed the nation’s attention but left some onlookers and many gaseous pundits scratching their heads about what the protesters were trying to say besides, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not gonna take it anymore!”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry had telegenic good looks and Lone Star swagger but couldn’t count straight on national TV in a Republican presidential debate. Another leading GOP contender, gliding past these Dickensian times for the nation’s swollen ranks of the poor and unemployed, glibly made a dare on a $10,000 bet.

Some folks this year got the content part of the equation right but fumbled the form or format. Netflix has a base of more than 23 million subscribers starved for better entertainment than can usually be obtained at the local cineplex. But it lost hundreds of thousands of them in a matter of weeks after jacking up its rates and making other changes to needlessly muddle its procedures.

Similarly, Facebook — the seductive, pearly toothed George Clooney of Internet interfaces — blamed a “coordinated spam attack” for inundating its news feeds with violent and pornographic imagery, causing unsuspecting Facebook users’ own faces to grimace in disgust.

One of the year’s worst cloud-content abusers — technically still “alleged” but witnessed by millions — was Lt. John Pike of the UC Davis campus constabulary, who unleashed cumulus puffs of pepper spray into the faces of vulnerable Occupy demonstrators. Officer Pike’s actions were one of the more egregious examples of a global outbreak of “befogged brain condition.”

The titles alone of many of this year’s literary novels alluded to voids, absences, things that are fleeting, insubstantial, unfulfilled and liable to evaporate at any second: “House of Holes” (Nicholson Baker), “The Sense of an Ending” (Julian Barnes), “A Moment in the Sun” (John Sayles). Tom Perrotta’s “The Leftovers” envisions a rapture in which Buddhists, Muslims and Hindus mysteriously vanish — as if into the clouds? — along with chosen Christians.

As the late Steve Jobs proved with his peerless ingenuity: Seamlessly matching form with function, cloud with content, is a tall order. But where’s the next Steve Jobs of politics or pop music, cinema or higher education? Come to think of it, where’s the next Steve Jobs of Apple?

As a work of informational architecture, the cloud inspires awe. It materializes in the blink of an eye, like a flash mob at a Mumbai train station. Hovering above digital firewalls, the cloud can store and transmit the sum of all human knowledge — the Bhagavad-Gita, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, Kim Kardashian’s top 10 mani-pedi parlors — to your laptop, your smartphone, your tablet (iPad, that is — not stone). It’s the online equivalent of a giant safety deposit box. Its inventors and worshipers compare the cloud to a public utility, like the water department, that will connect users around the planet, allowing billions of people to touch-screen their way to personal fulfillment and communal enlightenment. Ownership of mere hardware will become passé. What matters will be sharing — Lady Gaga tunes, PhD theses, DIY videos of demonstrators being clubbed in Athens’ Syntagma and Cairo’s Tahrir squares.

“We’ve seen a bit of a perfect storm this year,” Daniel Ek, Spotify’s founder and chief executive declares in Rolling Stone magazine. “The world is getting more connected, and it’s becoming more and more obvious that music belongs in the cloud.”

Perhaps if we all went down on bended knee and started Tebowing the cloud it would yield up a few droplets of condensated wisdom.

We’ve looked at clouds from all sides now. The extended forecast for 2012: Continuing nebulousness and occasional turbulence, with intermittent glimmers of light.

reed.johnson@latimes.com