Collecting in the Cloud: Apple’s server farm at Maiden, NC

Site of the new server farm?

Most analysts have connected Apple’s recent purchase of Lala, a startup music streaming company, to their $1 billion North Carolina data center in development since this summer.  The server farms will perhaps appear here, as various sources have reported, in sites along route 321 and the town of Maiden in particular, where Apple’s presence already appears in a quick Google maps search.  Putting Lala and Maiden together, all signs point toward the possibility of cloud storage for iTunes–perhaps along with some subscription-based model–which would stream all your music from this future location.  If Apple is at the forefront of a sea change here, as they usually are, this move prefigures some massive realignments not only to habits of listening but–more drastically–to collecting.

One could perhaps find signs of this some time ago.  I remember a conversation I had with my undergraduate advisor about five years back, sitting in his office surrounded by painstakingly organized–never alphabetized–media of every sort, and comparing our respective listening habits.  At that point I had a 120GB iPod, and he ventured that surely I couldn’t have listened to every single song stored on there–and of course I hadn’t.  This was the case for the majority of my classmates, and it was pretty clear that our modalities of collecting music, our means and reasons for it, had been fundamentally altered during the movement away from physical media.

But this was also a time when I was listening to more than I ever had before, thanks to a campus wide Direct Connect (DC++ to be exact) hub.  Networks were small and slow enough to preclude absolute totalization–one certainly couldn’t find everything, and users took pride in the organization and scope of their personal archives, with the tree file structure of each individual user preserved as a part of the interface.  On the other hand, we had enough speed to download the entire back catalog of Beethoven, for instance, which I did over the course of a few days.

[Students gathering at Rutgers New Brunswick to protest the administration's shutdown of a campus-wide Direct Connect hub. People revealed their usernames and boasted how many gigs they had shared. The address and pass for a new hub was already circulating through the crowd. 4/29/04]

While we were downloading faster than we could ever possibly listen, we were storing these files in a manner that expressed something of the collector.  The user leaves traces on these obscene amounts of data if only through the act of collecting the fact of access to a particular spectrum of material, rather than collecting the fact of the songs themselves.  Because none of us can actually own or intellectually encompass such a collection (>250MB of audio), the curation, the interface, the display of this collection becomes all important, as Susan Stewart recognizes:  “Any collection promises totality.  The appearance of that totality is made possible by the face-to-face experience of display, the all-at-onceness under which the collection might be apprehended by an observer.  This display of course marks the defeat of time, the triumph over the particularity of contexts in which the collected objects first appeared” (“Death and Life, in That Order, in the Works of Charles Wilson Peale” 185).

Enter this new dispositif–collecting in the cloud–and we must rethink what kind of work a collection of access points does in the (local) absence of the data itself.  Without material ownership over the data, what do we display our access to?  This complete dissociation of the interface from the archive will certainly open up the potential for new modalities of self-fashioning so important to the practice of collecting.  But streaming music at something like the $1 billion scope Apple appears to have in mind, personal collections would stand as little more than permutations at 10¢ a piece of the totalizing mega-archive housed at Maiden, NC.  If for Benjamin “the collector is the true resident of the interior,” she now inhabits a steady dissolution and condensation of this cloud whose absolute ubiquity is predicated on a mere 183 acres pulsing with 20 megawatts annual power consumption and thousands of feet of water line to maintain an operating temperature of 68ºF.  An economy of scale must be retained between the imprint of the collector and the “appearance of [a] totality” that is not reducible to Maiden, NC.