We live in the cloud.

We live in the clouds. Plural. There are so many of them. Three billion of them, give or take, everywhere. Surrounding. Enclosing. Auras of eyes, ghosting over your limbs, trunk, neck and head; there isn’t anywhere they won’t go. There’s a tremendous degree of comfort in this perfected and perfectly complete surveillance – and in fact surveillance is an ugly term, far too politically loaded. Observation and documentation are cold and clinical and don’t even come close to capturing what the experience of this is like.

That was in the early days, though. When this was new enough to be sensual, to actually be an experience. Now we live in the clouds and the clouds are us, and we notice them in the way you might notice your fingers: useful, always there and always doing things, but you aren’t really aware of them unless something goes wrong.

We live in the clouds and they live in us. In us and around and all over and everywhere.

~

Here’s what they look like: very pretty. Stand in a beam of sun and raise your hand, watch a hundred thousand motes of dust dance around your fingers. Hover over your skin, follow you as you move. A few cling to the fine hairs of your forearms and the backs of your hands, your fingers. They drift around each other. Blow and you disturb them but only minutely, and they return to their state of elegant, organic disorder in the time it takes you to draw in the breath you let go.

How many angels can dance on the head of a pin? How many angels can dance on the tip of your finger? More, seems like, reflected by glittery nail polish.

We have an exact figure for this, more or less. Flick your fingers one at a rapid time, in a wave, watch it all flow. On the tip of an extended finger there can dance approximately three hundred and fifty drone nanocameras.

You can stand there in that beam of sun until it’s gone, watching this. Watching yourself. Watching yourself being watched.

Not that anyone does.

~

Why?

Why not?

~

Within us there are two impulses and they’re in constant conflict with each other.

To make the things we make as completely a part of us as possible, and to keep them at such a remote distance that there isn’t any more contact than utility requires. We’re not comfortable with blurred lines, and we’re not comfortable with anything that fucks with definitions, categories, ingrained meanings. Persistent over time. We don’t like things that aren’t persistent.

Everyone used to be very uncomfortable with this.

But there’s a tipping point. There’s a technological and documentation event horizon beyond which no one gives a shit anymore. Machines as effortless and complete as memory – more so. Memory is unreliable. These things are so crystalline in their clarity, so wonderfully real.

All of you, all of you seen. Eyes turned inward, a cloud of dancing mirrors; who ever really watches these things, or looks at the things anyone else sends into the ether? But they’re there. Knowing that…

Listen: Look on my works.

But there’s so much beauty in the ephemeral.

Time and bodies are gossamer. Strands intertwined and winding and so intimately entangled. How much more fully in the moment could you possibly be?

~

We breathe them in, on occasion. Swallow them. They’re self-replicating; nothing is lost. But they’re inside you now. Supposedly they break down, but what if they don’t?

Eyes in your blood. Nesting in your heart.

People have dreams about golden cities built inside bloody fists, watching everything always forever now until death do you part.

~

No one is stupid enough to really imagine that any of this will last. That’s not the point. That’s not why.

We used to think that. The clouds did a lot to adjust that way of thinking. If time is gossamer and bodies are the same, if this interweaving is as intimate as it feels, in the end everything falls apart. Is dust.

In the end everything is the clouds.

~

Nothing beside remains.