Time-Sharing and Virtualization
Time-Sharing and Virtualization
This chapter examines the pre-history of what is now called “cloud computing”: the idea that computer power and software could be ‘piped’ into a user’s home, like electricity or other utilities. This vision came out of a 1960s technology called time-sharing, which allowed the million-dollar cost of a computer to be shared and the computer multi-tasked. Time-sharing not only invented the modern idea of a user as a personal subject, but also positioned that user within a political economy that makes a user synonymous with his or her usage. The freedom that results, however, is a deeply ambiguous one, for the virtualization technologies that allow files and user accounts to be made private in the cloud also represent a subtle form of control.
Keywords: virtualization, time sharing, user, privacy, immaterial labor, neoliberalism, computer viruses, digital hygiene
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