Cloud computing for the confused

I added Kik to the lengthening list of Things I Just Pretend to Understand. Foursquare. Bitcoin. The Cloud. Recently, I tried to learn about that last one by Googling a site that was clearly meant to be “The Cloud for Dummies.”

I read that the Cloud is a giant network of computer servers capable of holding one Exabyte of data — that is, the amount that could be stored on 4.2 million Macbook Pro computers. So, that would be like everyone in the city of Los Angeles — and I mean everyone, from infants to octogenarians — stuffing their computers’ memories with vacation photos and Excel spreadsheets and bootleg copies of Rolling Stones concerts until there was no more space.

You can’t even imagine it, right?

My mind does deep knee-bends when I try to fathom the size of the Cloud. Besides, I’m a little fixated on the metaphor. It reminds me of the heaven I’ve never believed in, where God sits on a golden throne ringed by angels in wings of white tulle. That heaven, where everyone re-meets everyone, like a huge family reunion except without the questionable potato salad and the emotional baggage.

My own vision of what-comes-next involves less poufy white stuff. Instead, it’s a dissonant, hectic Babel of a place, more like Grand Central Station than the world’s biggest moon-bounce. My heaven is a giant repository crammed with weird doodles, nearly extinct languages, bad jokes, existential questions, and shimmering ideas.

It’s such an appealing trope, isn’t it, the notion of a big container filled with Everything That Matters, everything that ever was. We don’t like to think of things disappearing forever, vanishing without a trace. Especially ourselves. And maybe that’s what’s comforting about the Cloud, both as metaphor and engineered reality: it’s your grandma’s attic, it’s the Library of Congress, it’s the place where everything goes to never really die.

A version of eternity

Come to think of it, I have my own version of this ever-afterlife.

If you’re under 30, you might not recognize this contraption, or you might lump it in the same dusty mental box where you put vinyl records (you know, those really big CDs) and manual typewriters. What I’m talking about is a Rolodex. Mine is deluxe, with a tubular metal stand. Standing still, it resembles an Elizabethan ruff, the infinity scarf of Shakespeare’s era. The Rolodex is where I keep — yes, still — the names, addresses, and telephone numbers of the people I love. Or used to love. Or met one time on that tour of Chichen Itza in 1987.

I have some rules about the Rolodex. I write in ink. I never throw away a card. If someone divorces or moves, I draw a single line through the outmoded information and write the new data, in smaller print, on the same card. If they move a lot, I start a new card and place it in front of the old one. This way, I can track my peripatetic friend Charles from Washington, D.C., to Orlando to Raleigh to Philadelphia to Mexico City and back to D.C.; when I glance at his multiple entries, my brain performs a rapid shuffle: the tiny Northwest Washington apartment where he kneaded bread on the bathroom counter; the Philly Victorian with the wraparound porch.

In my Rolodex, I see dead people. I flip to the card for Al Honickman, my maternal grandfather, who died in 1996, and remember him polishing my sneakers (Oh, Pop-pop — not my new Adidas!) one afternoon in Fort Lauderdale because he wanted so badly to be useful. The address where he lived with my Bubie is there, too, and just reading “Kerper Street” brings a sluice of recall: the acrid stink of Pop-pop’s cigars, permanent sinkhole in the orange chair where he sat to watch Get Smart.

The Rolodex is sturdy where memory, increasingly, slips: Who the heck are Sherri and Wayne Mezick? Was Clarence Goodman (SE Hawthorne Street in Portland, Oregon) a neighbor or someone I once interviewed for an article? Sometimes seeing a name or street — Gertrude Copperman; Sunny Valley Loop — is enough to jolt an old memory awake. But even if I can’t recall, the card stays put. Once in my Rolodex, you’re in for life. . .or beyond. Final Address Unknown.

If I spin my Rolodex fast, twirling the end-knob like a crazy person while the paper cards flutter by — angel wings, tiny headstones, scribbled love notes — it looks a little like. . .well, like a cloud.

A vision of eternity

People talk about data living forever in the Cloud, a locale far above the grit of everyday life. Does everything end up there — that terrible Instagram picture of your friend just out of the shower, the snotty email you banged out last Tuesday, your Google search for “best hemorrhoid cream,” the blogpost you knew, even as you were writing it, was self-involved blather? All of it? Never to be erased or edited or redeemed?

It’s our fantasy, and it’s our nightmare — that what we do is indelible, that our every action matters. We want our lives to have lingering impact, but there are parts we’d like to redact or revise, thank you very much. The Cloud, for all its squishy associations, is a dispassionate place, making no discernment between the proud and the petty, the sublime and the unspeakable.

Here’s the real Kik in the pants, the news we don’t want to remember:

We die.

But this is also true: the stranger you helped up the crumbly steps of Chichen Itza on that 1987 tour, the bread you made and fed to your friends, all the things we invent and ruin in our tiny time on Earth — that stuff does live on, in somebody’s ancient Rolodex, in the trembling, tarnished arena of memory, our personal and collective cloud.