The Great Shift

Shift:

verb (used with object)

1. to put (something) aside and replace it by another or others; change or exchange: to shift friends; to shift ideas.

2. to transfer from one place, position, person, etc., to another: to shift the blame onto someone else.

3. Automotive. to change (gears) from one ratio or arrangement to another.

4. Linguistics . to change in a systematic way, especially phonetically.

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This word, for me, is significant in order to comprehend what exactly is happening in the “digital age” that we are in. A shift of property, a shift of information, a shift of interfaces, a shift of roles and a shift in relationships. These great shifts are the basis for what Sean Dockray argues in Interface, Access, Loss from the book Undoing Property. Dockray first mentions the notion of “the cloud.” An existential entity that holds all of our “stuff.” Sounds so mystical when you say it, THE CLOUD….  It’s forever infinite, hovering above us? (yeah, right). Quite contrary. In reality, it’s like a factory. A factory of servers and wires. This is one shift that Dockray talks about. The shift from the modern industrial factory to this factory in the clouds, so to speak.

What goes hand in hand with this shift is the shift in property. Our “stuff” is no longer physical, but metaphysical. The stuff we own in this cloud is not even technically ours. This brings up questions and concerns with the notion of ownership. As Dockray states, “What is less recognized—because it is still very much in process—is the subsequent undoing of property, of both the individual and common kind. What follows is a story of “the cloud,” the post-dot-com bubble techno super-entity, which sucks up property, labor, and free time.”

Another interesting thing that Dockray brings up is the shift of relationships in the digital realm. There is a shift of how we interact with the “thing,” how others interact with us through it, and of course how we interact with the world. As Dockray puts it, things have been reduced in a sense to inputs and outputs. Our roles as users has changed drastically.

“Is this a conceptual reduction of the richness and complexity of reality? Yes, but only partially. It is also a real description of how people, institutions, software, and things are being brought into relationship with one another according to the demands of networked computation (not to mention the often contradictory demands of business, government, or collective desire); and the expanding field of objects encompasses exactly those entities integrated into such a network.”