TEO 'The cloud'

The Theory of Everything debuts with a three part expedition to the center of the cloud.  In part one Twitter employee number 7 Britt Selvitelle tells us what happened when Justin Bieber joined Twitter in 2009 and how everything had changed by the time the Bieb joined Instagram in 2011.  Harper Reed, CTO for Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, explains why cloud infrastructure is awesome,  Matt Wood, Amazon’s principal data scientist, explains how the cloud is changing our relationship with technology, and Parse’s Charity Majors shows us what it is like to work in the Cloud. But when your host attempts to get inside the cloud itself he runs into difficulties…


The Clouds (1 of 3)

Your host continues his journey to the center of the cloud by way of the earth. Rare Earth.  Dr. Alex King leads the Critical Materials Institute in Ames Iowa, and he explains how dependent the cloud is on Rare Earth Elements like Neodymium. If we could get inside a Data Center we would find neodymium in all the custom made hard drives, and companies like Amazon are using giant wind turbines packed with neodymium magnets to power their data farms. In fact most of the devices we use to access the cloud: our ipads, our phones, our personal computers - they all use Neodymium too. Dr. Karl “Mr. Rare Earth” Gschneider introduces us to the other 16 Rare Earth elements and we learn that they are key to most of our advanced technologies, electric cars, medical devices, drones!  When your host discovers that China controls 95% of the Rare Earth market he decides to go, he hopes to see the illegal mines in the Ganzhou region with his own eyes. We also hear from Frank Tang, a Beijing based analyst at the investment bank NSBO, and we visit a Rare Earth Magnet factory. 

The Clouds (2 of 3)

Our series concludes with some revelations. Metahaven's Daniel van der Velden and Vinca Kruk use the story of Wikileaks to show us the infrastructure of the cloud and its super-jurisdictional powers. The BBC's Paul Mason takes us on a wild tour of China in his novel Rare Earth. And a pile of iPhones brings your host a moment of clarity.

The Clouds (3 of 3)

Papá. Todo lo que me mueve, me estremece, me inspira y me aterra. ¡Que no muera el transístor!

TEO 'The cloud'

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