Cloud Bank

Can you weather the storm?
Perhaps with the outrage in Cyprus with the banking situation, you now realize how tenuous is your control over whatever you have deposited with your bank. Without warning, the whole thing can be frozen and you can’t touch your own money. It might quickly no longer be yours. There was a time when carrying around loads of cash was risky, and so was trying to hide it at your home. Banks were more secure and they had a contractual obligation to give you quick access. Then there arose the system by which they would handle the transfer of funds for you. Now it’s just a matter of waving your plastic cards. But the whole system is surprisingly fragile and degrading before our very eyes.
Worse, far too many of us have no choice. Our income source demands we accept it in the form of a direct deposit at the bank. Do I have to make note how this plays into the hands of oppressive government officials who don’t love Jesus and aren’t particularly fond of you and I, either? The probability of having your access blocked in the near future is very, very high. You might want a backup plan.
The same goes with your digital data. While I can’t prove it’s a nasty plot to intrusively grab control over our private data, you’d have to work pretty hard to convince me otherwise. Who uses film cameras any more? All your pictures, your financial records, private correspondence, everything you’ve written — they want you to put in the cloud. They want you to trust them to guard it for you so you can get to it as you wish without anyone else seeing it. Except you’ve already seen what happens with things like the Mega Upload caper.
I suppose if the cloud was totally automated and distributed with failover backups across some global system, blindly shared between a large group of servers scattered across the world, I might be more relaxed about it. Instead, they are already planning to make all commodity computers incapable of actually storing data, so you are forced to use the cloud.
But having seen what TPTB can do with stuff like this, I think I’ll keep my old computers and rely on my own storage, thank you. I keep at least two copies of the valuable stuff on separate drives not permanently attached to my computers. Stuff on this blog that I really value I keep that way; some of it becomes articles on my static website or published as books elsewhere. Most of it reflects what’s already in my soul, and I can regenerate it when needed. Still, I don’t trust anyone else, given I teach you can’t even trust yourself.
If you fall for the propaganda ploy to let someone else hold your money or your data, don’t cry when things fall apart on you.