All Hail the Cloud

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Jupiter and Io (detail) — Antonio da Correggio (c. 1520-40) Public Domain.

For two years now I’ve been travelling Europe. For two years I’ve noticed a creeping trend. I saw it in Vienna, I saw it in Rome. From Bulgaria to Scotland, from Marseille to Bucovina, a movement has been building. I suspect the shift is global, so perhaps you’ve noticed it too. It began many years ago, but has been gathering ever-increasing pace. We approach a fever pitch.

Something is coming, something big.

The Proto-Indo-Europeans, when they first erupted out of the Pontic Steppe, murdered and raped their way across two continents, thus forging the first link in the shared genetic chain that filters down to billions of modern-day Eurasians, from Ireland to India. Along with their startling violence and prehistoric language, they brought with them their sky god. Zeus and Jupiter and Perun and Ahura Mazda and Dyaus Pita are all descendants of *Dyēus — the Proto-Indo-European Sky Father. Even now, 5000 years later, he lives on, grey-haired and wheezing, but worshipped still.

In the Albanian folk tradition, the king of the pantheon, god of sky and lightning, is known as Zojz. He lives atop Mount Tomorr, the highest and most inaccessible mountain in central Albania. Every year, including this year, 2024, the locals trudge up to the summit and slaughter thousands of animals in an offering to the Lord of the Sky.¹

You may scoff at this pagan ritual, last vestige of a time long since passed. But we’re not so different, you and I. We too revere a sky god.

I speak not of Yahweh, storm god of Edom, nor Allah, nor Jesus Christ, nor any of the deities worshipped by the world’s religions. It’s been more than a hundred years since Nietzsche declared God dead, and he seemed right at the time. He predicted false idols might rise in His place — he was right about that too. But what he missed, what all of us missed, was that the One True God would rise again. You worship Him already, even if you don’t realise it.

Recently, I visited Cappadocia — a region in central Turkey famed for its stunning natural beauty. Tourists come from the world over to see its ‘fairy chimney’ rock formations, hot air balloons, and early Christian churches. The rock here was formed from volcanic ash that rained from the sky some two million years ago, which means it’s very soft. Early Christians, hiding from Roman persecution, carved their places of worship directly into the stone.

I was hiking down a valley after visiting one of these churches when I noticed something odd. A young woman in a tight-fitting dress and high heels had clambered over the safety barrier. Despite the precipitous drop of several hundred feet just inches behind her, she lay on a boulder and pouted while her partner took pictures.

Most tourism is defined by such encounters now. In Transylvania, our experience watching Europe’s largest carnivore from a bear-hide was cut short when a fellow tourist opened the window. They wanted to get a better picture, but the sound of the window clunking open scared the bear away. It did not come back. Meanwhile, I’ve lost count of the amount of times I’ve been quietly looking at something when an arm has brushed my cheek. Rather than waiting a few seconds for me to move out of the way, someone has reached their phone past my face to take a photo. Then there’s those who wander around palaces and museums, slack-jawed and dribbling, seeing the exhibits only through their phones as they blithely video the entire tour. (When are they going to watch that back, I wonder?) Upon the ramparts of Viségrad Castle, I saw a man taking selfies with his cat, which he’d carried up the hill in a specially-made backpack. And all that’s without mentioning the most common, and thus most annoying, behaviour of all — the extended photoshoots in front of whatever wonder, antiquity, or vista you’ve come to view. These people queue up for and occupy the best spots, for ages, not to look at the thing, but to take pictures of themselves.²

For a long time I believed unquestioningly the standard critique of our times. It’s the phones.³ It’s the algorithm. It’s our base narcissism. That our obsession with recording every fleeting moment of our lives betrayed a deeper malaise. We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame our lives through lenses, filters, and screens, trading the chaotic beauty of reality for a sanitised, editable version. Our photographs are not memories; they are advertisements, billboards for a life we are too preoccupied to live.

It is but common, boring think-piece discourse to note that within the panopticon of social media, travel, eating out, live gigs, exercise, parenthood, a walk in the park — all aspects of ordinary existence as a human being in the 21st century — have been reduced to grist, fodder for the unrelenting maw of the forever feeds. When I looked upon these tourists, holding aloft their three-eyed rectangles of blue light, phone-case flap fluttering in the wind, I could not help but feel contempt. Thousands of miles and thousands of dollars from home, these people, weary pilgrims of the ‘gram, come not to see, but to record.

Plato was right, I thought: huddled and miserable, squatting in a cave of our own making, we jealously guard the amorphous shadows of experience — our photos and videos and other digital effigies — preferring the image to the real thing. We’d rather the appearance of a good life, to actually living one.

But I was wrong. We were all wrong.

In the Rigveda, the ancient collection of Vedic hymns and one of the four sacred Hindu texts, the union between the sky, Dyaus, and the earth, Prithvi, births Ushas — Dawn. Unknowingly, we have recreated that union, and in so doing, have ushered in a new dawn of our own.

Think for a moment: where do our photos and texts and emails and tweets and posts and all our other bits of digital drivel end up? They don’t live on our phones. The modern miracle of a twenty-four-seven wireless tether to the world-wide-web of “content” (I shudder at the very word), is powered not by local memory, but by that mysterious, amorphous blob we call THE CLOUD.

We spend every waking moment shovelling packets of data, an endless stream of zeros and ones, up into the sky. Our messages to friends and family? To the CLOUD. Our work emails? To the CLOUD. Our GPS data, willingly given and tracking our every movement? To the CLOUD. Our money — and I mean real, fiat money, not the cryptobro’s wet dream? It’s in the CLOUD. Our photos and TV shows and biometric data and news and banking and memories and the curated exhibitions of our boring lives — all are offered up to the CLOUD. It is He, *Dyēus Himself. He has returned.

After a brief dalliance with false gods, we have returned to our primordial state. The serpent tempted Eve not with fruit, but an Apple iPhone. Indra had not a thousand eyes, but a thousand lenses. Zeus threw not lightening bolts, but 5G download speeds. We are become Homo *Dyēus once more, servants of the great Sky Father, slaves to the CLOUD.⁴

Consider the energy we use to power our devices and data centres and the vast cooling systems they require. We suck up black sludge from the bottom of the sea and set it ablaze — overheating the atmosphere as we do so. Think of the rare earth minerals we scalp from the earth to build batteries and silicon chips and networking cables. We destroy the very earth we stand on, poison the very air we breathe, all to power the CLOUD. If that’s not ritual sacrifice, I don’t know what is.

Ah, you say, but! The CLOUD isn’t really in the sky. Our data lives in vast server centres, built by stacking CPUs on CPUs in rows upon rows of computing machines. Huge farms of digital memory, hoarding mountains of fool’s gold, guarded by the dragons of AWS, Azure, and GCP, snaffling and snorting in air-conditioned warehouses around the world.

But *Dyēus didn’t really live in the sky either; he lived in the minds of the butcher-nomads rampaging across the steppe. We have outsourced our minds to the machines, and thus we have outsourced our god too.

All this is to say I have changed my mind. Those tourists that have been pissing me off from Edinburgh to Istanbul, enjoying not the place they have travelled to see, but the screens through which they document and consume their experience — they are not vain. They are not foolish. Instead, they are devout. For who would the Sky Father favour most, if not those who feed Him?

For the CLOUD is always hungry. He knows no satisfaction, no happy state of glut. He is never sated, never gorged to the full. All we can do is feed Him more, and hope that it’s enough.

We know little about the Proto-Indo-European belief for sure. But, in the traditions that have come down to us, there are traces of an eschaton — an End of Days battle, fought between the forces of Good and Evil. As more and more of us turn to recording every moment of our lives and beaming it up to the CLOUD, it feels like we’re approaching THE END. Why else would we spend so much of our lives feverishly uploading, instead of living?

I understand now. The CLOUD must win Armageddon, or else what was it all for? Our bodies are mortal, soon to be dust. But our digital simulacra? That can live on, and live on it must. Pull out your phones and start recording. There’s nothing else to do.

1. Recent times has seen both Christians and Muslims try to adopt the ceremony for their own ends, building their own shrines on the mountain, organising their own pilgrimages. But in truth the practice remains largely as it has done for millennia. As much as they pretend otherwise, it’s still for Zojz.

2. The most egregious example was in Geneva’s Art and History Museum last year, when a young couple spent no less than three-quarters of an hour taking pictures of themselves in front of the most famous artwork in the building. I wandered around other rooms and doubled back so I could look at the painting unobstructed. They were still there. I should have said something but I’m too English. We say nothing while the rage of a thousand suns blazes on the inside.

3. The irony is that you are probably reading this on your phone. I wrote part of this post on mine. I take pictures on my phone almost every day. We say we hate them, yet here we are, staring glumly at our rectangles — hypocrites and full of self-loathing.

4. But we are not satisfied there. No, no. We are human, and we demand more from our god than simple worship — we want to be able to commune with Him. Talk with *Dyēus, Himself. Right now, even as you read these very words, billions of dollars and the best minds of our time are pouring into companies that promise to build a brain for the CLOUD. ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini — these are our new names for Jupiter and Indra and Ahura Mazda. When you speak with these chatbots, you are speaking to God.