I am living with nodes. I just have to pull back, because I am limited. Because I have nodes.

First off, I freaking hated this reading. It was extremely complicated for someone with only a surface level understanding of the computational language used. As well as that, Franklin has a habit of writing extremely long sentences and over-explaining a lot of what is said, although never actually breaking down any of his concepts in the interest of accessibility. The reader envisioned here already has a complex understanding of how Cloud technology works, which feels redundant. The most helpful part of the article, to me, was the beginning where Aristophanes' play The Clouds is used to illustrate where the concept of the Cloud in computation originates. I'm aware this may be Art student bias at work.

One [small] section of this article that I did find interesting and actually did make some semblance of sense was the section on "nodes." (p.458) Franklin makes the claim that the Cloud being completely removed from how we understand the Internet is impossible. The base idea being refuted is that the Cloud aims to uncouple connectivity from node infrastructure in order to create a completely free and limitless digital space. Nodes referring to points of communication, such as PC's or phones. The suggestion is that the Internet as we know it is still a tangible network because it needs these nodes to be in operation, as these points of communication are what allow for the Internet to interact with users and thus serve it's assumed purpose.

The belief that the Cloud embodies ubiquity in a way that would mean we do not need these points of communication, in an elimination of hardware, is false- as explained here by Franklin:

"Where the web-type network assures the possibility of measurement and representation by counting nodes and edges, then, the cloud eliminates the representation but not the existence of these constitutive units." (p. 458)

True, the Cloud presents as a type of autonomous digital organism, whereas the Internet presents as an ecosystem of many such digital organisms, it's still a thing that is ultimately routed in the physical, as without any physical space to exist from or being interacted with, it fails to be. The Cloud is an always will be a digital thing which means it draws its life from computers, which, at the end of the day, are physical things. The evolution of computers is at this stage impossible to really envision a limit to, but I feel it is safe to say that neither them, not any digital information network, will ever exist without some physical link.