...could Alan, or anyone else, expound on the virtuosness of cloud computing as in terms of, as Rudy put it in another email, "democratiz(ing) the production of nature and science, to democratiz(ing)the reproduction of bodies and medicine, and/or to democratiz(ing)the production of culture and space."
...........
Alan might have a different interpretation. While we wait...
The computing graybeards with whom I've discussed the political aspects of 'cloud computing' (guys who remember the Santa Cruz Operation from the time before its current status as a punchline in Linux head jokes) have usually offered the following explanation.
According to these ancients, cloud computing holds the promise of turning the power of machina analytica into a common utility. As a utility (publicly managed, ideally) it would be an inherently democratic resource. Or at least, have a very good chance of becoming one.
Instead of money being the arbiter of how much access a person gets to processing resources and how good or bad that access is, the cloud would be available to every citizen.
or example, aspiring CGI animators who can't afford a box north of 3,000 dollars (or any box) could plug into a vast system with seemingly limitless reserves of CPU and memory. You can see a fictional presentation of this vision in "Star Trek", that unstoppable pop culture artifact. In ST world, people don't have 'personal computers' as we understand them. They carry devices which provide an interface to the always on, everywhere available, essentially free LCARS (Library Computer Access/Retrieval System).
A related concept, ubiquitous computing or ubicomp for short, is sometimes described as having a similarly democratic potential. Although, in ubicomp's case, the idea is more that 'intelligent', networked objects will find their way into everything from boxes of breakfast cereal (which will RFID broadcast the ingredients and freshness of their contents --becoming, in Bruce Sterling's neologism, SPIMES or blojects) to your chatty, energy miserly fridge.
Spielberg's version of Phillip K. Dick's "Minority Report" is a surprisingly well realized visualization of what life might be like in a ubicomp world. Not very democratic, I'm afraid. In fact, quite the opposite (even without the precognitive storyline).
Anyway, that's the way the *political* -- as opposed to the simply technical -- potential of cloud computing has been described to me.
.d.