Fluffy Clouds

When a handful of companies can quietly knock whole swaths of the internet offline, that is not a technical inconvenience. It is a structural warning.

Every time Amazon Web Services hiccups, hospital systems stall, classrooms lose their tools, small businesses stop taking payments, and public services go dark. When Cloudflare has an outage, millions of sites vanish in an instant. We treat these events as "downtime." We should treat them as case studies in why concentrating our digital lives in a few clouds is a bad idea.

The problem is not just uptime. It is power. Centralized cloud platforms combine three things we should never hand to any single actor: everyone’s data, everyone’s traffic, and everyone’s dependence. In the name of convenience, we have rebuilt the mainframe era at global scale: thin clients at the edge, a few giant computers in the middle, and a public that mostly has no idea how any of it works.

That last part is what worries me most. A society that runs on computers but doesn’t understand them is a society that has quietly outsourced its agency. If most people experience technology as a black box, they are forced to trust whoever owns the box. When the box breaks, gets hacked, or changes the rules, they have no real recourse.

Decentralization is not a lifestyle choice for hobbyists; it is a resilience strategy for democracies.

At the infrastructure level, decentralization means more independent providers, more local ownership, and fewer single points of failure. It means universities, municipalities, cooperatives, and small businesses running critical workloads on their own terms, sometimes in the big clouds, sometimes on regional providers, sometimes on-premises, rather than assuming "put it on AWS" is the only sane default. It means content and services that can survive one vendor disappearing, whether through federation, mirroring, or open standards.

At the social level, decentralization means treating computer literacy as civic literacy. People do not need to become kernel developers. But they do need to understand the basics: what a server is, what a database does, what it means when you "log in with Google," why "free" services still come at a cost. Right now, we have an expert priesthood that speaks YAML and Terraform, and a public that is expected to simply accept whatever abstractions are handed down to them. That gap is unsustainable.

Outages at companies like AWS and Cloudflare expose how brittle this model really is. When one misconfiguration, one failed deployment, or one regional incident can ripple across healthcare, finance, education, and government, we do not have "the cloud." We have a monoculture.

In any other critical system, we would recognize the risk. No regulator would accept an electrical grid where one substation failure plunged half the country into darkness. No sane nation would rely on a single factory for all of its drinking water pipes. Yet we have normalized a digital economy where a few platforms quietly sit in the middle of almost everything.

The answer is not to abolish large cloud providers; they exist because they solve real problems. The answer is to stop designing as if they are the only tool in the box.

That means:

• Architecting systems to run across multiple providers and on local infrastructure when it matters.
• Prioritizing open protocols and interoperable services over proprietary lock-in.
• Supporting community networks, local ISPs, and public-interest infrastructure alongside commercial platforms.
• Teaching students not just how to use apps, but how those apps are built and where their data actually lives.

Most importantly, it means recognizing that "the cloud" is just someone else’s computer, and that someone else’s incentives may not always align with ours.

We will never eliminate outages. Complexity guarantees that something will always fail somewhere. What we can choose is how failure behaves: Does it quietly degrade in small, manageable pockets, or does it cascade across entire sectors because we placed too many critical eggs in the same few baskets?

Decentralization, paired with broad understanding of computer systems, is how we move from blind dependency to informed choice. It is how we turn technology from something that happens to us into something we actively shape. And it is how we make sure the next big outage is an inconvenience, not a crisis.