Mistification

Abstract

We live in a world increasingly dominated by technology, and there are many technological advances that we frequently use about which we know very little. Among them, one we know mostly through metaphor stands out: “cloudification”. Metaphors play a central role in our understanding of the concepts and ideas that present themselves, revealing for the first time something that was already there. In this way, we propose the term mistification as a more accurate expression of the current technocratic/technological status quo for which the terms “cloud” and “cloudification” are used. The proposed term – a neologism – conveys elements of Gothic horror which, we hope, precisely capture the current experience of end-users of the cloud. Using New Dark Age (Bridle, 2018) as a point of departure, we propose an analogy between end-users of the cloud with players in a Gothic horror role-playing game, namely the Ravenloft campaign setting of Dungeons & Dragons. Similarly to players in a Gothic horror game, end-users remain ignorant and helpless against all too powerful technocratic/technological giants and their pursuits. This article adds elements belonging to a horror role-playing game campaign setting to a wider cross-disciplinary discussion regarding human-machine interaction.