Members of the contemporary tech industry speak of cloud computing with such awe and reverence that one might think that they were referring to the Kingdom of Heaven. “The cloud is for everyone. The cloud is a democracy,” declared Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com, a major business software company, in 2010.

Today, more and more companies are shifting their products and services to the cloud, most recently including Adobe with the successor to its Creative Suite of graphic design and editing software. Tech websites fill daily with articles arguing for businesses and individuals to transfer their data to the cloud. As Steve Jobs once commented, “I don’t need a hard disk in my computer if I can get to the server faster . . .  carrying around these non-connected computers is byzantine by comparison.” Few in the industry would argue against the convenience and opportunities provided by the technology.

This consensus, however, is not without its discontents. Instead of functioning as a digital democracy, the net activist Jaron Lanier sees the cloud as more of a feudal kingdom. In his 2010 book, You Are Not a Gadget, Lanier illustrated the stratification of the digital world into “Peasants and Lords of the Clouds”: the lords own the digital architecture and are rewarded handsomely for it, while the creative class forms the peasantry, reduced to providing content for free and hoping for patronage.