donfabi0

In the aftermath of this week’s AWS outage, I came across a series of related tweets that immediately caught my attention. I grabbed some tea, rubbed my hands together, put my glasses on, and began scrolling—a smile already spreading across my face. Making fun of accelerationist techno-fascists is one of my favourite pastimes.

The first tweet that pulled me in came from Matteo Franceschetti—self-described “sleep nerd” and “biohacker”. Franceschetti is the CEO of Eight Sleep, a “sleep fitness” company that develops smart mattresses. These beds can change temperature, adjust to reduce snoring and back pain, and track heart rates and sleep cycles. Most importantly, they share the data they collect with Eight Sleep to “improve user experience”.

Franceschetti was apologising. Why, you might ask?

Because the mattresses have an AWS cloud dependency — meaning that during the outage, they simply stopped working. Users were unable to raise or lower temperatures, unable to adjust their sleeping positions, their smart beds unresponsive. Some complained of being jolted awake in sweat as their mattress was locked at its highest temperature setting. How dystopian.

For the uninitiated, Amazon Web Services (AWS) is the invisible backbone of the modern internet. It’s Amazon’s cloud computing arm — a vast network of remote servers that rent out computing power, storage, and data infrastructure to other companies. Over the last fifteen years, as the world shifted to cloud computing, most businesses abandoned their own data centres. Why bother with the hardware, staff, and security when you can simply rent from a trillion-dollar company promising lower costs and higher efficiency?

Many household names — Netflix, Spotify, even government departments — rely on AWS to host their websites, apps, and databases. The problem is that the “cloud”, though vast, is effectively a monopoly shared by Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Three companies control most of the world’s cloud infrastructure, meaning the internet as we know it largely lives on private servers owned by billion-dollar corporations. That concentration makes the system fragile—as last year’s CrowdStrike outage proved all too well.

In its aftermath, Google, the smallest of the three, accused Microsoft of stifling competition. “Microsoft’s complex web of licensing restrictions prevents customers, particularly its existing on-premises enterprise clients, from choosing any other cloud provider at the time of migration into the cloud and ultimately locks those customers into its Azure ecosystem,” Google said in its complaint.

Which brings us back to Eight Sleep and the not-so-helpless victims of San Francisco — the ones who paid thousands for a mattress that needs an internet connection to function.

Dubbed “Silicon Valley’s favourite mattress”, Eight Sleep has raised concerns about data collection before. Back in February, security researcher Dylan Ayrey discovered that each mattress contained an SSH backdoor, allowing engineers to remotely connect to any bed at any time. “Any other device connected to that home network — smart fridges, smart stoves, smart washing machines, laptops — is typically routable via your bed,” Ayrey explained. “The (in)security of those devices is now entrusted to random Eight Sleep engineers.”

Dark — but this has always been the case. Like most of what Silicon Valley offers, the end user’s data is the real product. Eight Sleep’s primary customers aren’t insomniacs; they’re venture capitalists who believe they can A/B test their way to enlightenment.

These people aren’t interested in helping you improve your sleep. What they really want is a monopoly on your data and personal information. They already track our steps, calories, and daily routes via GPS — and now, how often you wake up to piss at night and who shares your bed with you.

It’s funny watching the same people who evangelise and design these systems melt down online, sleepless through the night because their smart beds stopped working. There’s a kind of poetic justice in seeing accelerationists choke on their own bloat. But the joke, ultimately, is on us.