Ownership as edge
I cleared out my cloud storage last month. Not strategically — I was trying to free up space and got carried away. Photos, documents, old projects. Fourteen gigabytes, gone in two clicks and a confirmation dialog that didn't try very hard to stop me.
The weird part was the relief. Not because the files were bad, but because they stopped being my problem. Fourteen gigs of things I was technically responsible for but couldn't remember saving.
A file on your hard drive is yours. You can open it offline. You can copy it to a USB stick and hand it to someone in a parking lot. You can delete it and it's gone — actually gone, not "deleted" in the way that means "hidden until someone subpoenas it."
A file in someone else's data centre is yours the way a coat in a coat check is yours. You can get it back during business hours if you have the ticket and they haven't changed their terms of service.
The further from your hands, the less you own. Everyone knows this. But the interface is the same whether the file is on your desktop or on a server in Virginia or replicated across three continents with a retention policy you've never read. The sameness is the trick.
I keep a text file on my laptop called notes.txt. It's eleven years old. It has survived four operating systems, three laptops, and one coffee spill. Nothing in the cloud has lasted that long without changing its URL at least twice.