George Orwell famously wrote that there is a constant struggle to see what is right in front of one’s nose. This may be truer than ever. These days we barely register things that seemed downright bizarre 20 years ago – like people staring at their phones at a busy intersection. The unnatural begins to seem natural.
unless and until. This has coincided with the proliferation of data centers across the US. After years of ignoring their meteoric rise – there are more than 4,000 In the US – the public now clearly sees them and doesn’t like what they represent, whether it’s rising energy bills or the advent of job-killing AI. People now oppose having data centers in their communities. In real life – and in the movies too edington -Politicians are now caught between the desires of their voters and the insatiable needs of Big Tech.
Hatred of data centers sparks action cloud thiefAn exciting new novel that is equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital jungle. It was written by novelist Nathaniel Rich, who is best known for ecological non-fiction such as his 2019 book. lose the earth. Their story is set in 2014 – when tech billionaires were still considered visionaries, not bullying moguls – cloud thief It centers on an intelligent young man who, like the boy in Leonard Cohen’s song, is just like Joseph in search of a manger.
Our narrator “Tim” – a pseudonym he says – is a freelance writer who is busy writing magazine articles about climate change. He’s alone and lost until he meets Virginia (not even her real name), who might be the American cousin of dragon-Tattooed Lisbeth Salander.
Tech-savvy and paranoid and extremely elusive, Virginia lives off the grid in a Manhattan mini-storage unit and plans a strike against Big Tech. Obviously, Tim has never seen a noir film because he doesn’t just get sucked into the fantasy of a 21st century femme fatale, he goes along with her dream plan to rob a data center in Pryor, Okla., and steal the marketable information contained in their servers.
Once they left for Pryor – Rich described their road trip wonderfully – cloud thief Kicks into high gear, serving up the juicy ingredients in the heist story we all love. We see the Baroque plan. We see them in terms of their target, a silver smoke-spewing monster whose size is as grand as two futuristic airport terminals, but which is actually about as flexible as a boondocks mini-mall.
And we learn how things work. While the data centers contain the records of major corporations and government departments – each building contains thousands of servers with documents – they are guarded by a small number of minimum wage guards.
“No one knows about them,” Tim says of these huge stores. “But they are the foundation of life on Earth. …If every data center went dark tomorrow, we would be plunged into the Middle Ages.”
As Virginia and boyfriend Tim prepare for a robbery, cloud thief There is an explosion. They philosophize, have sex, wear silly disguises, are full of doubts and argue constantly, often quite humorously – he is amazed by their amateurish mistakes that can catch them out. They often appear as if teenagers are committing a crime. But they commit to it.
Of course, if you’ve ever read or watched a heist story, you know that things never go according to plan, and that the setup is more fun than the aftermath. And so it is here. But rather than spoil things, I’ll just note that Rich’s ending tells us what we already know.
No matter. Full of sharp descriptions and wonderful dialogue, cloud thief stuck with me. I haven’t read any other novel that conveys so cleanly what it means to be a data-center nation – the plight of the physical landscape, the excessive use of fossil-fuel energy, the way these huge, bland buildings owned by private companies like Google and Amazon now control almost all aspects of our lives.
Living a life of dire frustration and powerless analysis – he is the soul of defeated idealism – Tim can convince himself that robbing the Pyro data center might be a worthwhile gesture. In reality, he’s just chasing a woman – and trying to escape his failing life. But his blindness helps us see our world.
Early in the novel, Tim muses on “the cloud”, a word whose vague innocence tempts us not to think about its power. He says, “The goal of any technology is to make itself both essential and invisible, like air.” In cloud thiefRich does the opposite. He helps us see the real, mundane workings of the magical sounding cloud, and he makes us think about the dangers of needing it so badly.
