George Orwell famously wrote that it takes a constant struggle to see what's in front of one's nose. That may be truer than ever. These days we barely register things that 20 years ago would've seemed downright bizarre — like people staring down at their phones in busy crosswalks. The unnatural comes to seem natural.
Until it doesn't. This has happened with the proliferation of data centers all over America. After years of ignoring their mushrooming growth — there are over 4,000 in the U.S. — the public now sees them clearly and doesn't like what they represent, be it soaring energy bills or the advent of job-killing AI. People now oppose having data centers in their communities. In real life — and in movies like Eddington — politicians are now pulled between their constituents' desires and the devouring needs of Big Tech.
The hatred of data centers ignites the action in Cloudthief, a boisterous new novel that's equal parts heist thriller and cry in the digital wilderness. It was written by novelist Nathaniel Rich, who may be best known for ecological non-fiction such as his 2019 book Losing Earth. Setting his story back in 2014 — when tech billionaires were still considered visionaries, not bullying moguls — Cloudthief centers on a brainy young man who, like the guy in the Leonard Cohen song, is just some Joseph looking for a manger.
Our narrator "Tim" — a pseudonym he says — is a freelance writer who's gone broke doing magazine articles about climate change. He's lonely and lost until he stumbles upon Virginia (also not her real name), who could be the American cousin of dragon-tattooed Lisbeth Salander.
Tech-savvy and paranoid and scarily elusive, Virginia lives off the grid in a Manhattan mini-storage unit and has plans for a blow against Big Tech. Evidently, Tim has never seen a noir movie because he doesn't merely fall for this 21st-century fantasy of a femme fatale, he dreamily goes along with her plans to rob a data center in Pryor, Okla., and make off with the sellable information their servers contain.
Once they drive off to Pryor — Rich describes their road trip wonderfully — Cloudthief kicks into high gear, serving up the juicy stuff that we all love in a heist story. We see the baroque planning. We watch them case their target, a silver-smoke spewing behemoth that has the majestic size of two futuristic airport terminals but is actually as tacky as a boondocks mini-mall.
And we learn how things work. While data centers contain the records of major corporations and government departments — each building contains tens of thousands of servers fat with documents — they're protected by a smattering of minimum wage guards.
"Nobody knows about them," Tim says of these gigantic repositories. "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 the lovestruck Tim prepare for the robbery, Cloudthief is a blast. They philosophize, have sex, don silly disguises, bristle with suspicion and constantly argue, often quite wittily — she's aghast at his amateur mistakes that could get them caught. They often seem like teenagers playing at committing a crime. But commit it they do.
Of course, if you've ever read or watched a heist tale, you know that things never go as planned, and that the setup is more fun than the aftermath. And so it is here. But rather than spoil things, I'll merely note that Rich's ending earnestly tells us what we already know.
No matter. Filled with sharp descriptions and terrific dialogue, Cloudthief stuck with me. I've read no other novel that captures so neatly what it means to be a data-center nation — the blighting of the physical landscape, the voracious use of fossil-fuel energy, the way that these huge, bland buildings, owned by private companies like Google and Amazon, now house, and thereby control, nearly all aspects of all our lives.
Leading a life of garrulous desperation and powerless analysis — he's the very soul of defeated idealism — Tim can kid himself into believing that robbing the Pyror data center might be a meaningful gesture. In fact, he's just chasing a woman — and trying to escape his own thwarted life. But his blindness helps us see our world.
Early in the novel, Tim ruminates on "the Cloud," a term whose vague innocence seduces us into not thinking about its power. "The goal of any technology," he says, "is to make itself both essential and invisible, like air." In Cloudthief, Rich does the opposite. He helps us see the actual, earthbound workings of the magical-sounding cloud, and he gets us thinking about the perils of our needing it so badly.
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