Since the turn of the millennium, the tech industry has spent billions to conjure a seductive narrative that the cloud—a term most nontechnical people use to mean everything the internet touches —is limitless and weightless, that it is “greener,” more durable, and securer than the analog data storage practices that preceded it. They have trained us to upload, download, stream, post, and share to infinitum. In turn, we have come to expect seamless and instant access to digital content anytime, anywhere, as if data were immaterial.
What exactly is the cloud? Where does it begin or end? Is it the fiber optic cables that transmit our data packets across oceans and continents? Is it cellular towers and mobile phones? Is it servers whirring in the halls of data centers? Since 2015, I have been asking this question as an ethnographic researcher, shadowing technicians and interviewing executives and residents who live near digital infrastructure sites. I have found that the answer depends greatly on who you are asking. For the less technically minded person, the cloud is the entirety of the information and communications technology network (ICTs). In the data storage industry, the cloud refers to a specific class of ultra-efficient data centers called hyperscalers (which make up just over a third of data centers in operation), run by a handful of companies like Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, Tencent, and Alibaba. In either case, the cloud is a metaphor we use to abbreviate the complexity of the infrastructures behind the digital sphere.
That so many laypeople struggle to specify what the cloud is speaks to the dazzling success of Big Tech’s marketing, but also its careful obfuscation of the cloud’s material residues. In the wake of recent megadroughts, gigafires, heat domes, and hurricanes, however, this marketing illusion of an immaterial cloud is evaporating before our eyes. Thanks to the work of activists, scholars, and journalists, we know now that the cloud warms our skies and drains our watersheds. It pollutes our communities with electronic waste and harmful noise. It is an accomplice to global heating, desertification, and the toxification of our environment, an epoch and force that I call nubecene (nubes is Latin for “cloud”).
The cloud’s voracious expansion has not been met without resistance. In some communities, residents are organizing, citing pollution, power grid failures, excessive land use, or lack of job creation as reasons to oppose the construction of new data centers. Even so, the cloud’s exponential growth shows little sign of ebbing, which raises the question: Is it too late to fix it? What reforms can be implemented to curb the cloud’s increasing environmental impacts? Much of the work of activists has been devoted to answering these questions, but fewer are asking this: Is the cloud an inherently unsustainable paradigm? Must the cloud as we know it come to an end, for our collective survival?
Enter the Nubecene
Data centers are anything but homogenous. The first data center I visited was nothing like the sleek cyberpunk technoscape depicted in films or Google’s marketing content. Instead, I arrived in a crumbling shell of an office building, where racks of blinking servers were arrayed in opposing rows and columns, and cold air was pumped up from an air-con
