Securing the Cloud

Jacinda Tran

I have taken hundreds of photos of clouds. I have taken them from the most mundane places—like grocery store parking lots that sometimes allow for best viewership of sunsets—and I have also taken them when I travel and witness varied meteorological concoctions, directionalities, and formations. These photos exist for no tangible reason other than the representational promise I find in their beauty, which I strive to “preserve, secure, and replicate” through documentation, as Mimi Thi Nguyen writes in The Promise of Beauty (2024). Oftentimes I don’t ever look at them again. But rarely do I delete them.

I can allow myself the whim of this ephemeral habit after surrendering to a 2TB subscription of cloud storage. My ability to be up in the clouds—partaking in a brief reprieve from the present material reality—is supported by the backups that I have on the cloud. Being in versus on the cloud/s marks a stark differentiation between leisure and labor, daydream and security; though both, in some instances, might be linked to the retrieval of memory. The shift from the plural clouds to the singular cloud distinguishes between an abundant natural resource and the singularity or enclosure of technological innovation.

The euphemism of the cloud as a diffuse and networked storage facility operates to obscure its very labor, history, and physicality. The deterritorialized imaginary of the cloud offers us a fantasy: that what we’re saving, archiving, and keeping simply evaporates into an airy borderless internet or virtuality, much like a mist of droplets suspended in the sky. The fetish of the cloud mystifies processes of affective, discursive, and material securitization integral to these everyday operations and interactions.

Most notably, the cloud is not fluffy, ephemeral, or even aerial. In A Prehistory of the Cloud (2015), Hu Tung-Hui traces how the cloud has come to inhabit physical space in the form of massive data storage centers: some of which extract precious energy or resources from ailing communities, others breathe new life into obsolescent nuclear bunkers. For instance, a 1968 military communications hub just outside Des Moines, Iowa has been converted into commercial real estate known as InfoBunker: a 65,000 square foot data storage center offering military-grade protection to paying customers. Inside these militarized structures, such data centers reinscribe Cold War discourses of national security: like the invention of the internet, the construction of these bunkers can be traced back to the U.S. Department of Defense (perhaps now more appropriately renamed the U.S. Department of War, foregrounding the conflict that “defense” anticipates and manufactures).

Likewise, the vestige of Cold War secrecy around data storage operations renders the physical location where one’s data might be stored untraceable and maintains the pretense of an intangible cloud with the imagined protection of concealment. The bunker is instrumental to this imaginary as its subterranity provides the illusion of imperceptibility. Initially conceptualized as a shield from aerial and nuclear threats from an imagined enemy, the bunker assures protection from optical detection and environmental disaster. (In combat, clouds also screened against aerial detection as they often thwarted Icarian attempts at visual reconnaissance, aerial fumigation, or precision bombing during US counterinsurgent campaigns waged in the Third World.) These renewals of militarized infrastructures coalesce in the mythologization of the cloud. Like the pretense of “defense,” such infrastructures presage an enduring demand to constantly be guarded or on guard, a continual need for protection and preemption.

To give an example: my father is a war refugee from Vietnam, one of the Cold War’s deadliest theaters. On special occasions, he takes out his phone camera and keeps his finger on the trigger, producing hundreds of images that he then culls and edits before sharing. He is by far the #1 user of the 2TB of cloud storage that I share with four others. He’s always had a penchant for photographic documentation, though as he gets older, I notice this compulsion intensifying, a paranoiac safeguarding against the threat of potential disaster; an immortalizing impetus to archive in lieu of living.

For my father, the cloud offers a means to recover the missing at the same time that it suspends him in the limbo of waiting or longing for it. Much like the cloud, his attempts at memorialization sublimates a deeper aspiration for the semblance of security. I might diagnose it as a melancholic attachment to memory, one that could be traced to the conditions of war, displacement, and resettlement charted by my father’s diasporic trajectory and the ample losses symptomatic of it; however, this instinct might also extend beyond the lived experience of violence to be applicable to us all.

Maybe we are alike in our proclivities for preservation, sharing in the same infrastructures of feeling to save amidst or in spite of probable destruction: whether through the trauma of war and its afterlives, or deep in the maw of racial capitalism. Yet our endeavors remain routed through such ordinary architectures of militarism as the internet, cloud, or bunker. These remnants of the technological Cold War ensnare us as much as they may tempt us with the connective possibilities, emancipatory promises, and lure of salvation offered by a 2TB share of seeming infinity.

If the bounded bunker suggests an illusion of safety achieved through the physical distinction between an inside and outside, the cloud’s amorphousness blurs these boundaries and the attendant fantasies of sovereignty and security yielded by a border. Yet the physical bunkerization of the cloud follows these same spatial logics of shielding and occlusion, which are also at once temporal. By attempting to secure the past—through the preservation of memories in silico—the cloud offers a glimmer of resilience against an uncertain future. This hope is the condensation of feeling rooted in nostalgia for a time/place other than our present inasmuch as it also predicts a future nostalgic return. What survives beyond our own memorialization will not only be the contours of our data, but the pervasive longing embedded in our desires to save. However incidental this wish may be, it remains enclosed—and perhaps even foreclosed—by the architectures of an insatiable militarism.