'Cloudthief' and 'Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep' are novels that center tech
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What is the premise of Nathaniel Rich’s novel *Cloud Thief* and why does it matter?
Hi, I'm Alyssa Nadwarney and this is NPR's book of the day. Today, two novels with tech at the center. In a minute, a book from horror writer Paul Tremblay about a gamer who takes on an odd job. But first, climate journalist and author Nathaniel Rich's new book, Cloud Thief. The story of a hacker and a journalist who team up to rob a data center in Oklahoma, going after all the precious information and memories stored in the cloud. Rich talked with here and now host Indira Lakshmanan.
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In Nathaniel Rich's new novel, Cloud Thief, a mysterious hacker living off the grid in a Manhattan mini storage unit and a disaffected climate journalist team up for a new kind of heist, robbing the cloud and the valuable secrets hidden within. We talk about the cloud as if it's a celestial weightless ether where our digital photos and emails just float, but Rich's story is a stark reminder that all of those memories live in a physical place, massive, energy hungry data centers that are hidden gold mines.
The most valuable thing in the world is no longer money, you know, or jewels or artwork. It's data. And all of this data lives in these Fort Knoxes that no one really talked about, called data centers.
Again, the novel is cloud thief, and journalist and author Nathaniel Rich recently joined me from NPR New York. I began by asking him where he got the idea for the heist of a data center.
I think it must have come from a piece I reported many years ago about a group of people who were connected to the WikiLeaks organization and Julian Assange who were extremely concerned about privacy surveillance and this sort of coming age that we've now entered of tech corporations controlling every aspect of our lives. And I remember a conversation with one of these activists who told me, you know, Google is more powerful than any country in the world and I said, 'Cause they're, you know, so rich. He said, No, no, in their servers. They have information that could compromise any political leader, any CEO, any you know, news organization, any military. Everybody uses these servers and they own all of it.
And that kind of staggered me.
Hm. Well, I think it's true that most of us think of the cloud as something ethereal, that all of our information is up in the air somewhere. And you address that in the book. Can you read a passage for us from page fifty nine?
Yes. These fortresses of information were imagined to be as weightless as a mass of fine water droplets. Their security seemed tied to data's ephemerality. If our information was everywhere, it was nowhere. But our information was somewhere. It lived on servers.
How does *Cloud Thief* reveal the physical reality and environmental cost of the digital cloud?
Computers without monitors or keyboards, sleek rectangular black boxes dotted with blinking LEDs. Data servers were stacked in cabinets that resembled commercial baking racks in Pentagon scale warehouses and The largest of these centers tended to be built on the margin between exurbs and rural sprawl. Areas with cheap water, abundant land, and cheap utility costs, places like prior, Oklahoma.
Well, you're right that we've been conditioned to think of data as weightless, that it's a strategy by tech companies to hide the physical and environmental costs of our digital lives and all those memories being uploaded. Talk about those costs.
If you combined all the data centers in the world into a state, it would rank only behind Texas in terms of energy use. And I think they're bound to pass Texas in the coming year. The chips require enormous amounts of energy, usually powered by gas and coal plants. You also need a lot of water to cool down the machine so they don't explode.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the premise of Nathaniel Rich’s novel *Cloud Thief* and why does it matter?
0:02–3:31
2
How does *Cloud Thief* reveal the physical reality and environmental cost of the digital cloud?
3:31–7:26
3
What real‑world data‑center heists inspired the story and what did the investigation uncover?
7:26–11:06
4
Why does Rich argue that data centers are a new kind of “Fort Knox” and what are the security implications?
11:06–13:46
5
What moral and societal questions does *Cloud Thief* raise about privacy, corporate power, and climate change?
13:46–16:20
6
How does Paul Tremblay’s *Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep* explore AI through a gamer‑controlled vegetative patient?
16:20–19:25
7
Why does Tremblay view AI as both a horror element and a warning about future technology?
19:25–21:21
8
What call to action do the authors give listeners about confronting AI, data privacy, and the ethics of art?
21:21–23:53
Speakers
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