Concrete clouds: Bunkers, data, preparedness

Abstract

As visions of the end-times accelerate under neoliberal capitalism, corporations and governments are moving their valuable digital data into that most iconic end-of-the-world architecture: the nuclear bunker. This article traces the rise of the bunker as a prominent architectural form for the industrial storage of data. In doing so, it introduces the concept of ‘data preparedness’ to explore one way that data centres and cloud back-up providers strategically position themselves and their clients in imaginative relation to threatening futures. Rebranded as an ‘ultra-secure’ data centre, the bunker is no longer orientated towards the omnipresent threat of nuclear terror that structured everyday life during the Cold War. Rather, the bunkered data centre promises preparedness for an existential threat that lurks behind the screens of daily life in the digital world: the unending prospect of data loss or IT system failure.