A Prehistory of the Cloud

Hu is a former network engineer turned literature professor, and the book reflects both formations. He traces how the metaphor of the "cloud" inherits older infrastructural imaginaries — railways, pneumatic tubes, Cold War bunkers, virtualized time-sharing systems — and argues that each inheritance carries political assumptions about centralization, sovereignty, and user passivity. The analysis moves from nineteenth-century railroad networks through SAGE air defense to contemporary data centers, showing that the fantasy of dematerialized computing has deep roots and persistent consequences. Hu is especially sharp on how "the cloud" naturalizes surveillance and obscures the labor and energy that sustain it. For product people, the book reframes cloud infrastructure not as a neutral platform but as a historically loaded metaphor that shapes what we imagine is possible. It is the kind of argument only someone who has both configured routers and read Foucault could make.