In 2006, at an industry conference, then-Google-CEO Eric Schmidt introduced a now ubiquitous term: “the cloud.” Here was a grand technological shift, Schmidt explained, that would let information exist simultaneously nowhere and everywhere. Naming it “the cloud” made the change sound almost natural. Your information is not in a massive bank of servers in Nevada; it is, as he put it, “in a ‘cloud’ somewhere.” Data as a nimbus floating above. The cloud is just one of many linguistic elisions between the artificial and natural worlds.