Spending all the money you have and all the money you can get and all the money you can promise has a number of side effects, such as gigantic data centres full of high-power chips just to run lying chatbots. These are near actual towns with people, and people object to things like noise, rising power bills, and AI-induced water shortages.

So what if, right, what if, we put the data centres in … space!

This idea has a lot of appeal if you’ve read too much sci-fi, and it sounds obvious if you don’t know any practical details.

Remember: none of this has to work. You just have to convince the money guys it could work. Or at least make a line go up.

A lot of people who should know better have been talking up data centres in space over the past couple of years. Jeff Bezos of Amazon wants Blue Origin to do space manufacturing. Google has scribbled a plan for a small test network of AI chips on satellites. [Reuters; Google]

But what’s the attraction of doing data centers on hard mode like this? They want to do their thing with no mere earthly regulation! Because people are a problem.

Space is unregulated the same way the oceans are unregulated — that is, it’s extremely highly regulated and there’s a ton of rules. But rules are for the peons who aren’t venture capitalists.

Startups are on the case, setting venture cash on fire. Lonestar Data Systems sent a computer the size of a book, riding along with someone else’s project, to the moon! The lander tipped over and it died. Oh well. [Grist]

Starcloud is targeting the AI bros directly. They’ve got a white paper: “Why we should train AI in space.” [Starcloud, 2024, PDF]

Last month, Starcloud sent up a satellite, Starcloud-1, containing one Nvidia H-100 processor. It didn’t die on launch, so that’s something! [Data Center Dynamics]

Starcloud-1 was a test. Starcloud-2 is the big deal: [Starcloud]

Our first commercial satellite, Starcloud-2, features a GPU cluster, persistent storage, 24/7 access, and proprietary thermal and power systems in a smallsat form factor.

That’s written in the present tense about things that do not exist. It’s a paper napkin scribble that got venture funding.

A good friend who writes under the pen name Taranis is an actual ex-NASA expert who has personally built electronics to go into space. Taranis also worked at Google on deploying AI systems. And Taranis has written an excellent blog post on this stupidity: “Datacenters in space are a terrible, horrible, no good idea.” [blog post]

You can send a toy system into the sky, and it might work a while before it breaks. You can’t send up a data centre, with tens of thousands of expensive Nvidia chips, with any economic feasibility, any time in the near future.

Firstly, you don’t actually have abundant power. The solar array for the International Space Station delivers 200 kilowatts and it took several trips to get it all up there. You could power about 200 Nvidia H-100 cards with that 200 kilowatts.

Secondly, cooling in space is an absolute arse. Space is an excellent insulator for heat. That’s why a thermos works. In space, thermal management is job number one. All you can use is radiators. Getting rid of your 200 kilowatts will need about 500 square metres.

Thirdly, a chip in space needs radiation tolerance. Cosmic rays zap it all the time.The chips degrade at best and short out at worst.

If your GPUs are cutting edge, they’re fragile already — they burn out all the time running in their optimum environment on Earth. Space is nastier:

GPUs and TPUs and the high bandwidth RAM they depend on are absolutely worst case for radiation tolerance purposes. Small geometry transistors are inherently much more prone both to SEUs [single-event upsets] and latch-up. The very large silicon die area also makes the frequency of impacts higher, since that scales with area.

If you want chips that work well in space, you’re working with stuff that’s 20 years behind — but built to be very robust.

And finally, your network is slow. You have at most a gigabit per second by radio to the ground. (Compare Starlink, which is on the order of one-tenth of that.) On Earth, the links inside data centres are 100 gigabit.

I’ve seen a lot of objections to the Taranis post — and they’re all gotchas that are already answered in the post itself, from people who can’t or won’t read. Or they’re idiots going, “ha, experts who’ve done stuff! What do they know? Possibility thinking!” Yeah, that’s great, thanks.

If you really want to do space data centres, you can treat the Taranis post as a checklist — this is every problem you’re going to have to solve.

So space is a bit hard. A lot of the sci-fi guys suggest oceans! We’ll put the data centres underwater and cooling will be great!

Microsoft tried data centres in the ocean a few years ago, putting a box of computers underwater off the coast of Scotland from 2018 to 2020. They talked about how it would be “reliable, practical and use energy sustainably” — but here in 2025, Microsoft is still building data centres on land. [Microsoft]

Microsoft admitted last year that the project was dead. The only advantage of going underwater was cooling. Everything else, like maintenance or updating, was a massive pain in the backside and underwater data centres were just not practical. [IT Pro, 2024]

Space is going to be just like that — only cooling’s going to suck too. This is unlikely to slow down the startup bros for one moment.

• Video — Podcast

Today's links

• All the books I reviewed in 2025: A year in books.
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: David Byrne v RIAA; Sam Buck vs Starbucks; Eek-A-Trad; Mesopotamian DRM; Distanced stage plays.
• Upcoming appearances: Where to find me.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

All the books I reviewed in 2025 (permalink)

I read as much as I could in 2025, but as ever, I have finished the year bitterly aware of how many wonderful books I didn't get to, whose spines glare daggers at me whenever I sit down at my desk, beneath my groaning To Be Read shelf. But I did write nearly two dozen reviews here on Pluralistic in calendar 2025, which I round up below.

If these aren't enough for you, please check out the lists from previous years.

• 2024: https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/02/booklish/#2024-in-review

• 2023: https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/01/bookmaker/#2023-in-review

• 2022: https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/01/bookishness/#2022-in-review

• 2021: https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/08/required-ish-reading/#bibliography

• 2020: https://pluralistic.net/2020/12/08/required-reading/#recommended-reading

Now that my daughter is off at college (!), I have a lot fewer kids' books in my life than I did when she was growing up. I miss 'em! (And I miss her, too, obviously).

But! I did manage to read a couple great kids' books this year that I recommend to you without reservation, both for your own pleasure and for any kids in your life, and I wanted to call them out separately, since (good) books are such good gifts for kids:

• Daniel Pinkwater's Jules, Penny and the Rooster (middle-grades novel)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato

• Perry Metzger, Penelope Spector and Jerel Dye's Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works (graphic novel nonfiction)

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

NONFICTION

I. Cooking in Maximum Security, Matteo Guidi

Cooking in Maximum Security is a slim volume of prisoners' recipes and improvised cooking equipment, a testament to the ingenuity of a network of prisoners in Italy's maximum security prisons.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/24/moca-moka/#culinary-apollo-13

II. 9 Times My Work Has Been Ripped Off, Raymond Biesinger

A masterclass in how creative workers can transform the endless, low-grade seething about the endless ripoffs of the industry into something productive and even profound.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/28/productive-seething/#fuck-you-pay-me

III. Three Rocks, Bill Griffiths

What better format for a biography of Ernie Bushmiller, creator of the daily Nancy strip, than a graphic novel? And who better to write and draw it than Bill Griffith, creator of Zippy the Pinhead, a long-running and famously surreal daily strip? Griffith is carrying on the work of Scott McCloud, whose definitive Understanding Comics used the graphic novel form to explain the significance and method of sequential art, singling out Nancy for special praise.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/27/the-snapper/#9-to-107-spikes

IV. The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé

A brilliantly told, brilliantly researched tale that left me with a much deeper understanding of – and appreciation for – the cultural phenomenon that I was (and am) swept up in.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/21/1060-west-addison/#the-new-oldsmobiles-are-in-early-this-year

V. Close to the Machine, Ellen Ullman

Ullman's subtitle for the book is "Technophilia and its discontents," and therein lies the secret to its magic. Ullman loves programming computers, loves the way they engage her attention, her consciousness, and her intelligence. Her descriptions of the process of writing code – of tackling a big coding project – are nothing less than revelatory. She captures something that a million technothriller movies consistently fail to even approach: the dramatic interior experience of a programmer who breaks down a complex problem into many interlocking systems, the momentary and elusive sense of having all those systems simultaneously operating in a high-fidelity mental model, the sense of being full, your brain totally engaged in every way. It's a poetics of language that meets and exceeds the high bar set by the few fiction writers who've ever approached a decent rendering of this feeling, like William Gibson.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/16/beautiful-code/#hackers-disease

VI. Chasing Shadows, Ron Deibert

Deibert's pulse-pounding, sphinter-tightening true memoir of his battles with the highly secretive cyber arms industry whose billionaire owners provide mercenary spyware that's used by torturers, murderers and criminals to terrorize their victims.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/04/citizen-lab/#nso-group

VII. Little Bosses Everywhere, Bridget Read

Read, an investigative journalist at Curbed, takes us through the history of the multi-level marketing "industry," which evolved out of Depression-era snake oil salesmen, Tupperware parties, and magical thinking cults built around books like Think and Grow Rich. This fetid swamp gives rise to a group of self-mythologizing scam artists who founded companies like Amway and Mary Kay, claiming outlandish – and easily debunked – origin stories that the credulous press repeats, alongside their equally nonsensical claims about the "opportunities" they are creating for their victims.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/05/free-enterprise-system/#amway-or-the-highway

VIII. Careless People, Sarah Wynn-Williams

Wynn-Williams was a lot closer to three of the key personalities in Facebook's upper echelon than anyone in my orbit: Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, and Joel Kaplan, who was elevated to VP of Global Policy after the Trump II election. I already harbor an atavistic loathing of these three based on their public statements and conduct, but the events Wynn-Williams reveals from their private lives make them out to be beyond despicable. There's Zuck, whose underlings let him win at board-games like Settlers of Catan because he's a manbaby who can't lose (and who accuses Wynn-Williams of cheating when she fails to throw a game of Ticket to Ride while they're flying in his private jet). There's Sandberg, who demands the right to buy a kidney for her child from someone in Mexico, should that child ever need a kidney.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/23/zuckerstreisand/#zdgaf

IX. More Everything Forever, Adam Becker

Astrophysicist Adam Becker knows a few things about science and technology – enough to show, in a new book called More Everything Forever that the claims that tech bros make about near-future space colonies, brain uploading, and other skiffy subjects are all nonsense dressed up as prediction.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/22/vinges-bastards/#cyberpunk-is-a-warning-not-a-suggestion

X. Murder the Truth, David Enrich

A brave, furious book about the long-running plan by America's wealthy and corrupt to "open up the libel laws" so they can destroy their critics. In taking on the libel-industrial complex – a network of shadowy, thin-skinned, wealthy litigation funders; crank academics; buck-chasing lawyer lickspittle sociopaths; and the most corrupt Supreme Court justice on the bench today – Enrich is wading into dangerous territory. After all, he's reporting on people who've made it their life's mission to financially destroy anyone who has the temerity to report on their misdeeds.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/17/actual-malice/#happy-slapping

FICTION

I. Letters From an Imaginary Country, Theodora Goss

Goss spins extremely weird, delightful and fun scenarios in these stories and she slides you into them like they were a warm bath. Before you know it, you're up to your nostrils in story, the water filling your ears, and you don't even remember getting in the tub. They're that good. Goss has got a pretty erudite and varied life-history to draw on here. She's a Harvard-trained lawyer who was born in Soviet Hungary, raised across Europe and the UK and now lives in the USA. She's got a PhD in English Lit specializing in gothic literature and monsters and was the research assistant on a definitive academic edition of Dracula. Unsurprisingly, she often writes herself into her stories as a character.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/11/athena-club/#incluing

II. The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, Margaret Killjoy

A collection of three linked short stories set in Killjoy's celebrated Danielle Cain series, which Alan Moore called "ideal reading for a post-truth world. Danielle Cain is a freight-train-hopping, anarcho-queer hero whose adventures are shared by solidaristic crews of spellcasting, cryptid-battling crustypunk freaks and street-fighters.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/18/anarcho-cryptid/#decameron-and-on

III. Fever Beach, Carl Hiaasen

Hiaasen's method is diabolical and hilarious: each volume introduces a bewildering cast of odd, crooked, charming, and/or loathsome Floridians drawn from his long experience chronicling the state and its misadventures. After 20-some volumes in this vein (including Bad Monkey, lately adapted for Apple TV), something far weirder than anything Hiaasen ever dreamed up came to pass: Donald Trump, the most Florida Man ever, was elected president. If you asked an LLM to write a Hiaasen novel, you might get Trump: a hacky, unimaginative version of the wealthy, callous, scheming grifters of the Hiaasenverse. Back in 2020, Hiaasen wrote Trump into Squeeze Me, a tremendous and madcap addition to his canon. Fever Beach is the first Hiaasen novel since Squeeze Me, and boy, does Hiaasen ever have MAGA's number. It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/21/florida-duh/#strokerz-for-liberty

IV. Jules, Penny and the Rooster, Daniel Pinkwater

Jules and her family have just moved to a suburb called Bayberry Acres in the sleepy dormitory city of Turtle Neck and now she's having a pretty rotten summer. All that changes when Jules enters an essay contest in the local newspaper to win a collie (a contest she enters without telling her parents, natch) and wins. Jules names the collie Penny, and they go for long rambles in the mysterious woods that Bayberry Acres were carved out of. It's on one of these walks that they meet the rooster, a handsome, proud, friendly fellow who lures Penny over the stone wall that demarcates the property line ringing the spooky, abandoned mansion/castle at the center of the woods. Jules chases Penny over the wall, and that's when everything changes.

On the other side of that wall is a faun, and little leprechaun-looking guys, and a witch (who turns out to be a high-school chum of her city-dwelling, super-cool aunt), and there's a beast in a hidden dilapidated castle. After Jules sternly informs the beast that she's far too young to be anyone's girlfriend – not even a potentially enchanted prince living as a beast in a hidden castle – he disabuses her of this notion and tells her that she is definitely the long-prophesied savior of the woods, whose magic has been leaking out over years.

Nominally this is a middle-grades book, and while it will certainly delight the kids in your life, I ate it up. The purest expression of Pinkwater's unique ability to blend the absurd and the human and make the fantastic normal and the normal fantastic. I laughed long and hard, and turned the final page with that unmissable Pinkwatertovian sense of satisfied wonder.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/11/klong-you-are-a-pickle-2/#martian-space-potato

V. Where the Axe Is Buried, Ray Nayler

An intense, claustrophobic novel of a world run by "rational" AIs that purport to solve all of our squishy political problems with empirical, neutral mathematics. It's a birchpunk tale of AI skulduggery, lethal robot insects, radical literature, swamp-traversing mechas, and political intrigue that flits around a giant cast of characters, creating a dizzying, in-the-round tour of Nayler's paranoid world. A work of first-rate science fiction, which provides an emotional flythrough of how Larry Ellison's vision of an AI-driven surveillance state where everyone is continuously observed, recorded and judged by AIs so we are all on our "best behavior" would obliterate the authentic self, authentic relationships, and human happiness.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/03/20/birchpunk/#cyberspace-is-everting

VI. Lessons in Magic and Disaster, Charlie Jane Anders

A novel about queer academia, the wonder of thinking very hard about very old books, and the terror and joy of ambiguous magic. Anders tosses a lot of differently shaped objects into the air, and then juggles them, interspersing the main action with excerpts from imaginary 18th century novels (which themselves contain imaginary parables) that serve as both a prestige and a framing device.

It's the story of Jamie, a doctoral candidate at a New England liberal arts college who is trying to hold it all together while she finishes her dissertation. That would be an impossible lift, except for Jamie's gift for maybe-magic – magic that might or might not be real. Certain places ("liminal spaces") call to Jamie. These are abandoned, dirty, despoiled places, ruins and dumps and littered campsites. When Jamie finds one of these places, she can improvise a ritual, using the things in her pockets and school bag as talismans that might – or might not – conjure small bumps of luck and fortune into Jamie's path.

There's a lot of queer joy in here, a hell of a lot of media theory, and some very chewy ruminations on the far-right mediasphere. There's romance and heartbreak, danger and sacrifice, and most of all, there's that ambiguous magic, which gets realer and scarier as the action goes on.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/19/revenge-magic/#liminal-spaces

VII. The Adventures of Mary Darling, Pat Murphy

The titular Mary Darling here is the mother of Wendy, John and and Michael Darling, the three children who are taken by Peter Pan to Neverland in JM Barrie's 1902 book The Little White Bird, which later became Peter Pan. After Mary's children go missing, Mary's beloved uncle, John Watson, is summoned to the house, along with his famous roommate, the detective Sherlock Holmes. However, Holmes is incapable of understanding where the Darling children have gone, because to do so would be to admit the existence of the irrational and fantastic, and, more importantly, to accept the testimony of women, lower-class people, and pirates. Holmes has all the confidence of the greatest detective alive, which means he is of no help at all.

Only Mary can rescue her children. John Watson discovers her consorting with Sam, a one-legged Pacific Islander who is a known fence and the finest rat-leather glovemaker in London, these being much prized by London's worst criminal gangs. Horrified that Mary is keeping such ill company, Watson confronts her and Sam (and Sam's parrot, who screeches nonstop piratical nonsense), only to be told that Mary knows what she is doing, and that she is determined to see her children home safe.

What follows is a very rough guide to fairyland. It's a story that recovers the dark asides from Barrie's original Pan stories, which were soaked with blood, cruelty and death. The mermaids want to laugh as you drown. The fairies hate you and want you to die. And Peter Pan doesn't care how many poorly trained Lost Boy starvelings die in his sorties against pirates, because he knows where there are plenty more Lost Boys to be found in the alienated nurseries of Victorian London, an ocean away.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/06/nevereverland/#lesser-ormond-street

GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS

I. Science Comics Computers: How Digital Hardware Works, Perry Metzger, Penelope Spector and Jerel Dye

Legendary cypherpunk Perry Metzger teams up with Penelope Spector and illustrator Jerel Dye for a tour-de-force young adult comic book that uses hilarious steampunk dinosaurs to demystify the most foundational building-blocks of computers. The authors take pains to show the reader that computing can be abstracted from computing. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's logic. While there's plenty of great slapstick, fun art, and terrific characters in this book that will make you laugh aloud, the lasting effect upon turning the last page isn't just entertainment, it's empowerment.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac

II. Feeding Ghosts, Tessa Hulls

A stunning memoir that tells the story of three generations of Hulls's Chinese family. It was a decade in the making, and it is utterly, unmissably brilliant. It tells the story of Hulls's quest to understand – and heal – her relationship with her mother, a half-Chinese, half-Swiss woman who escaped from China as a small child with her own mother, a journalist who had been targeted by Mao's police.

Each of the intertwined narratives – revolutionary China, Rose's girlhood, Hulls's girlhood, the trips to contemporary China, Hulls's adulthood and Sun Yi's institutionalizations and long isolation – are high stakes, high-tension scenarios, beautifully told. Hulls hops from one tale to the next in ways that draw out the subtle, imporant parallels between each situation, subtly amplifying the echoes across time and space.

Feeding Ghosts has gone on to win the Pulitzer Prize, only the second graphic novel in history to take the honor (the first was Maus, another memoir of intergenerational trauma, horrific war, and the American immigrant experience).

https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/02/filial-piety/#great-leap-forward

III. The Murder Next Door, Hugh D'Andrade

Hugh D'Andrade is a brilliant visual communicator, the art director responsible for the look-and-feel of EFF's website. He's also haunted by a murder – the killing of the mother of his childhood playmates, which cast a long, long shadow over his life, as he recounts in his debut graphic novel. It's a haunting, beautiful meditation on masculinity, trauma, and fear. Hugh is a superb illustrator, particularly when it comes to bringing abstract ideas to life, and this is a tale beautifully told.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/10/pivot-point/#eff

IV. Simplicity, Mattie Lubchansky

Simplicity is set in the not-so-distant future, in which the US has dissolved and its major centers have been refashioned as "Administrative and Security Territories" – a fancy way of saying "walled corporate autocracies." Lucius Pasternak is an anthropology grad student in the NYC AST, a trans-man getting by as best as he can, minimizing how much he sells out.

Pasternak's fortunes improve when he gets a big, juicy assignment: to embed with a Catskills community of weirdo sex-hippies who supply the most coveted organic produce in the NYC AST. They've been cloistered in an old summer camp since the 1970s, and when civilization collapsed, it barely touched them. Pasternak's mission is to chronicle the community and its strange ways for a billionaire's vanity-project museum of New York State.

This is post-cyberpunk, ecosexual revolutionary storytelling at its finest.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/01/ecosexuality/#nyc-ast

V. The Weight, Melissa Mendes

A book that will tear your heart out, it will send you to a dreamy world of pastoral utopianism, then it will tear your heart out. Again.

A story of cyclic abuse, unconditional love, redemption, and tragedy, the tale of Edie, born to an abusive father and a teen mother, who is raised away from her family, on a military base where she runs feral with other children, far from the brutality of home. This becomes a sweet and lovely coming-of-age tale as Edie returns to her grandparents' home, and then turns to horror again.

The Weight is a ferocious read, the sweetness of the highs there to provide texture for the bitterness of the lows.

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/21/weighty/#edie-is-a-badass

TWO MORE (BY ME)

This was a light reading year for me, but, in my defense, I did some re-reading, including all nine volumes of Naomi Novik's incredible Temeraire:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/08/temeraire/#but-i-am-napoleon

But the main reason I didn't read as much as I normally would is that I published two international bestsellers of my own this year.

The first was Picks and Shovels, a historical technothriller set in the early 1980s, when the PC was first being born. It's the inaugural adventure of Martin Hench, my hard-fighting, two-fisted, high-tech forensic accountant crimefighter, and it's designed to be read all on its own. Marty's first adventure sees him pitted against the owners of a weird PC pyramid-sales cult: a Mormon bishop, an orthodox rabbi and a Catholic priest, whose PC business is a front for a predatory faith-based sales cult:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels/

The other book was Enshittification, the nonfiction book I'm touring now (I wrote all this up on the train to San Diego, en route to an event at the Mission Hills Library). It's a book-length expansion of my theory of platform decay ("enshittification"), laying out the process by which the tech platforms we rely on turn themselves into piles of shit, and (more importantly), explaining why this is happening now:

https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

I've got a stack of books I'm hoping to read in the new year, but I'm going to have to squeeze them in among several other book projects of my own. First, there's The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, which drops in June from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. I'm also *writing a new book, The Post-American Internet (about the internet we could have now that Trump has destroyed America's soft power and its grip on global tech policy. There's also a graphic novel adaptation of Unauthorized Bread (with Blue Delliquanti), which Firstsecond will publish in late 2026 or 2027; and a graphic novel adaptation of Enshittification (with Koren Shadmi), which Firstsecond will publish in 2027.

But of course I'm gonna get to at least some of those books on my overflowing TBR shelf, and when I do, I'll review them here on Pluralistic for you. You can follow my Reviews tag if you want to stay on top of these (there's also an RSS feed for that tag):

https://pluralistic.net/tag/reviews/

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