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Abandoned after the Cold War, nuclear bunkers around the world have found afterlives as ultra‐secure data storage sites for cloud computing providers. The operators of these bunkered data centres capitalize on the spatial, temporal, and material security affordances of their subterranean fortresses, promoting them as ‘future‐proof’ cloud storage solutions. Taking the concept of ‘future‐proofing’ as its entry‐point, this essay explores how data centre professionals work with the imaginative properties of the bunker to configure data as an object to be securitized. The essay takes the form of an ethnographic tour through a UK‐based data bunker. During this tour, threatening data futures and fragile data materialities are conjured in order to secure the conditions of possibility for the bunkered data centre's commercial continuity. Future‐proofing, it is argued, provides a conceptual opening onto the entangled imperatives of security and marketing that drive the commercial data storage industry.

How to recognise potential disasters is a question at the centre of risk analysis. Over-reliance on an incomplete, often epistemologically-biased, historical record, and a focus on quantified and quantifiable risks, have contributed to unanticipated disasters dominating both casualties and financial losses in the first part of the 21st century. Here we present the findings of an online workshop implementing a new scenario-planning method, called downward counterfactual analysis, which is designed to expand the range of risks considered. Interdisciplinary groups of disaster researchers constructed downward counterfactuals for a present-day version of the 365CE Cretan earthquake and tsunami, imagining how these events might have been worse. The resulting counterfactuals have trans-national, long-term impacts, particularly in terms of economic losses, and connect risks previously identified in separate sectors. Most counterfactuals involved socio-political factors, rather than intrinsic components of the hazard, consistent with the idea that there are “no natural disasters”. The prevalence of cascading counterfactuals in our workshop suggests that further work is required to give the appropriate weight to pre-existing economic and social conditions in scenario-planning methods, such as downward counterfactual analysis, which focus on the occurrence of a hazard as the temporal starting point for a disaster. Both proposed counterfactuals and their justifications reflect a bias towards contemporary issues and recent historical disasters. We suggest that interdisciplinary groups can expand the range of imagined risks. However, the setup used here would be improved by including local stakeholders. Qualitative forms of downward counterfactual analysis have potential applications for community engagement and education, as well as for risk analysis.

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