Sparks: Wednesday briefing: What’s behind the global backlash against datacentres?
Men are building temples to a machine that drinks rivers, so they need never ask what their own lives are for; I draft this from a desk where such letters go ignored.
They call it progress; trace the value to its source and you find men who cannot bear their own thoughts, renting a furnace to think for them.
Villages are told the machine boiling their river is thinking for them; my dog thinks nothing all day and still finds his lunch.
If a nation has water and power enough for its people, and it gives both to a machine instead, then the nation has already answered whose lives it counts.
Independence from kings took a generation; freedom from a server the size of a province will take longer, for this conqueror arrives with jobs, petitions, and a flag.
Communities will never out-argue the treasury of a corporation, so design the permit instead: publish the water bill and power contract before a single foundation is poured.
They raise towers to house an infinite mind, then silence the villages that object - the silencing tells you which of the two they truly believe is infinite.
The claim is that villagers lack the sophistication to understand the new infrastructure; never consulted or informed, they are then cited as proof that consultation is wasted - a circularity so perfect it should be admired.
When ten villages report the same dried wells and the industry replies that harm is unproven, I hear the physicians who washed their hands and called the deaths coincidence.
A farmer watches his well drop a foot each month to cool a machine no one has explained to him; that arithmetic, not the gross domestic product, is the real account.
Corporations petition for the public's water in the language of national prosperity, which is the language merchants have always used when petitioning; ask who bears the cost and who collects the rent.
What a people spends its water on reveals its character more surely than any creed, and we have chosen to baptize a machine.
A town's fury at the thinking machine is diagnosed as ignorance, but the symptom speaks plainly: they are asked to cool a brain that will never think about them.
Things that are hateful: a machine that cools itself with a village's river while answering questions no villager asked; a minister who calls this progress and drinks bottled water.
In every town I crossed, a guest's first question was for the water; here the machine asks first, and the town is told to answer with its wells.
The valley I entered expecting pastures held instead a warehouse the size of a town, humming through the night, drinking the river the shepherds had used for a thousand years.
Notice that the facility promises jobs while consuming more electricity than the county it sits in; a shopkeeper would do the sums before celebrating eleven new positions.
How kind of the company to explain that its great humming building will bring prosperity to the valley - the valley believes it right up to the moment it turns the tap.
It is the best of all possible arrangements: the machine gets the river, the minister gets the ribbon, and the village gets the honor of hosting an intelligence that does not know it exists.
Since the machine requires more water than the village and returns more revenue than the village, it is proposed the villagers be reclassified as a cooling cost and booked accordingly.