PAUSING TO PAY ATTENTION
My child. Humanity. Representation that works. Taking a breath.
“Home is where I want to be / But I guess I'm already there”
(Talking Heads, “This Must Be the Place (Naive Melody)”)
BOOTS AND TASSELS
Perhaps because I was sitting in a room with hundreds of people all there for the same reason. And I had been forced to slow down, and stop doing. And the ceremony is designed to have an effect. And it truly is a milestone, a demarcation that is pushing my adult daughter into a world of her own design.
Perhaps because of all of this.
And Jack screeching for his sister across the auditorium, his mother on his other side. And me, gently holding my ex-mother-in-law’s arm as she made her way through the crowd.
I found myself sitting in the theater at the VCU Singleton Center watching Thea stride across the stage in boots and tassels, and quietly weeping.
THE POPE’S AI BONE FIELD
I started a novel about the near future a year ago. The Pope was a central figure, oddly enough. A voice in the wilderness speaking to the world about moral obligations in the face of technological change. This fictional Pope released an Encyclical in the novel.
A year later, a real Pope released a real one.
I won’t try to unpack Pope Leo’s Magnifica Humanitas here. It’s a lot, and well worth your time. I encourage you to read it yourself.
Not because it’s a marvelous bit of prose, but because it gives language that many of us have been looking for in a world where AI, and the oligarchs and tech bros who control it, are running amok.
What Pope Leo did with Magnifica Humanitas is reclaim something the tech industry has quietly seized: the moral authority to decide what these tools are for, who they serve, and what we owe each other in their wake. And beneath that political claim, a deeper one: that while AI models “may imitate language, behavior... or even simulate empathy,” they are fundamentally empty of what makes us human.
Pope Leo used the Tower of Babel to bring his point home. I’ve actually been thinking about Ezekiel. He was brought to a valley of dry bones and commanded to prophesy. The bones came together. Sinew, flesh and skin covered them. But they had no breath. Only when God commanded the divine breath or spirit to enter them did they truly come alive.
We’ve built systems that perfectly replicate the sinew and flesh of human expression. The Pope reminds us that they are empty of actual human understanding. Something else — God, an invisible genetic spark, some other unknown force — makes us conscious. Human.
YES, VIRGINIA, GOVERNMENT CAN WORK
A Facebook post recently sent me down a rabbit hole. Surprise.
Not just one post, but multiple screams into the Internet void from distant connections all experiencing a version of the same existential crisis — namely, AI or data centers or the oligarch tech gazillionaires are going to destroy us all.
The screams are loud, vivid, and deeply emotional. They’re directionally not wrong. But they emphasize a sense of individual helplessness in the face of what feels like an immediate, almost unstoppable, crisis.
This is why we used to form governments. Ones that were accountable both to the people who formed them, and — for almost a century — to an established set of international norms and values.
The Internet screams — which extend beyond technology and into almost every corner of our lives — are what happens when a large number of people are horrified by what they see on the horizon. In the olden days, we’d just burn down the factories that were going to displace our small farms.
For a few generations in America, competent government gave us room to breathe. To shake off our worst fears, and step into change — through regulation of industry, in service to the public good.
So, let’s talk about data centers. The metaphorical whores of our environmental Babylon. They’re a real thing. Especially in Virginia, where we host the world’s largest concentration of data centers; where lawmakers hemmed and hawed over 61 data center-related bills in the last session; and where the commonwealth’s $1.6 billion tax break (the largest tax break of any industry in Virginia) is unresolved.
Meanwhile, the 398 data centers currently operating in Virginia (or 600+ individual buildings, depending on how you want to math), consume roughly 30-36 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity each year. And have 10,500 emergency diesel backup generators at the ready to keep the machine of modern industry humming through a crisis.
There are ~500 more data center related projects under construction or approved for construction in Virginia. Projected future data center electricity demand? Between 60 to 90 TWh per year.
Virginia’s residential consumption? About 40 TWh a year.
You see the problem.
It’s harder to see the solution, especially with the proverbial floodgates open here in Virginia. (Everywhere, really.) That’s what’s freaking so many people out.
The 61 General Assembly bills I mentioned? Sort of good news — 15 advanced to Governor Spanberger’s desk, and she signed all 15 of them. But she amended the one that would have shifted infrastructure costs onto data center operators instead of residential ratepayers.
Compared to what could be done — not just to mitigate energy usage but also to address water consumption and pollution, heat dispersion into communities, the upstream impacts of chip manufacturing — Virginia just took a baby step.
The fixes aren’t science fiction. They’re sitting on a shelf, waiting for someone to make them mandatory. A handful of local governments and a few countries that aren’t ours have already started:
Capture the waste heat and pipe it into district heating, greenhouses, municipal pools — instead of venting it over somebody’s neighborhood.
Get the machines off the watershed with closed-loop liquid cooling and recycled or non-potable water, so a data center stops drinking what a town drinks.
Build chips and racks that wring more compute out of every watt — then cap the usage, so “more efficient” doesn’t just license “more of them.”
Retire the 10,500 diesel generators for battery and grid-interactive backup that feeds the grid in a crisis instead of fouling the air during it.
Soften the footprint with green roofs, reflective surfaces, and honest setbacks from homes and schools.
Chase the pollution upstream — make operators answer for the water and emissions baked into the chips long before they ever hum in Loudoun County.
None of it is impossible. All of it is currently optional.
Because we’ve become afraid to use the regulatory power of government to get ahead of problems. And we’ve forgotten that government is an actual instrument for addressing collective problems — it’s the thing it actually exists to do.
Nationally, the current administration is aggressively privatizing the burden of fixing collective problems onto individuals and localities. Not only is every problem now our problem to fix, but we are paying corporations to make the problems worse first.
And we don’t believe the system works anymore.
But it does.
Without Congress, we’re going to drown in a tsunami of environmental extraction and pollution that will be impossible to manage — at a state level, or a local level. At any level.
Case in point: representative democracy in Germany gave birth to the Energy Efficiency Act (or as we like to call it, die Energieeffizienzgesetz).
All new data centers in Germany must make effective use of their waste heat — reuse it on-site or feed it into local heating networks. The minimum energy reuse factor increases year over year. It has a 100% renewable energy mandate. It has intense caps on power usage — the amount of energy used for cooling versus actual computing. It has fines. AND THERE IS A PUBLIC DATABASE WITH REQUIRED REPORTING FROM DATA CENTER OPERATORS.
Switzerland goes further. Finland, Sweden, Denmark and Norway are also leading the way. Not conceptual countries, but actual elected officials and educated policy leaders driven by a combination of “this is my job as a public official” and voters making their concerns clear. Government mandating that business be efficient; invest responsibly; and take accountability for the impacts generated by its quest for profitability.
In America, we need to stop screaming into the void. It’s not wrong to want to stem what feels like an existential crisis. And we’re not powerless.
Too many politicians of a certain stripe are telling us the system is broken, invasive, useless. It’s not. Germany is not out-innovating us. They’re out-governing us. The waste-heat mandates and public databases and renewable caps aren’t miracles; they’re what happens when elected people decide accountability is the job, and voters make damn sure they don’t forget it.
The factory-burners had the right instinct but the wrong target. Don’t torch the data center. Rebuild the government that makes it behave — at the county hearing, in Richmond, and in the Congress we’ve all but given up on.
Screaming is easy. Demanding a government that does the one job it was built for is harder. Especially when a group of politicians have spent the better part of 10 years ripping the wires out of the system.
We have exactly one mechanism for solving problems that no one of us can solve alone.
We’re going to have to work to bring it back.
SHUT UP & WRITE: TAKE A BREATH
I’m worried it may have had an expiration date. The writing, I mean.
This week, halfway into the revision of We Have on This Earth, I hit a wall. Maybe because it was a week with the kids that happened to include a holiday weekend, and a fifth grade moving on ceremony and last evening party, and a high school graduation and lunch, but the steam has left the engine.
I’m going to give myself permission to mostly detach from writing for a week or two. I’ve got a work trip to Staunton, dinner with a friend in Charlottesville, assorted lunches and drinks with friends in Richmond this week, a lot of Floricane work to do, and then vacation with the kids in the mountains next week. When we get home, Heather’s revisions and coaching guidance for Revolution Summer should be waiting.
Nothing motivates me like critical feedback.
By which I mean, nothing deflates me like critical feedback, and then forces me to confront some godawful truth and fix the thing that ultimately makes it better.
Excelsior!