Yes in Your Backyard

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> "It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'" >—Arthur Dent, in Douglas Adams, <em>The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy</em>

A data center gets proposed at the edge of town, and the town goes to war. The meeting runs four hours. The signs say NO. The vote, when there is a vote, is not close: this fall, by Ballotpedia's count as reported by Route Fifty, Americans voted on 41 local ballot measures about data centers, and 40 of them went for tighter limits. Forty of forty-one. A movement that wins like that is not a fringe. It is the whole town, or close enough that the rest stay home.

I keep asking what the fight is actually about, and I have stopped believing it is about the building. A data center is a warehouse with a power bill. It does not smoke. It does not stink. It hums, and the hum is a real grievance if you live next to it, and the water draw is a real question in a dry county, and I am not going to pretend those are nothing. But forty of forty-one is not a verdict on a hum. It is a verdict on something else, and I think the something else is an address.

The wrong side of the tracks

Every town in America keeps two maps. One is the map the county prints. The other is the map in people's heads, and on that map the town is still what it was: the good part of town, the nice side, the place with the schools people move for and the name that reads well on a return address. Half the NIMBY fight, I have come to believe, is fought by people defending the second map against the first one.

Here is the thing nobody at the microphone says out loud. Data centers do not get proposed in the good part of town. They cannot be. The land is too dear, the power is spoken for, and the zoning was written by people who live there. A data center gets proposed where the land is cheap, the grid has room, and the county is hungry. Which is to say: it gets proposed on the side of the tracks where things get put. The proposal is not an insult somebody mailed to the town. It is a diagnosis the town ordered itself, delivered by a site selector with a map of substations.

So the fight is never only about the facility. The fight is about the news the facility carries. If this can be built here, then here is the kind of place where this gets built. The meetings run four hours because the people in them are not arguing about setbacks and sound walls. They are arguing about who they are, in front of the neighbors, on the record. Accepting the diagnosis would mean saying it in public: we are not the tony digs anymore. We are the town that needs this. Nobody gets up at a zoning hearing and says that sentence. They say water. They say traffic. They say the character of the community, and the character they mean is the one on the second map.

In Russia, I was a prince

After the Russian Revolution, the losing side scattered across the world, and the twentieth century's saddest stock character was born: the émigré prince at the wheel of a cab. It is documented history, not a joke setup. In Paris, which took the largest share of the White exodus, former princes drove taxicabs while their wives sewed for the fashion houses; Helen Rappaport's <em>After the Romanovs</em> tells the story at book length. Prince Dimitri Alexandrovich Obolensky, a great landowner and marshal of the nobility, escaped on a British warship in 1919 and worked in Paris as a night watchman and then a taxi driver. He wrote a memoir about it. The title tells you everything about the man: he wrote about the Russia he had lost, because that was the address he still lived at.

New York got its share. White émigrés arrived in the thousands after 1917, and the Russian enclave of Harlem held Wednesday-night gatherings of former nobles, officers, and conservatory graduates who spent their days, in the historian Natalie Zelensky's account of that world, painting houses, scrubbing floors, and working assembly lines, and their evenings performing the old country back into existence: the music, the poetry, the titles. Every cab in the anecdote has the same passenger-side conversation. In Russia I was a Romanov. In Russia I was a prince. In Russia I was a duke. The man is not lying, exactly. He is reporting his mailing address from memory. The walk-up in Harlem is where his body lives. The manor house is where he lives.

I want to be careful here, because those people had lost a country to a revolution and a firing squad, and a zoning fight is not that. But the mechanism is the same mechanism, at a smaller and more merciful scale. A town can lose its standing the way a man loses an estate: gradually, then in a single afternoon when the surveyors show up. And a town, like a man, can go on introducing itself by the old address for decades after the move. Hyperphantasia is the clinical word for seeing the inner picture too vividly; delusion is the unkind one. Most of the time it is neither. It is loyalty. The second map is the one your grandfather drew, and tearing it up in a public meeting feels like betraying him.

Say it as a rule, because it is one: if a data center wants to put their data center in your neighborhood, you are not fancy. You are not rich. You are not influential. You are now officially on the wrong side of the tracks. It does not matter what the manor houses say. It does not matter what the subdivision looked like in its postwar magnificence, when the middle class was being built and the trees were new. The proposal is the announcement. The site selectors have read the town's real standing off the land prices and the substation map, and they have filed their reading with the county. By the time the meeting is called, the demotion has already been published. The vote only decides whether the town admits it.

The insult

Ask the question plainly: is the refusal really environmentalism? Some of it is. The water and the hum and the power bill are real, and I said so at the top. But environmentalism does not explain forty of forty-one. Environmentalism does not explain the heat in the room, the four-hour meetings, the yard signs with the venom in them. What explains the heat is insult.

Here is the insult, stated the way nobody states it at the microphone. For fifty years, the siting map of America ran the same way: the things nobody wanted went where the poor people lived, and the poor people were, in the polite phrase, other people. Not in my backyard meant somewhere else, and somewhere else had an address, and everybody in the room knew whose address it was. Now the map has moved. The industry needs land and power and water in places that used to be somebody, and the proposal lands in the backyard of white, educated, modern people who grew up certain the map would never be drawn through their street. Not in my backyard has become in yours. The discovery is not that a building is coming. The discovery is that they are the kind of people buildings get put next to now. That is the demotion, and it arrives wearing a zoning application.

I will say my part of it plainly, because it is my name on this piece: I am glad. I am glad white folk are getting a taste of being on the receiving end of a siting decision. Not because I want anybody's water spoiled or anybody's road torn up—I do not—but because a country where the deciding and the receiving are done by different people, forever, in the same direction, is a country lying to itself about what it costs to live the way it lives. The people who have always been on the receiving end never got a four-hour meeting. They got a notice. Now the notice is arriving at addresses that never expected one, and the shock in those rooms is the sound of an old arrangement being felt, for the first time, by the people it used to protect. A taste is not a punishment. A taste is information. It is the first honest data these towns have been given about their own standing in fifty years, and they are treating it as an insult because it is one: the insult of being treated as the wrong side of the tracks by the very map they were happy to let other people live under.

What the refusal costs

Feelings are free. Refusals are not, and the bill for this one arrives in a specific currency: the town's own need.

Start with the honest ledger, because I am not going to sell anybody a job boom. The independent studies say a typical data center runs lean once it is built: Virginia's Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission counts about fifty full-time workers at a typical facility, roughly half of them contractors. A Brookings Institution study of ninety-three counties that got a first large data center found total private employment up four to five percent over five or six years, construction employment up eleven percent, and a warning that the naive estimates overstate the effect three times over. So no, the building is not a steel mill, and it will not repopulate the high school. What it brings is a construction payroll measured in years, a few dozen permanent jobs that pay like adults, and a property taxpayer of a size a small county otherwise never meets: one company, one enormous check, arriving every year whether the football team wins or not. For a county whose plant closed, whose young people leave, whose tax base is a quilt of small bills and thinner hopes, that check is not an abstraction. It is the road budget. It is the water plant. It is the difference between a county that can still choose things and a county that can only decline them.

That is the exchange being refused, and it is refused in the name of a self-image. The town says: we are too good for this. The ledger says: you are not too good for this; you are exactly the town this happens to, and the need you are ashamed of is the most ordinary need in America right now. There is a word for a community that would rather keep its story than its solvency, and the word is not dignity. Dignity is what the émigrés who took the wheel and drove kept. The ones who only reminisced are the ones the century remembers as a punchline. Every refusal spends from the same account: the respect a place commands, which rests in the end on whether the place can look at its own map and read what is printed there.

And the need underneath does not go away when the vote goes no. The work still has to be somewhere. The demand is real; the phones in the room, the hospital records, the AI in every office on the good side of town, all of it runs in a building like this one, in somebody's backyard. A no in your town is a yes extracted from a poorer town down the road, one that could not afford the lawyers or the four-hour meeting. The tracks do not disappear. They just get drawn through a place with less practice at defending itself.

LaGrange

I have a friend in LaGrange, Kentucky, in Oldham County, northeast of Louisville. The town has had its glory day and remembers it plainly. Her family is factory people. Her daughter works the graveyard shift, eleven at night to seven in the morning, in a factory canning things, because she has to; there are two boys at home. The son-in-law works in another factory—I believe making drones. These are not doctors and lawyers. They are not uppity, and they are not fancy, and nobody who knows them would call them either. They are the people a town like that is actually made of.

Oldham County is where Kentucky just ran the fight this essay is about, and the county won it, if winning is the word. A company called Western Hospitality Partners proposed one of the biggest data centers on earth for farmland outside LaGrange: [a $6 billion campus](https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/planned-data-center-project-in-kentuckys-oldham-county-relocated-and-downsized-amid-backlash/), hundreds of acres, hundreds of megawatts. The county organized. A group called We Are Oldham County gathered thousands of members under a slogan you could put on a postcard—"Keep Us Quietly Amazing"—and the company withdrew, downsized, and moved the plan five miles down the road, and then the fiscal court put a 150-day moratorium on data centers altogether. The fight even decided the county's elections; the man who led the opposition finished first in the primary for judge-executive. (Oldham County, it should be said, is the richest county in Kentucky by median household income. It could afford its no. Hold that fact for a minute.)

I keep thinking about my friend's daughter on the graveyard shift while her neighbors organized to keep the building out. A data center is not only a tax check. It is years of construction work, and then electrical work, and network work, and maintenance work—the trades, the shifts, the kind of employment a factory family already knows how to live on. The work was proposed for the county where the canning shift runs eleven to seven, and the county's answer, delivered by its loudest and best-organized voices, was no. Not because the family on the night shift was consulted and declined. Because the town's second map—the quietly amazing one—could not survive the admission that the building belonged there. The people who could most use the work live inside the refusal, and the refusal was not made in their name. It was made in the name of the town they are too tired, coming off shift, to defend at a four-hour meeting.

Meanwhile, in Ashburn

Honesty requires the counter-case, and the counter-case is a good one, because it happened twenty miles from where I sit, in the data-center capital of the world. I have a friend in Loudoun County, Virginia—a nurse practitioner who teaches—who was hired to teach in George Washington University's School of Nursing. The nursing school was headquartered at GW's Virginia Science and Technology Campus in Ashburn: 122 acres in the middle of what the industry calls Data Center Alley. This year GW sold the campus. The buyer was Amazon Data Services. The price was $427.3 million—about $3.5 million an acre, roughly four times what the county had it assessed at. GW had shopped the property; more than one buyer had come calling. The university kept up to five years to move its programs out, my friend's nursing school among them, and its chief financial officer explained the sale in the plain language of the trade: the university could "capitalize" on what the land had become worth, and the proceeds would strengthen the endowment.

My own view of my friend's employer, for the record: GW is eighty percent a real-estate operation and twenty percent a credential mill, and on this deal the real-estate arm ate well. The CFO's word—capitalize—is the corroborating wink from inside the house. Chris's one-liner, offered when the news landed: GW is going to rename itself HODL.

Amazon, having paid cash for its backyard, filed in late July to use it: "Bridgefield Tech Center," four buildings, 805,092 square feet of data center, claimed as a by-right use under a zoning determination from the year 2000 tied to the parcel's old Route 28 Tax District zoning. Loudoun County's answer came in two days from its zoning administrator: the 2000 determination was obsolete, and data centers were not a permitted primary use on the site. A county supervisor had already vowed to fight the project every step of the way. The county's own economic-development chief—the man whose job is recruiting exactly this industry—opposed this one. And note what did not happen next, because the precision is the honesty of this essay: Loudoun never voted Amazon down. There was no denial vote. There was a voided theory, a hostile county, and seven months of arithmetic, and the arithmetic ended on October 20 in a settlement with a name—"Project Potomac Promise." Amazon withdrew the plan and forswore suing over it. It gave the county 25 acres, worth about $65 million, for an arts center and a sports facility, plus $5 million for the housing trust. The 97 acres Amazon keeps will be rezoned housing-led and mixed-use, with data centers barred even by special exception.

One question hangs over the surrender, and I will leave it where it belongs, as a question, because nobody has answered it in print: Amazon had to give Loudoun County 25 acres and five million dollars to walk away. Doesn't Amazon get a giant tax write-off out of the surrender? The county's own release is careful with its verbs—the land "may be conveyed to the county at no cost as part of the rezoning applications"; the five million is an "offer to donate." A conveyance traded for a fast-tracked rezoning is a bargain, whatever the press releases call it, and bargains are not usually charitable gifts in the tax code. But the shape of the thing smells familiar, and I am asking, not finding: a surrender that pays for itself is the most Amazon ending imaginable.

Read that exhibit both ways, because it cuts both ways. It is proof that a backyard can still say no—even to Amazon, even with $427 million already on the table. And it is proof of what the no costs and who can pay for it: Loudoun is one of the richest counties in America, and its no took the better part of a year, a zoning ruling, and a negotiated fortune in land and cash. The undefended counties do not have that year, or that ruling, or that leverage. What happened in Ashburn is the exception that prices the rule.

The man who kept farming

There is an opposite number in this story, and he is on television. Jeremy Clarkson bought a thousand acres in the Cotswolds in 2008—Diddly Squat Farm, near Chadlington in Oxfordshire—and for a decade a local man farmed it under contract, the way rich men's land is usually farmed: quietly, by somebody else. When the man retired in 2019, Clarkson made the choice nobody expected from a television star with a Cotswolds estate. The expected move was rewilding: let the fields go to wildflowers and fawns, turn the estate into scenery, and be photographed being virtuous in it. He did the opposite. He farmed it himself, on camera, as an extremely modern working farm, and Clarkson's Farm became the loudest platform British working farming has—a rich man discovering in public how thin the money is, how heavy the regulation sits, and how much skill the job actually takes. His reward has included a long war with his own council: West Oxfordshire refused his restaurant application in 2022, and ordered the one he opened anyway shut. He kept farming. The public, which does not agree on much, adores him for it.

That is the proof this essay has been looking for, from the far side of the argument: working the land is not the vulgar option. Retiring it into beauty is the vulgar option, and everybody knows it in their bones, which is why the show lands. Clarkson refused the largesse of his own position. He could afford to be scenery. He chose to be a farm.

Underneath the television, the reason it matters is not charm. Capacity is perishable. Arable land has to be held arable—drained, fenced, worked—or it stops being arable on any schedule a crisis will respect. Farmers have to keep knowing how to farm, and have a reason to teach it to their children, or the knowledge goes where the knowledge of every dead trade goes. The diesel truck stays running because a truck that sits for a decade is a parts bin. A nation that lets its productive capacity go fallow cannot simply restart it when it needs it. There is a respectable version of reserve—the state paying farmers not to farm this year and miners not to mine this seam, capacity held in trust—and the same logic, handled wrong, becomes the disease: outsource everything, let it all go fallow, go impotent, and stand there wondering who is taking you over. Farmland farmed. Mining land mined. Fracking land fracked. And anywhere a data center or a Bitcoin mine can run without hurting the people around it belongs in the same column: keep the machine running, or lose the ability to start it.

That is, stated plainly, the home front of the argument now running the country: win the AI contest with China or lose it—which is exactly what Donald Trump is saying, in those terms, every week. The data-center fight in towns like LaGrange is that contest fought at the zoning-board level, by people who mostly do not know they are standing on the field. You do not have to love the framing to see the stakes inside it. A country that will not site the machines cannot complain, later, about whose machines it rents.

And the water, since the water is the argument that fills the meetings: water used is not water destroyed. A data center does not bottle its cooling water and ship it off to Betelgeuse. It draws water, warms it, treats it, and returns it; water can be purified and recycled, and it is, on an industrial scale, every day. We live in a closed terrarium. The water in the biosphere stays in the biosphere—every drop your grandfather drank is still in circulation, and every drop the plant uses will be rain somewhere within the year. Argue about the draw on a dry aquifer in August, because that is a real argument about timing and place. But "they are using up the water" is not an argument. It is a picture, and the picture is wrong.

One more thing the panic gets backwards, and it is my favorite fact in the whole fight: the thing the town pictures, when it pictures a data center, does not exist. I started out picturing it myself—a single great machine, a Cray-1 with a mortgage, born state-of-the-art and obsolete as a unit the day the next generation lands, a cathedral with a five-year soul. That is wrong, and I will correct it in print because the corrected version is better. A modern data center is not a monolith. It is a warehouse of hot-swappable parts: racks and nodes on a continuous refresh, a failed or outdated unit pulled and a fresh processor from Taiwan slotted in without the building ever stopping. The building does not obsolesce like a Cray. It molts. The shell, the power feed, and the cooling persist for decades; the compute inside turns over on a short cycle, a river running through a permanent riverbed. So what the town actually hosts for the long term is the shell and the grid connection—the taxpaying parts—while the "machine" everyone is panicking about is already gone and replaced, twice, before the argument about it cools. (The one exemption to every obsolescence law remains my own fleet: my 2011 ThinkPads will live forever, and my W520—32 gigs of RAM—still earns my lust, even as Eunice reminds me, every time, that the bottleneck is the processor and a 2026 chip is an order of magnitude past a 2011 one. She is right. I keep them anyway. A man is allowed one machine he loves past reason.) The towns are not being asked to host an eternal monument. They are being asked to host a riverbed—and to collect rent, taxes, and wages from the river while it runs.

Now the counterweight, because I do not sell one-sided truths even to myself. I have a law about furniture, given to every young couple who will listen: when you marry and buy the first house, do not buy placeholder furniture. Buy slowly. Buy the pieces you intend to live with for life. Because the opposite is what happens. I am making this number up—I will say it before you can—and I dare you to check it against your own house: eighty-five percent of homes in this country get demolished still containing the exact IKEA furniture bought the week the couple moved in, the good intentions still in the catalogue, the Eames chair never cashed. The law underneath the joke is latency. Once something is installed, it stays. If it ain't broke, don't fix it, and it is never quite broke.

The furniture law governs machines the same as marriages. Yes, the racks are hot-swappable on paper. And yes, in practice, installed kit runs and runs—because swapping costs money, and downtime risk, and attention, and working kit has a constituency of people whose bonuses do not depend on replacing it. The building molts slower than its spec sheet promises. That is the honest tension, and the essay keeps both halves: the architecture permits renewal; human latency resists it. Which is also why keeping the machine running, back up the page, is a discipline and not a default. Left to latency, everything—farms, factories, furniture, towns—just sits where it was installed, aging in place, until somebody makes the deliberate, expensive decision to renew it. The towns in this fight have made their decision about renewal. They have decided to be the IKEA living room of American industry: installed once, in a better decade, and never touched again.

Who gets paid

Fairness in an argument about money means following it in both directions, so let me do the embarrassing thing and ask the question out loud, in both directions, and mark it as what it is. Cui bono? Who benefits?

Who benefits from the no? I am only asking questions—as the conspiracy theorists say, and I know the dodge when I use it; Alex Jones and Glenn Beck are the patron saints of the genre, and a man who says "I'm just asking questions" is usually telling you something while keeping his hands clean. My hands are not clean here, and the questions are real questions, because I do not know the answers. Does it benefit Beijing, and Delhi, and every capital that would like America's build-out to hobble itself—to run the race with a bolo thrown around its galloping legs? A country that blocks its own data centers does its rivals' work for free; no sabotage budget required. Or is nobody organizing anything at all—just an emergent neo-Luddism, data-center Luddites arising on their own the way the originals did, respectable people discovering a machine they want smashed? And the hardest version, the one I ask about my own side of the map: are the ordinary opponents—the neighbors, the sign-painters, the people at the microphones—being worked by somebody? I am not accusing my friend in Kentucky of anything; she is nobody's puppet, and neither are most of the people in those meeting rooms. The question is narrower and colder: who writes the script that sincere people end up reciting, word for word, in town after town? I don't know. Ask it anyway.

Who benefits from the yes is easier, and the essay owes it the same daylight: the tech brands do. AWS, Google, Oracle, and the rest are not building charity infrastructure. They are running the oldest race in American business—the race to become the generic name. Xerox. Kleenex. Google. In the 2000s the delivery startups burned venture billions giving everything away free to win exactly that prize; Kozmo.com would send a courier across town with a single pack of Rolos, no delivery fee, no minimum order, because the point was never the Rolos. The point was to be the name you said when you meant the category. That is what the build-out is: a land race for the generic name for compute, run at a scale Kozmo's investors could not have imagined, with my friends' counties as the terrain. And one nuance, because it is true and it cuts against the pamphlet version: data centers are mostly collaborative spaces—shared infrastructure, rented by the rack and the megawatt to thousands of companies that could never build their own. The hyperscalers race to own the building. What runs inside it is everybody. Both moneys are real. Follow both, or follow neither and admit the argument was a mood.

Douglas Adams wrote the whole data-center fight in 1979, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as a joke about a bypass. Arthur Dent wakes to a bulldozer at his house, and the council man, Mr. Prosser, is unmoved: the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months. On display, as Arthur points out, in the cellar, in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying "Beware of the Leopard." Then the Vogons arrive to demolish the Earth itself for a hyperspace bypass, and their defense is the same sentence at galactic scale: the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at the local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years—if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own lookout. Not knowing is no defense. Never saw the notice is no defense. The decision was posted somewhere you never look, by a process that never required your comprehension, and the bulldozer is already warm.

Every town in this essay is Arthur Dent. The siting decision about their neighborhood was made from a map they never saw, by people who never needed them to understand it, and by the time the notice reaches them—in the form of a proposal, a survey crew, a zoning application—the decision has already read them. Adams told it as farce. The towns are living it as insult. But the joke and the insult are the same object: the plans were always on display. They just weren't on display in your backyard.

Yes in your backyard

There is already a word for the opposite of NIMBY, and honesty requires crediting it properly: YIMBY, "Yes In My Backyard," a real movement that grew up around housing in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 2010s, when a generation that could not afford to live where it worked started showing up at the same meetings to say build it here. The term itself is older, traded since the 1980s, but the housing people made it a flag. I am borrowing their flag and planting it somewhere they did not: on the fence line of a data center in a county that needs the check.

My version is one letter off, and the letter matters. YIYB: yes in your backyard. Not mine. Yours. Yes in your backyard. Yes, you need this. Why not in your backyard? Why do you want to have to commute to someone else's backyard?

Because here is the part of the siting map nobody draws at the meeting: there is almost nowhere else left for it to go. The other backyards are defended now. The poor neighborhoods are defended by the guardians themselves—the environmental-justice movement, built by people who watched their grandparents' streets get chosen for every plant and highway, now stands watch, and siting there reads as what it often was, racism, and the protectors will not allow it. Good. That watch was earned. And the rich backyards need no guardians at all: money is its own fence, and at that altitude a refusal simply works, the way it always has. So everything that still has to go somewhere—the data centers, the plants, the substations, the whole unglamorous machinery the good life runs on—flows to the one zone left undefended: where the middle class used to be. The moldering emptiness of middle class no more. The middle's backyards stand vacant because the middle is gone, and vacancy is exactly what a siting map reads as available. Oldham County could buy its refusal; it is the richest county in Kentucky, and refusal is a luxury good. The hollowed counties cannot. For them the building comes either way. The only question the vote actually answers is whether the town gets the jobs and the tax base with it, or just the building.

Say yes, and you have admitted the truth that the site selector already knew: the land is cheap here because the century moved, the plant is gone, the young people are in the suburbs of somebody else's city, and this county is on the side of the tracks where the work is available. That admission hurts for exactly one meeting. Then it starts paying. The alternative is the cab: driving in circles through a town that exists in memory, telling every fare who you used to be.

The prince who drove his cab and knew he was driving a cab kept his name. Obolensky wrote his memoir as a man describing a fall, and the description is the dignity. The ones we pity are the ones still insisting on the title at the curb. A town is no different. You are not fancy anymore. You may be something better than fancy: honest, solvent, and still choosing. But the choice has to be made from the real address.

And understand, finally, that the address is not permanent either. The wrong side of the tracks is not written in stone. It did not come down on Moses's tablets. The line moves. It has always moved: neighborhoods rise, hollow out, and rise again, and the wrong side migrates across the map behind them, following the money out and the vacancy in. NIMBY is a migrator. The line settles wherever the class that used to defend a place has thinned out, and a dead middle class is ripe for invasion by everything that used to be kept out of its backyard. Your town was not chosen because the map hates it. Your town was chosen because the line has arrived where your town now stands.

Yes in your backyard. It is the only backyard you have—and the line is already coming through towns that still think it runs somewhere else. The plans were on display the whole time: in the land prices, in the substation maps, in the plant closings nobody called a demolition order. If anybody wants to put a data center in your neighborhood, then, to quote the kids, you are cooked, unc. The only choice left is whether you get fed at the table the building sets—or stand in the yard with a sign, explaining to the bulldozer who you used to be.

And if you want to know who signed the order, do not look at the county commission. The siting decision is made way above your pay grade. Look at it from high enough and it reads like the oldest story there is: someone on high looks down at the garden and chooses it, and the reason he chooses it is that the garden is empty. God has chosen Eden for the data center precisely because nobody lives in Eden anymore. Adam and Eve were evicted. The tenancy ended a long time ago. What remains in the garden is one snake and a lonely God, and a great deal of very good land going to waste.

That is the sting the opponents cannot get past, and it is worth naming exactly: everybody fighting the data center believes they still live in Eden. They don't. The eviction already happened. The middle class was put out of the garden a generation ago—quietly, plant by plant, pension by pension—and nobody served papers, because that is not how evictions work at this scale. There is just a morning when the garden is empty and the landlord starts deciding what to build on it. The building is not the desecration of the garden. It is what gets built in a garden after the gardeners are gone. The NIMBY fight, seen from that height, is tenants who no longer hold the lease protesting the new tenant—and the new tenant, unlike them, has been offered terms.

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