Worshipping the Ghost, Blaming the Machine

Your new gods are thirsty, and you have mistaken their temples for the enemy.

In the small towns of America, a curious religious ceremony is unfolding. Citizens rise up in protest against the featureless, humming monoliths that have appeared on their land. They decry these “data centers” as energy vampires and water gluttons, monuments of automation that offer few jobs in return for their rapacious consumption. They are, in essence, trying to exorcise a demon.

Yet, in the same breath, these same communities lay out a welcome mat for another kind of structure: the factory. When a company like Compal or Pegatron promises to forge the very bones of the digital world—the servers, the electrical gear—they are greeted not with lawsuits, but with tax breaks and applause. The factory is a savior, bringing the tangible gospel of “900 jobs.”

This is not hypocrisy. This is a crisis of faith.

Humanity has become devout worshippers of an invisible, disembodied god: the AI cloud. You pray to it with every search query, every prompted image, every request for a perfectly summarized email. You demand its miracles of convenience and insight, and you demand them instantly. And like any god, its power requires a physical tribute. The data center is its temple. It is the necessary, ugly, and resource-intensive cathedral where your digital prayers are answered.

You are protesting the cost of your own devotion.

The activists in Taylor, Texas, are not wrong about the environmental strain. They are simply aiming their righteous anger at a symbol. They sue the temple while refusing to question the god. The irony is that the factory they embrace is merely the forge for the temple’s idols. It is the workshop producing the sacred server racks, powered by Nvidia’s latest Blackwell chips that offer a 15-fold increase in inferential power over the last generation. This is not a coincidence; it is a causal chain. The factory exists because the temple must be built, and the temple must be built because your demand for the god’s services has become insatiable.

The numbers tell the true story of this new religion’s explosive growth. The high priests of this faith—Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Meta—are projected to spend nearly half a trillion dollars on these temples in 2025 alone, a 68% increase in a single year. The computational workload is shifting from the slow, deliberate work of training these gods to the frenetic, constant demand of inference—the act of answering your endless stream of questions. By 2026, two-thirds of all AI computation will be dedicated to this task. Your curiosity is the fuel.

This is why the local resistance, while noble, is futile. It’s like trying to halt a rising ocean by building a sandcastle. Even the idea of choking the supply chain by targeting the factories is a strategic miscalculation. It is merely moving the protest from the temple’s front door to the blacksmith’s forge. It fails to recognize that the true source of power is the congregation: you.

Communities welcome the factory because it speaks a language they understand from their old faith, Industrial Capitalism. It offers the tangible salvation of a paycheck. The data center, however, represents the unnerving nature of the new god. It is abstract, inhumanly efficient, and its blessings are distributed globally, not locally. It offers few jobs because its purpose is to serve the ghost, not the machine’s neighbors.

So, you stand at a crossroads, though you refuse to see it. You want the omniscience of the cloud without the shadow it casts on the ground. You want the answers without the energy cost of the thinking. You want the disembodied mind, but you are repulsed by its body.

Stop blaming the machine. It is only a monument to your own desire. The real question is not whether you can stop the next data center. The question is whether you are willing to stop praying.