Why AOL and Raytheon share an address
Photography: Rowan Wernham. Producer: Daniel Grjonko.
There’s been a lot of reporting on the massive data center buildout happening in Northern Virginia — just west of Washington D.C. But none of the coverage has mentioned perhaps the most interesting part: These data centers are being built right in the middle of a military contractor zone. That’s right, the densest data center region in the world — one that uses something like 20 percent of all energy in Virginia and hosts data harvesting and compute services for Amazon, Google, Facebook, OpenAI, Oracle, and all the rest — is interlocked with the biggest private police state contractors out there: Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, BAE…
Here’s me talking about the situation at a historic street corner in Northern Virginia: what used to be AOL’s sprawling headquarters is now being turned into a massive cluster of data centers…and this cluster of data centers has sprouted like mushrooms around Raytheon. It makes sense. The internet was created by America’s police state…and it is still very much a part of the police state today. In fact, if my book Surveillance Valley could be distilled into a single intersection, this is it…
This a snippet of the first Vampire Valley episode — EP 01 — I’m working on right now.
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