The internet made real
Flying over Virginia's Data Center Alley, the densest cluster of data centers in the world.
Mark Fisher first introduced the “vampire castle” metaphor for the internet thirteen years ago. Even if he didn’t elaborate on the structural forces that underpin the internet and drive its toxic culture, he got the metaphor right: the internet as a parasitic place, a place where everything gets drained of its vital energy…a place that’s designed to waste our lives…a place where politics go to die. What do these vampire castles look like in the light?
I got to fly a drone over a few of them this weekend in the police state contractor zone known as Northern Virginia. The press calls it Data Center Ally. It apparently has the densest concentration of internet data harvesting facilities on the planet. And it is a strange place — just north of Dulles Airport, all this data infrastructure sits right in the middle of various privatized spy and military office parks and suburbs housing workers at these office parks. It’s all connected — the data, the clients, the workers. And it used to be farmland not that long ago. I’m working on a little film about it — EP 01 of Vampire Valley — that I hope I’ll have in April. But I’ll be releasing some clips as I go along…
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These data harvesting centers — some of them are multistory “hyper-scale” facilities that you can see in the flyover above — are loud and huge and suck power from dozens of states, with just one of these things burning as much as a hundred thousand homes. Some of the ones not plugged into the grid have to run their own extremely noisy gas power plants. If you’re looking for a directed energy technology that gives people the Havana Syndrome, these centers are it.
People are fighting them everywhere because of how shitty it is to live next to one of these — the constant loud hum, the pollution, the fear of getting dosed by the electromagnetic radiation given off by the massive electrical infrastructure, and the fact that they basically make every home surrounding them worthless…robbing people of whatever meager wealth they tried to store in their properties, thinking that they were secure until Amazon and Google and OpenAI came to the neighborhood unannounced.
It’s interesting being out there, talking to people — because it is with these data centers that the internet has been made real for people. For the first time in their lives, they can see what the cloud really is all about. And the internet, as they are finding out, is just another giant factory — a series of polluted and noisy industrial sites…or dark satanic data mills, as the Luddites or that Romantic-adjacent poet might have called them.
