Edition 017: The Cost

The cost of the data economy is not only the loss of autonomy and power that previous editions have described. It is also more systemic, involving the land, water, energy, and labor taken from places and people without the power to refuse... The system was built to see certain things and to be blind to others. What it sees, it counts. What it does not see, it does not owe... Texas is an example of that pattern. The state is on pace to host the largest concentration of data center capacity in the world by 2030... Texas has the highest uninsured rate in the country, for adults and for children... One in five Texas children, roughly 1.7 million of them, lives in a household that cannot reliably afford enough food... The extraction continues. From the extraction of human data to the extraction of human labor to the extraction of the earth itself, the cost is being borne by places and people without the power to refuse it. What the state counts as a boom is what the people inside it are paying for.