Twenty thousand tons for a data center. Thirty tons a week for the shop that fixes your gate. This is the full accounting: the steel, the subsidies, the seven hundred billion dollars, and the man left
Thanks, Tom. Americans call this abundance “normal” because someone else paid the bill for it.
What strikes me reading this is how completely our expectations have drifted away from the real cost of the world we move through every day. Daily hot showers, always-on electricity, cheap fuel, the sense that there will always be more steel and more concrete for whatever we decide to build next. We treat all of that as a baseline entitlement, not a choice. The ten‑dollar toaster oven at Walmart is a perfect emblem of that distance: its sticker price has almost nothing to do with what it actually costs to exist.
The highest price was paid by the people who once lived on and with the land that now furnishes the ore, the coal, the oil, the hydropower easements, the rail and highway right‑of‑way. Indigenous communities paid in dispossession, poisoning, and often in their lives, long before a single data center broke ground or a single transformer came off the line. By the time that toaster oven shows up under fluorescent lights, the violence that made it possible has been thoroughly laundered into “growth” and “jobs.”
Down at the retail end of the chain, the minimum‑wage cashier ringing it up is, perversely, near the top of the pyramid of people who actually get to touch the benefits. Everyone below that point — the hands in the mine, the refinery, the mill, the grid, the shop that can’t get its steel order filled — absorbs the weight of our expectations while remaining almost entirely invisible.
We keep calling this an economy or a market, as if it were a neutral system instead of a long‑running extraction project that burns through people and places to preserve the illusion of “normal life.” Buy low, sell high is not a moral guideline. Endless growth is the philosophy of a malignant cancer.
Your piece makes clear how unsustainable this is in the narrow sense of steel and transformers, but it’s just as unsustainable morally.
A society that trains people to expect endless cheap abundance while hiding the bodies and broken landscapes that make it possible is not actually stable; it’s just very good at postponing the bill.
I'm sixty and have always expected the bill would come due during my lifetime. I know so many people with cancer from poison Iowa water and air, and none of my children can afford to buy into this system. Microplastics and the so-called "artificial intelligence" will doubtless affect both the micro and macro environments. The supposed leaders are more and more isolated from the empathy and (perhaps more importantly) insulated from the violence.
There are people who build out of rubble, using their creativity and intelligence to craft local communities that don't adhere to the systemic expectations. This is where I pin what hope I have. Humans are social, community-based creatures. I believe our strength lies in duty to our communities and our drive to create something beautiful.
Don’t know if I’m looking at the bigger picture too simply, but … This mass-extraction event we’re living in, if it continues at the current rate, won’t it become something the market will no longer be able to correct for? By eliminating jobs and eating up resources in every sector - including their own - won’t that result in not enough customers to buy what these behemoth companies are selling? Aren’t they effectively eating their own? Capitalism operates on a balance, or so I was taught in Econ 1A. These tech bros aren’t capitalists, they’re planet-eaters.
I've said from the beginning that AI would end human civilization as we know it. Either by becoming sentient which I believe is a real possibility, or by using up all the water for cooling servers. I've followed the water situation in the West for years and between overpumping of aquifers, lack of snowpack due to climate change, and billionaires and private equity quietly buying up water rights, there will be battles fought over water in the very near future. And yet the West is home to some of the largest data centers already with many more on the way.
I have zero need or use for AI. I've lived 65 years without it and I'll live the rest of my years the same way. Our kids and grandkids are the ones who are going to pay the price unfortunately.
I've always kept every piece of steel that came my way for building stuff in my shop, and that's going to become even more important now. I haven't bought any for a year or so, and it sounds like I might not have that option for quite some time.
I don't think you're alone in seeing it that way. Whether AI ever becomes sentient or not, we're already watching it consume enormous amounts of power, water, and money while the people making those decisions rarely have to live with the consequences.
The water issue is the one that keeps getting ignored. Out West, we've been borrowing from the future for decades by draining aquifers and assuming the snowpack would always come back. Now we're adding data centers to places that are already struggling. That doesn't seem like much of a plan.
And I smiled when you mentioned hanging onto every piece of steel. Our dad's generation never threw anything away because they knew there might come a day when you couldn't just run to the store and replace it. That wasn't being cheap. It was understanding that self-reliance matters. I have a feeling we're going to relearn that lesson.
Yes, to both of you. Personally, I think AI is being vastly oversold. "It'll cure cancer," they tell us, but I don't believe that for one second. There's too much money in managing cancer rather than curing it: milking each patient until their insurance runs dry along with whatever generational wealth they'd managed to accrue, all of it asorbed by The System. Curing cancer would leave that money-train stuck in the station ... but still they whisper those sweet promises in the ears of an increasingly desperate America that wants to believe. I don't see how AI will do anything real to improve our lives -- quite the opposite.
At this point, I'm not sure there's much left to belive in, other than the almost infinite capacity of people to endure -- but I think the limits of that strength will be put to the test in the years to come.
Your piece here is brilliant, clear, precise and importantly accurate. Like you I have no idea how to address the grievously outsized power structures that flawed men like bezos, ellison, altman, nadella, gates, musk, zuckerberg, page and others wield. These 8 guys collectively control more wealth than the next ‘poorest’ 187 countries. In my view it is criminal. With a phone call, these people can move markets, destroy economies, ecosystems and countless lives, just like Luiz’s, and for what…. exactly ? No, this needs to stop, but how?
It is trope that we are a nation of laws, but who exactly writes the laws and for whom? Clearly, we do know the answer, they’re not written for the citizens or for natural landscapes, or watersheds or animals and habitats, no, laws are written to maximize the benefit to the already outrageously wealthy, and they will take advantage of them all to further their power and their proclivity to domination. It is callous, it is blatant and it is wrong.
Now, as the world’s resources are becoming more scarce, when energy futures are in question, when the climate is shifting at rates unprecedented in ‘modern’ human history, this is the time to shore up our basic capacities to survive, not squander our resources on enterprises of questionable value. Whatever benefits AI and data centers might offer us, observations suggests that the sacrifice is nowhere near any potential gains that might accrue to the populace. Sure, those 8 guys will reap ever more filthy lucre, but none of us will ever see the benefit of that and every dime they extract and hoard is one less dime available to sustain our unquestionably finite world(and if musk wants to decamp to Mars, go and good riddance).
The tech oligarchs are selling us miracles, while consuming everything that supports life in the process. I say no. Enough.
We need ideas, solid, actionable ideas and approaches to reining this in.
Thank you. I wish I had an answer, but if I did I'd probably be writing about that instead.
What keeps bothering me is that we've started talking about men like Bezos and Musk as if they're weather. Like they're just something that happens to us. They aren't. They're people. They built companies. They operate inside a system that rewards this kind of concentration of wealth and power.
I don't think one election fixes it, and I don't think one law does either. But I do think we have to stop accepting the idea that this is just the natural order of things. It isn't.
The only thing I know how to do is what I've always tried to do here. Tell one true story at a time. Start with someone like Luiz instead of starting with a billionaire. If enough of us keep paying attention to the people carrying the cost instead of the people collecting the profit, maybe we begin asking different questions. And maybe different questions eventually lead to different answers.
That's about all I've got. But I think it's worth doing.
One suggestion - begin making an inventory of smaller mills that recycle old steel, Create a supply chain to feed the NON AI needs of your community. If electric furnaces or small integrated mills exist, begin thinking about having a number of communities buy them either AS communities or a pool of local investors. Turn the management over to the employees to run, working out what you all need and what they can produce. Create a separate supply chain that you control. It has been done elsewhere and quite successfully. Economies of scale can endure especially if they are owned and controlled by networks of people from employees to small businesses. It's kind of the Ag coop model on a different scale. It is really important to involve employees of the steel producers because that's where the technical innovation and productive knowledge lie. It's being done in other sectors. It works.
If you are interested in a model, the food distribution system that supplies independent grocers in the East is one. They carry a good but not high-level brand to distribute to non-chain groceries. Those groceries are members. It is organized as a retail coop. Non-coop forms are like those that supply IGA stores. In other words, they have found ways to step OUT of the monopoly structures and create independent sales and purchasing options.
We tend to pay little attention to the amount of economic action that is not part of conglomerates, monopolies and monopsonies, and we should. It has served us well for decades. Good time to return. If you are interested in talking to someone who can give your community information on alternative resources, please DM me on Bluesky, and I will give you his contact information.
Very interesting. My husband, btw, is a steel buyer.
Everyone I know in the business -- from Cat engineer to welder at a metal shop etc -- will tell you they're extremely busy because of all the data center construction.
Tell them so many workers can’t be busy because the AI-datacenters are taking all the steel 😉 ( and the water, and the electricity, and the land, and …). In my language, we have that cruel but sadly often true expression: The Bread of one, is the death of another
You can’t always know what particular part of it has to do with a data center or the traditional things they do, making parts for construction equipment mostly. You don’t know whether it’ll be used to plow a field, pave a road or build a data center.
“These are specific men, running specific companies, making specific decisions to book out a mill’s entire capacity a year in advance because they can, fully aware that every ton they lock up is a ton that doesn’t reach anyone who can’t pay the same premium or sign the same size of contract. That’s not an accident of the market. That’s the market working exactly as these men built it to work, with them and the companies they run at the front of every line it creates, and a welding shop in Scottsbluff standing wherever’s left over once they’re done.”
You can know if you track which company does the orders and book in advance. It’s like our hypermarkets in Belgium, they book contracts for years directly with the farms at fixed low prices and than the smaller shops have to fight for the leftovers.
Sometimes I'm tempted to print out this and countless other articles that testify to the diminishment of America and send them off to those who say we are not collapsing. Send them off to people that don't recognize that younger generations are recognizing that "the harder I work, the behinder I get." Except for the lasting damage this system is doing to the young, I cheer that data centers can't get their hardware and must cannibalize what they need from farmers and others that have built America. I hope they fail miserably. Microsoft negotiated a contract for land with leaders of a NC county all in secret-covered by NDAs-no participation, let alone knowledge of the citizenry.
Keep in mind that Dein Führer essentially halted steel imports from Canada, which formerly supplied a supply cushion to the beleaguered US steel industry.
Scarcity is a huge problem, only to get worst. Allowing corporations to use the resources they need to build the things that people will no longer be able to afford is absurd. But what do I know?
Tom, the economy is a Ponzi scheme dominated by the resource monopolists. The market is gone, as in supply and demand, as there are no more public goods. It is the recipe for a perfect implosion of trickle-down economics. Failure is our next stage of economic decline.
As always, written with passion and a real sense of loss.
I especially appreciated the way you wrote about Luiz’s resourcefulness without romanticizing the conditions that require it. In my own writing, I try to handle strength with that same care, especially when I write about Mexican American women whose endurance people often admire while they overlook its cost. You respected both the culture and the people who have learned to survive inside systems that rarely make room for them.
You write for real people. Rural folks like me. Thank you for giving us a voice. Thank you for clarifying Luiz is not complaining or having victim mentality but is still part of a fight he did not know he was in. Thank you for your straightforwardness for your research and your facts. for telling it the way it is for the common hard-working people. The country people who make things work, no matter what. you’re writing means more to me than you’ll ever know.
Means more than you know, hearing that. I don't get told that often, and when I do I don't quite know what to do with my hands.
I write about people like Luiz because somebody ought to, plain and simple. Not to make him a symbol of anything. Just because he's real, and what's happening to him is real, and most of the country talking about steel tariffs and AI investment never once thinks about the man at the counter trying to finish a job by Friday.
You calling it a fight he didn't know he was in, that's the truest thing anybody's said about this in a while. He's not complaining. He's just doing the math, quietly, the way people like him always have.
Thank you for saying so. It's the reason I keep sitting down at this desk.
Losing a fight he didn’t know he was in really sums up the situation everyone, except the Venetian Blind (attendees of the Bezo wedding extravaganza in Italy), are/will find themselves in. A solution is to stop patronizing the companies and corporations controlled by the oligarchs. Putting hope for change solely in the hands of politicians is foolish. We got a glimmer of the power of people a while back with Disney. It’s time for more.
Thanks, Tom. Americans call this abundance “normal” because someone else paid the bill for it.
What strikes me reading this is how completely our expectations have drifted away from the real cost of the world we move through every day. Daily hot showers, always-on electricity, cheap fuel, the sense that there will always be more steel and more concrete for whatever we decide to build next. We treat all of that as a baseline entitlement, not a choice. The ten‑dollar toaster oven at Walmart is a perfect emblem of that distance: its sticker price has almost nothing to do with what it actually costs to exist.
The highest price was paid by the people who once lived on and with the land that now furnishes the ore, the coal, the oil, the hydropower easements, the rail and highway right‑of‑way. Indigenous communities paid in dispossession, poisoning, and often in their lives, long before a single data center broke ground or a single transformer came off the line. By the time that toaster oven shows up under fluorescent lights, the violence that made it possible has been thoroughly laundered into “growth” and “jobs.”
Down at the retail end of the chain, the minimum‑wage cashier ringing it up is, perversely, near the top of the pyramid of people who actually get to touch the benefits. Everyone below that point — the hands in the mine, the refinery, the mill, the grid, the shop that can’t get its steel order filled — absorbs the weight of our expectations while remaining almost entirely invisible.
We keep calling this an economy or a market, as if it were a neutral system instead of a long‑running extraction project that burns through people and places to preserve the illusion of “normal life.” Buy low, sell high is not a moral guideline. Endless growth is the philosophy of a malignant cancer.
Your piece makes clear how unsustainable this is in the narrow sense of steel and transformers, but it’s just as unsustainable morally.
A society that trains people to expect endless cheap abundance while hiding the bodies and broken landscapes that make it possible is not actually stable; it’s just very good at postponing the bill.
I'm sixty and have always expected the bill would come due during my lifetime. I know so many people with cancer from poison Iowa water and air, and none of my children can afford to buy into this system. Microplastics and the so-called "artificial intelligence" will doubtless affect both the micro and macro environments. The supposed leaders are more and more isolated from the empathy and (perhaps more importantly) insulated from the violence.
There are people who build out of rubble, using their creativity and intelligence to craft local communities that don't adhere to the systemic expectations. This is where I pin what hope I have. Humans are social, community-based creatures. I believe our strength lies in duty to our communities and our drive to create something beautiful.
Spot-on - and very well put.
Love all of this - our strength lies in duty to our communities and our desire to create something beautiful. Yes. So much yes.
Don’t know if I’m looking at the bigger picture too simply, but … This mass-extraction event we’re living in, if it continues at the current rate, won’t it become something the market will no longer be able to correct for? By eliminating jobs and eating up resources in every sector - including their own - won’t that result in not enough customers to buy what these behemoth companies are selling? Aren’t they effectively eating their own? Capitalism operates on a balance, or so I was taught in Econ 1A. These tech bros aren’t capitalists, they’re planet-eaters.
💯
It’s called ‘cannibalism-capitalism’: It eats it’s own
I've said from the beginning that AI would end human civilization as we know it. Either by becoming sentient which I believe is a real possibility, or by using up all the water for cooling servers. I've followed the water situation in the West for years and between overpumping of aquifers, lack of snowpack due to climate change, and billionaires and private equity quietly buying up water rights, there will be battles fought over water in the very near future. And yet the West is home to some of the largest data centers already with many more on the way.
I have zero need or use for AI. I've lived 65 years without it and I'll live the rest of my years the same way. Our kids and grandkids are the ones who are going to pay the price unfortunately.
I've always kept every piece of steel that came my way for building stuff in my shop, and that's going to become even more important now. I haven't bought any for a year or so, and it sounds like I might not have that option for quite some time.
I don't think you're alone in seeing it that way. Whether AI ever becomes sentient or not, we're already watching it consume enormous amounts of power, water, and money while the people making those decisions rarely have to live with the consequences.
The water issue is the one that keeps getting ignored. Out West, we've been borrowing from the future for decades by draining aquifers and assuming the snowpack would always come back. Now we're adding data centers to places that are already struggling. That doesn't seem like much of a plan.
And I smiled when you mentioned hanging onto every piece of steel. Our dad's generation never threw anything away because they knew there might come a day when you couldn't just run to the store and replace it. That wasn't being cheap. It was understanding that self-reliance matters. I have a feeling we're going to relearn that lesson.
Yes, to both of you. Personally, I think AI is being vastly oversold. "It'll cure cancer," they tell us, but I don't believe that for one second. There's too much money in managing cancer rather than curing it: milking each patient until their insurance runs dry along with whatever generational wealth they'd managed to accrue, all of it asorbed by The System. Curing cancer would leave that money-train stuck in the station ... but still they whisper those sweet promises in the ears of an increasingly desperate America that wants to believe. I don't see how AI will do anything real to improve our lives -- quite the opposite.
At this point, I'm not sure there's much left to belive in, other than the almost infinite capacity of people to endure -- but I think the limits of that strength will be put to the test in the years to come.
Your piece here is brilliant, clear, precise and importantly accurate. Like you I have no idea how to address the grievously outsized power structures that flawed men like bezos, ellison, altman, nadella, gates, musk, zuckerberg, page and others wield. These 8 guys collectively control more wealth than the next ‘poorest’ 187 countries. In my view it is criminal. With a phone call, these people can move markets, destroy economies, ecosystems and countless lives, just like Luiz’s, and for what…. exactly ? No, this needs to stop, but how?
It is trope that we are a nation of laws, but who exactly writes the laws and for whom? Clearly, we do know the answer, they’re not written for the citizens or for natural landscapes, or watersheds or animals and habitats, no, laws are written to maximize the benefit to the already outrageously wealthy, and they will take advantage of them all to further their power and their proclivity to domination. It is callous, it is blatant and it is wrong.
Now, as the world’s resources are becoming more scarce, when energy futures are in question, when the climate is shifting at rates unprecedented in ‘modern’ human history, this is the time to shore up our basic capacities to survive, not squander our resources on enterprises of questionable value. Whatever benefits AI and data centers might offer us, observations suggests that the sacrifice is nowhere near any potential gains that might accrue to the populace. Sure, those 8 guys will reap ever more filthy lucre, but none of us will ever see the benefit of that and every dime they extract and hoard is one less dime available to sustain our unquestionably finite world(and if musk wants to decamp to Mars, go and good riddance).
The tech oligarchs are selling us miracles, while consuming everything that supports life in the process. I say no. Enough.
We need ideas, solid, actionable ideas and approaches to reining this in.
Anyone ?
Thank you. I wish I had an answer, but if I did I'd probably be writing about that instead.
What keeps bothering me is that we've started talking about men like Bezos and Musk as if they're weather. Like they're just something that happens to us. They aren't. They're people. They built companies. They operate inside a system that rewards this kind of concentration of wealth and power.
I don't think one election fixes it, and I don't think one law does either. But I do think we have to stop accepting the idea that this is just the natural order of things. It isn't.
The only thing I know how to do is what I've always tried to do here. Tell one true story at a time. Start with someone like Luiz instead of starting with a billionaire. If enough of us keep paying attention to the people carrying the cost instead of the people collecting the profit, maybe we begin asking different questions. And maybe different questions eventually lead to different answers.
That's about all I've got. But I think it's worth doing.
One suggestion - begin making an inventory of smaller mills that recycle old steel, Create a supply chain to feed the NON AI needs of your community. If electric furnaces or small integrated mills exist, begin thinking about having a number of communities buy them either AS communities or a pool of local investors. Turn the management over to the employees to run, working out what you all need and what they can produce. Create a separate supply chain that you control. It has been done elsewhere and quite successfully. Economies of scale can endure especially if they are owned and controlled by networks of people from employees to small businesses. It's kind of the Ag coop model on a different scale. It is really important to involve employees of the steel producers because that's where the technical innovation and productive knowledge lie. It's being done in other sectors. It works.
If you are interested in a model, the food distribution system that supplies independent grocers in the East is one. They carry a good but not high-level brand to distribute to non-chain groceries. Those groceries are members. It is organized as a retail coop. Non-coop forms are like those that supply IGA stores. In other words, they have found ways to step OUT of the monopoly structures and create independent sales and purchasing options.
We tend to pay little attention to the amount of economic action that is not part of conglomerates, monopolies and monopsonies, and we should. It has served us well for decades. Good time to return. If you are interested in talking to someone who can give your community information on alternative resources, please DM me on Bluesky, and I will give you his contact information.
EXCELLENT writing !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just gawd damn EXCELLENT !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Thank you Gregg!!
Very interesting. My husband, btw, is a steel buyer.
Everyone I know in the business -- from Cat engineer to welder at a metal shop etc -- will tell you they're extremely busy because of all the data center construction.
So would your husband agree with me or think I am blowing it out of proportion?
Idk. I am going to ask him.
Tell them so many workers can’t be busy because the AI-datacenters are taking all the steel 😉 ( and the water, and the electricity, and the land, and …). In my language, we have that cruel but sadly often true expression: The Bread of one, is the death of another
You can’t always know what particular part of it has to do with a data center or the traditional things they do, making parts for construction equipment mostly. You don’t know whether it’ll be used to plow a field, pave a road or build a data center.
“These are specific men, running specific companies, making specific decisions to book out a mill’s entire capacity a year in advance because they can, fully aware that every ton they lock up is a ton that doesn’t reach anyone who can’t pay the same premium or sign the same size of contract. That’s not an accident of the market. That’s the market working exactly as these men built it to work, with them and the companies they run at the front of every line it creates, and a welding shop in Scottsbluff standing wherever’s left over once they’re done.”
You can know if you track which company does the orders and book in advance. It’s like our hypermarkets in Belgium, they book contracts for years directly with the farms at fixed low prices and than the smaller shops have to fight for the leftovers.
Buying millions of nuts, bolts and tubes doesn’t work like that.
Capitalism doing what capitalism does.
But: We can surely pressure state and local governments not to subsidize these billionaires.
Not in Red States
Sometimes I'm tempted to print out this and countless other articles that testify to the diminishment of America and send them off to those who say we are not collapsing. Send them off to people that don't recognize that younger generations are recognizing that "the harder I work, the behinder I get." Except for the lasting damage this system is doing to the young, I cheer that data centers can't get their hardware and must cannibalize what they need from farmers and others that have built America. I hope they fail miserably. Microsoft negotiated a contract for land with leaders of a NC county all in secret-covered by NDAs-no participation, let alone knowledge of the citizenry.
Thank you for this. The unbelievable wealth gap is killing us. What will we do?
Very good question
I so appreciate your reflections. As a fellow Nebraskan, I am grateful for your wisdom and insight.
Thank you Diane, that’s really nice.
Keep in mind that Dein Führer essentially halted steel imports from Canada, which formerly supplied a supply cushion to the beleaguered US steel industry.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/canada-us-steel-aluminum-trade-charts-1.7458568
I'm filled with sadness and rage.
Scarcity is a huge problem, only to get worst. Allowing corporations to use the resources they need to build the things that people will no longer be able to afford is absurd. But what do I know?
Tom, the economy is a Ponzi scheme dominated by the resource monopolists. The market is gone, as in supply and demand, as there are no more public goods. It is the recipe for a perfect implosion of trickle-down economics. Failure is our next stage of economic decline.
As always, written with passion and a real sense of loss.
I especially appreciated the way you wrote about Luiz’s resourcefulness without romanticizing the conditions that require it. In my own writing, I try to handle strength with that same care, especially when I write about Mexican American women whose endurance people often admire while they overlook its cost. You respected both the culture and the people who have learned to survive inside systems that rarely make room for them.
Thank you!
You write for real people. Rural folks like me. Thank you for giving us a voice. Thank you for clarifying Luiz is not complaining or having victim mentality but is still part of a fight he did not know he was in. Thank you for your straightforwardness for your research and your facts. for telling it the way it is for the common hard-working people. The country people who make things work, no matter what. you’re writing means more to me than you’ll ever know.
Means more than you know, hearing that. I don't get told that often, and when I do I don't quite know what to do with my hands.
I write about people like Luiz because somebody ought to, plain and simple. Not to make him a symbol of anything. Just because he's real, and what's happening to him is real, and most of the country talking about steel tariffs and AI investment never once thinks about the man at the counter trying to finish a job by Friday.
You calling it a fight he didn't know he was in, that's the truest thing anybody's said about this in a while. He's not complaining. He's just doing the math, quietly, the way people like him always have.
Thank you for saying so. It's the reason I keep sitting down at this desk.
Please never stop writing. I received your book in the mail yesterday and I am so looking forward to reading it.
I hope you like it.
I have no doubt that I will love it
Losing a fight he didn’t know he was in really sums up the situation everyone, except the Venetian Blind (attendees of the Bezo wedding extravaganza in Italy), are/will find themselves in. A solution is to stop patronizing the companies and corporations controlled by the oligarchs. Putting hope for change solely in the hands of politicians is foolish. We got a glimmer of the power of people a while back with Disney. It’s time for more.