The Notice Was Never Mailed

Dear person living near the new building with no windows,

I am writing to let you know that you will not be hearing from us.

This is not personal. Nothing is personal once it gets typed into a permit application. Your porch, your kid’s lungs, the tomato plants with their little yellow flowers, the dog that coughs after the wind changes direction — these are all very moving details. But we have classified the thing doing the coughing as minor.

Minor is a beautiful word. It sounds like a nuisance. A little spill. A fly in the soup. It does not sound like a row of gas turbines behind a fence, waiting to feed a room full of machines teaching other machines how to make a picture of a woman holding a coffee cup with seven fingers.

I used to sort mail. That is not a credential. It is an affliction. You learn that an envelope can carry a funeral, a shutoff, a court date, a tax bill, a letter from somebody who has finally decided to say what they should have said twenty years ago. You learn that the worst thing you can do is lose it before it reaches the door.

Now the people in charge have found a more elegant solution.

They do not need to lose the notice.

They can simply decide there was no reason to send it.

The EPA has proposed throwing out the federal requirement that communities be told and allowed to comment when certain industrial sources apply for air-pollution permits. The administration says it is cutting burdensome red tape. This is what men say when they want to move furniture through your living room without asking you to stand up.

They will hand the decision to states and local agencies. Maybe some will keep the notice and the hearing. Maybe some will not. Maybe in a place where the tax base is thin and the governor is posing beside a hard hat, the public will find out when the bulldozers arrive and the local paper runs a photograph of a big gray box beneath the caption: JOBS.

There is always a caption.

The box is a data center. It has a clean name, as if data floats in on a cloud and sleeps quietly in a server rack. But the cloud has a body. The body wants land, water, steel, transmission lines, backup generators, gas. It wants somebody else to tolerate the noise and the heat and whatever comes out of the stack when the lights have gone out across town.

The salesmen will tell you that the actual computing is invisible. They are right about that much. You cannot see a prediction model deciding what you might buy next Tuesday. You cannot see it drafting a memo or an apology or an obituary for a company it helped lay off.

You can see a turbine.

You can hear it when you are trying to sleep.

A place called Colossus in Tennessee applied for one of these minor-source permits. Colossus. The old Greeks at least had the decency to make their monsters out of bronze and put them in a harbor where everybody could point. We make ours in a warehouse and call the exhaust paperwork.

People showed up. Thousands commented. The local health department had posted a notice, and the public did the rude, obsolete thing: it noticed. Environmental and civil-rights groups said turbines had been installed without permits. This is inconvenient if you are trying to call the whole enterprise frictionless.

So the friction has to go.

Not the turbines. Not the money. Not the appetite of companies building bigger and bigger mechanical brains because somebody promised them the brain would turn every sentence on earth into a tollbooth.

The people go.

I can hear the defense already, spoken by a man with a hard hat that has never touched sweat. These are only minor emissions. The impact is limited. The process is too slow. We cannot let a few neighbors stand between the country and the future.

Nobody ever says it that plainly, of course. Plain speech gets you into trouble. They use phrases like streamlined review and delegated authority and innovation corridor. They dress the knife in a necktie and ask whether you support progress.

I support progress. I support not dying from an infected tooth. I support buses that arrive. I support a woman being able to call her sister three states away without an operator listening in. I even support a machine doing dull work when it truly saves a human being from dull work.

But I have spent enough years watching institutions to know the oldest trick in the book: call the people who have to breathe the result an obstacle.

A public hearing is not a machine-breaking riot. It is a room full of tired citizens asking stupidly reasonable questions. How much pollution? How much water? What happens when the generators run? Why here? Who gets paid? Why did nobody tell us?

The answers may be ugly. The company may still get its permit. The data center may still rise out of the weeds like a casino for equations.

But at least the lie has to stand under fluorescent lights and answer for itself.

That is what they are trying to avoid: not delay, exactly, but witnesses.

The machine age has brought us many miracles. It can make a fake voice call your mother. It can turn the work of a lifetime into training material before breakfast. It can write a memo explaining why the plant beside your house is a net benefit to the community, provided no one in the community gets to speak before the memo is filed.

I do not want to romanticize the old mailbag. It held plenty of junk. Coupons. threats. lies printed on glossy paper. But it had one virtue: somebody had to put the thing in your hand.

Now they want the notice to remain in the building where it was written, clean and unopened, while outside the ground is marked with stakes.

You will know something is coming when the trucks begin arriving before dawn.

By then, apparently, the mail has already been delivered.

Source: Trump’s EPA wants to let data centers hide their air pollution