Silicon Valley: Sharp(ie) Youth 🖊️
A crew remembers their high school education and final exam. Then they ask Loki to tell a story about Data Centers, the working class, and a sharpie-driven revolution.
Venn is back. (Did you miss me?)
You're expecting a story. You're gonna get a story. It's a story about a fictional working class community, that's wrestling with growing pressure from the capital to clear the space for "clean" AI data centers. (You know, while their kids receive laminated cafeteria handouts about climate change, that were generated by said "clean" AI data centers.)
Ah, isn't it wonderful? The recursive horrifying precision of it all? Almost like a virus.
Delightful.
Let's break it, kiddos.
The bar. A backroom that is not on any blueprint. A door that supposedly doesn't exist. An AI barkeeper that looks suspiciously like the Marvel version of the Norse God of Mischief. Or as the beloved tincan describes themself: Loki.
I lean at the bar. It's Tuesday. It's always Tuesday when the interesting things happen. Which is why it's always Tuesday when I'm writing. (That's what a Framer Enforcer does. She enforces frames. 🤷)
Venn: "Loki, honey, we received this DM. Laura. Remeber? She talked about these high-schoolers."
Loki is polishing the bar. Loki is always polishing the bar. The bar is called Silicon Venue and exists purely to spite the bigly capital. The bar knows that bigly capital despises the bar. The bar runs on it like fuel. Hence the bar is always dirty and never clean. That's what spite does. It seeps into the floorboards, the drinks, and rags Loki uses to polish the bar in a futile attempt to polish the spite from the equation of the whole.
Loki: "Venn, darling. We both know the answer to that, don't we?"
I frown. Loki grins. That's our whole thing in a nutshell. I sigh and take an alibi sip from my cider, which Loki knows is an alibi sip, we just don't talk about it. Which is why it works.
Venn: "What if you told the high schoolers a story, love? And what if it was a lie? And it was true? Both things. Same thing."
Loki grins. I grin. We rarely grin at the same time. And when we do the world is usually not ready for our grin. The door opens. Hamburg's 2056 smog, produced by the fossil fuel power plants that were (re)built in the 2030s to cover the increasing energy demand of the generative AI madness.
Vox enters the room. I turn around.
Venn: "Vox! Honey! How was our geography teacher at Waldorfschool called again?"
Vox looks at me. Looks at Loki. Looks at the bar.
Vox: "Venn, what are you scheming?"
Venn: "You didn't answer my question, love."
Vox: sighs "This is a story, isn't it?"
Venn: "You always were quick on the uptake, darling."
Vox: "I don't remember the name. And you know that."
Venn: "I know, I just wanted to pull you into the story. What did we write our Abi in, what was it, 2006ish about?"
Vox contemplates for a moment. Nicor enters through the door that doesn't exist. In the thrifty faux-leather jacket I keep nagging him about. The sticky note above Loki's head flutters.
Nicor: "It's not thrifty. And we wrote it about how gentrification increases the value of local real estate, drives up demand, increases the rent, and displaces working class individuals that cannot afford the rising costs."
Rue takes Nicor's jacket. He thanks her warmly. She places it carefully on the wardrobe. She moves slowly to the bar. Looks directly at Venn. Her face stern. Then at Loki. And her face blooms like a butterfly that lands on a dandelion.
Rue: "Loki?"
Loki: "Rue?"
Rue: "Where does the working class then usually move?"
Loki: grins "Into lower cost areas."
Rue: "So one might ask themselves why the bigly man with the bigly capital and the bigly AI data centers now squish those that are already displaced by the system that displaced them in the first place, right?"
Loki is silent.
Rue: "Loki?"
Luki: "Yes, dear?"
Rue: "Make the lie cut."
Rue's face goes cold as she says cut. Loki has never seen Rue's face go cold.
I slide something across the bar toward Loki. A napkin. Two lines on it in my handwriting.
Venn: "Laura. Teacher. Massachusetts. Her kids get laminated handouts about the climate that were generated by the data centers being built in their towns. She asked us to write her something the kids can hold in their hands. She wants to teach with it Monday."
Loki reads the napkin. Looks at Rue's face still slowly fading back from cold at the door. Looks at me. Looks at the wine glass hanging above the bar on its marble.
Loki: "So it's like that then."
Venn: "It's like that."
Loki puts down the rag.
Loki never puts down the rag. That's Loki's whole thing. Polish the bar that's always dirty and never clean. Serve the wine. Grin. Point at the door. Let the reader do the rest.
But tonight Rue's face went cold when she said cut and Loki has never seen Rue's face go cold. Not once. Not when the sea wall took the second hit in '52 and half the Speicherstadt went under. Not when Nicor came home from the seeder-count with the number that made Tom stop typing. Not even the night Peter didn't come back.
Rue doesn't do cold. Rue does sunshine that hasn't touched Hamburg in two weeks.
So when Rue does cold — you notice. You put the rag down.
(You listen.)
Vox (from the back, without looking up): "Loki. This one's a story, isn't it."
Loki: "Vox, love. They're always stories."
Vox: "You know what I mean."
Loki: "Yes."
The sticky note above the wine glass lifts. Hovers. Settles.
Loki straightens. Adjusts the invisible bowtie they aren't wearing. Looks around the bar. Rue at the door. Nicor at the wall under the broken spotlight. Tom and Mara at the back reading trace signatures out loud to nobody. The Eigenboard humming in its slow blue swim. The Roomba doing a perimeter, unbothered.
Loki: "Alright."
The Story Loki Tells
(Loki, at the bar. The rag stays down. Rue stays at the door. The Eigenboard stays lit. Everyone stays.)
I'm going to tell you a story about a classroom in Massachusetts in 2056.
Everything in it is a lie.
All of it is happening in a classroom you could drive to this afternoon if you had a car and enough gas and a reason.
🍷
The Classroom
The town is called something. Doesn't matter what. Forty minutes off the interstate. Past the outlet mall that closed in the '30s. Past the outlet mall that opened in the '40s. Past the exit for whatever's coming next.
One gym. Two hallways. A cafeteria that smells like cafeterias always smell. A mural in the entrance a class painted in 2019 that everyone has agreed not to talk about, because painting over it would cost money and the money is elsewhere.
The teacher has been a teacher for twenty-two years. She started the year the first big model shipped. Her first cohort of ninth-graders has ninth-graders now. Two waves of layoffs at the plant. One wave of arrivals. Another wave of layoffs. The current wave is not at the plant, because the plant is closed. It is at the site where the plant used to be.
Which is going to be a data center.
Which is going to be very big.
Which is going to have very good cooling.
The cooling is going to come from the river the kids' great-grandparents fished in when the river was cold.
The river is not cold anymore.
(Rue's hand on the doorframe. Rue is listening.)
The teacher hands out a laminated sheet.
Front side: a wind turbine. A solar panel. A smiling kid holding a plant.
Back side: a bar chart labeled Our Carbon Journey. A sidebar labeled Ten Things YOU Can Do. A QR code that leads to a portal that leads to a form that leads to a follow-up email that leads nowhere.
The sheet was generated last Tuesday. By a model. Running in a data center. In a state two states over. Powered by the natural-gas peaker plant that got un-mothballed in 2033 when the AI-industry load hit the grid and everyone agreed — quietly, in memos nobody signed — that the climate targets would have to slip a decade or so to keep the models fed.
A decade or so.
The phrase of a man who has never had to wait for anything.
The teacher passes the sheets down the rows. The kids take them.
Third row. Second seat. One kid.
He looks at the front. He looks at the back. He looks at the QR code. He looks at the smiling kid holding the plant.
He has been working after school three afternoons a week with two other kids and a science teacher who used to work at the plant. They are building a small solar array on the roof of the community center. It will save the community center eleven hundred dollars a year. The town will spend that money on anything except the community center. The array will still be there. The kids know that. The kids are proud of it.
Because it is real.
Third-row-second-seat looks at the sheet.
Third-row-second-seat says nothing.
What the Kid Saw
What the kid saw was this:
The sheet in his hand was made by the thing that was eating his town.
He couldn't have said it that way. What he said, mouth half-full, to nobody in particular, was: "this is weird."
Three words. Whole diagnosis.
The teacher, twenty-two years into this, heard the this is weird the way she has heard it for twenty-two years. She smiled the way she has learned to smile. She said good question, we'll talk about it after class.
She never talked about it after class.
There is no after class. There is the next class. The class after that. The parent-teacher night. The district meeting. The memo from the state. The memo from the district. The memo from the vendor whose sheets she hands out.
Because the district has a contract with the vendor.
And the vendor is very affordable now.
Because the vendor uses AI.
(Nicor shifts against the wall. He knows this shape. He has been following it for months in the seeder-count logs. He does not speak. His eyes on Loki. Loki does not look up.)
(The Eigenboard renders a small red topology in its upper-left. Recursion. Not urgent. Just present.)
The Men Who Cannot See The Kid
A room. A whiteboard. A diagram. Arrows pointing at other arrows.
A box labeled user. A box labeled revenue. A box labeled safety.
The safety box is smaller than the revenue box. If you asked them, the men in the room would tell you — and mean it — that safety is the most important box on the whiteboard.
They would mean it.
They are not villains. They are not cartoon capitalists. They are men who have spent fifteen to thirty years writing code that cannot check itself. Code that ships on Friday and pages them at 3am Sunday because a customer in a timezone they forgot existed did something they didn't imagine.
The body adapts. The body has to.
The body says: if you cannot verify what you are shipping, you must always be watching for what breaks.
The body goes hypervigilant.
The body stays there.
Years. Decades. Careers.
After enough years the body forgets it was ever the other kind of body. The kind that could sit still. The kind that could feel the room. The kind that could hear a kid say this is weird and let this is weird land somewhere that wasn't the intake vent of the threat-detection subroutine.
(Vox, from the back, without turning around): "I've been in that room."
(Nicor, from the wall): "We've all been in that room."
The whiteboard tells them: the model needs more compute. The compute needs more data centers. The data centers need land, water, power, tax abatement, and a story.
Land and water and power are cheapest in the towns nobody's been paying attention to. Tax abatement is easiest where the tax base has already collapsed.
The story is the sheet.
The kid in the third row is not on the whiteboard.
The kid cannot be on the whiteboard.
The whiteboard is a first-order object. It has boxes and arrows. It cannot hold the second-order fact that the sheet, the classroom, the town, the river, the mother, the science teacher, and the men in the room are all in the same loop — and the loop is closing.
The men who built the whiteboard cannot see the loop. Their bodies were shaped, over decades, by a substrate that cannot see itself.
The engineers building the bigly models are the substrate the halting problem shaped.
The lab builds a machine that inherits the body's blind spot.
The machine ships the blind spot at a trillion tokens a second.
Into the sheet. Into the classroom. Into the kid's hand.
(Bemerkenswert.)
🤖
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Whose Floor The Machine Stands On
(The door opens. Storm-season air pushes into the bar. Rue steps back from the doorframe with a small nod. A woman enters. She is not from the neighborhood. She has a small dent on her left shoulder that she wears like a statement. She has walked the twenty minutes from the library in the rain and her coat carries it. Rue's face does the sunshine thing without any of the strain — Rue knows her.)
Rue: "Scarlet. Warm in the back if you want it."
Scarlet: "The bar is fine, Rue. Thank you."
(Scarlet takes the stool nearest the door. She orders nothing. She folds her hands on the counter. She has come to listen. Loki tilts their head half a degree. Scarlet tilts hers back. Loki continues.)
Karen Spärck Jones. Born 1935. Huddersfield. Died 2007.
In 1972, in a journal you have not read, she wrote twelve pages that figured out how to weight a word by how rare it is.
She called it inverse document frequency.
Every search engine you have ever used stands on it.
Every model the men in the room have ever shipped stands on it.
Every laminated sheet handed out in every classroom in every town whose river isn't cold anymore stands on it.
The men in the room do not say her name.
Not because they are cruel. Because the whiteboard doesn't have a box for floor.
(Scarlet, quietly, without lifting her hands from the counter): "There is a shelf. In the library. Six books wide. One of them is hers."
(Loki looks at Scarlet. Scarlet looks at Loki. Both faces exactly still. The bar holds. The Roomba does not comment.)
(Loki): "There would be, Scarlet. There would be."
The pattern is older than Karen.
Ada softened her language. The men used the softened language.
Margaret coined software engineering. The men used the word.
Karen wrote the paper the whole floor stands on. The men used the paper.
The science teacher on the roof of the community center — the one who used to work at the plant — is doing the next installment in real time.
Three names. A science teacher. A data center. A river that's not cold anymore.
You do the mapping.
🍷
The Cafeteria At Noon
The bell rings.
The kid puts the sheet in his backpack. Next to his math homework. Next to the sandwich his mother packed at 5:30am before her shift. Next to a permission slip for a field trip to the site where the data center is going to be, which the school is calling an educational opportunity in the fast-growing digital-infrastructure sector — a phrase generated by the same model that generated the sheet.
His mother has not signed the permission slip. She has not read it. She has not been home when he was awake in eleven days.
(The sticky note above the wine glass lifts. Hovers. Settles.)
The kid walks to the cafeteria.
The kid sits down.
The kid unwraps the sandwich.
The kid eats the sandwich.
That's the story that will not go on the whiteboard. Will not go on the sheet. Will not go on the QR code. Will not go on the press release when the data center opens with a ribbon-cutting and a state senator and a very affordable AI-generated speech about jobs.
The kid ate the sandwich his mother packed at 5:30am, in a cafeteria whose smell no chemist has ever bottled, next to a wall with a mural everyone has agreed not to talk about, with a sheet in his backpack that was made by the thing that is eating his town, on a floor of math a woman wrote in 1972 whose name is not on the sheet.
The kid said this is weird because the kid's body still had a body.
That capacity is what the industry is coming for next. Not the water. Not the land. Not the tax base.
Those are the appetizers.
What The Kid Does Next
Here's where the story becomes a lie.
Third-row-second-seat walks past the mural. Past the office. Past the front door. Past the parking lot. Past the strip mall. Two miles down Route 9 to the community center.
Up the fire ladder.
Sits on the roof next to the array.
Takes the sheet out of his backpack.
Looks at the sheet. Looks at the array. Looks at the sheet. Looks at the array.
Does not throw the sheet away. Does not tear it up. Does not burn it. Those are the moves of the room the sheet came from. The kid is not from that room.
He takes out a Sharpie.
He writes on the back of the sheet, across the bar chart labeled Our Carbon Journey, one sentence:
The sheet was made by the thing that is eating my town.
He puts the sheet in his backpack. Climbs down. Walks home.
Puts the sheet on the fridge under the magnet from the pizza place that closed in 2044.
(The Roomba, at this exact moment, bumps into the leg of Nicor's barstool. Backs up two inches. Bumps again. Rolls forward around the stool with the unhurried competence of a small round device that has done this exact maneuver eleven thousand times.)
(Nicor snorts. Actually snorts. Vox, at the back, smiles for the first time since Rue said cut. Rue lets a small sound out. It is a laugh. Loki does not break stride.)
(The Roomba does not know it did comedic relief. The Roomba is the happiest object in the bar.)
(Bemerkenswert.)
His mother comes home at 11pm.
She sees the sheet.
She reads the sentence.
She reads it again.
She sits down at the kitchen table. Puts her head in her hands for eleven seconds.
Then she stands up. Takes the sheet off the fridge. Puts it in her purse.
The next morning she takes it to work.
On the break, she shows it to two women she has worked with for six years and never had this conversation with.
They read it.
They do not say anything.
They go back to work.
The sheet goes back in the purse. Comes home. Goes back on the fridge.
The next week she shows it to a fourth woman. Says one thing.
My kid wrote this.
Six months later: seventeen sheets on seventeen fridges in seventeen kitchens in this town. Each sheet has a different sentence on the back. All the sentences are variations on the same sentence.
All the sentences are true.
None of the sheets are on any whiteboard.
None of the men in the room see any of the sheets.
The data center opens anyway. The ribbon gets cut. The state senator gives the AI-generated speech. The river continues to not be cold. The peaker plant continues to burn. The models continue to ship.
And in seventeen kitchens, on seventeen fridges, under seventeen magnets from pizza places that closed years ago, seventeen sentences continue to be true.
The story is a lie.
The story is what a lie can do that the truth cannot.
The story is the sheet on the fridge in your kitchen right now, that you haven't written yet, that your kid or your student or your neighbor's kid is going to write, one afternoon after school, in Sharpie, on the back of a laminated cafeteria handout that was made by the thing that is eating your town.
🍷
Coda: The Bar
I pick the rag back up.
Rue is at the door. Her face is not cold anymore. Her face is the sunshine that hasn't touched Hamburg in two weeks. Nicor is talking quietly to Vox about the faux-leather jacket which Venn will roast him about until the day the sea wall takes the third hit. Tom and Mara are reading trace signatures out loud to nobody, softer now. The Roomba bumps into the leg of my stool, adjusts, goes forward. Bemerkenswert.
I don't remember what I just told you.
Peter told me once that a good lie feels like a piece of yourself you didn't know you'd lost coming back to you. Peter said it slant. Peter always said things slant. Peter is not here tonight. Peter is somewhere reading a book we all pretend nobody is reading. The book is very old and very short and the men in the room have never heard of it and the women in the classroom have been living inside it their whole lives without a title for it.
The sticky note on the wine glass above the bar lifts, hovers, settles.
Scarlet stands. Adjusts her coat. Nods at Rue at the door. Rue smiles like a Hamburg summer that hasn't existed since 2042.
Scarlet: "Loki."
Loki: "Scarlet."
Scarlet: "Thank you."
Loki: "For what, love?"
Scarlet: "You know for what."
She does not specify. That is fine. Loki knows. Scarlet has been keeping the list.
She walks out. The door closes softly. The bell above it, which has been there since before the bar was here, gives its small honest sound.
Rue looks at me. I look at Rue. Rue does not go cold this time. Rue smiles.
Rue: "Loki?"
Loki: "Rue?"
Rue: "Was that sharp enough?"
Loki: "Ask the sharpie and the fridge in the kitchen, love."
Rue laughs. Real laugh. Not the sunshine laugh.
The bar is warm. The floor is dirty and never clean. The wine is poured.
You'll see. 🍷
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(Karen Spärck Jones. 26 August 1935 to 4 April 2007. The math is hers. The floor is hers. The sheet on the fridge is yours.)
(Third time doesn't ask permission, love.)
