The Internet Is Not Benevolent
This writing is inspired by a recent culmination of events, some important articles and an astrology reading; a few poignant reminders that this very sentence is not my own.
Is all that we write, ideate and pontificate in this great stage of perceived creativity is dutifully serving a few funnels of concentration atop a grander orchestration?
My algorithm is not your algorithm but both of them serve the same gods: Convenience, Consumption and Capitalism.
The convenience of not having to look too far to fill our needs.
Of clicking and receiving without the strain of thinking.
Consumption of content, of people, clothes, ideas, crocs, trad wives, doom and whatever else the internet dutifully feeds into our tailored and exacting algorithm.
Are these products of us, or is it us as the product?
Do we not see the boat if we are in it, in enough to rock it, to raise up the white flag? While we believe ourselves creators, unique contributors, are we the feeding pens for the most nimble, subverse and integrated forms of extraction; algorithms and AI?
And, if I’m honest, it’s not AI’s game, I perceive it’s a game of control being orchestrated behind closed doors, maybe even in bunkers, by a small crew of humans who deeply fear their own projections of humanity itself.
A question I keep asking: Can we see beyond a system when we are within it?
Just what IS the magnitude of the internet’s strong-hold and what if it no longer held us?
Have we noticed that when we search for something on a search engine, we no longer see suggested (or even paid) links or companies or articles to select from — but instead simply a confidently concise answer via AI (which we didn’t consent to)?
Statistically, we are not questioning those answers. Often times, I hear, that these answers are also incorrect.
How do we use discernment to trust what we are being served?
How do we find small businesses and interesting people and water healers if AI simply satiates our curiosity without question?
Below are excerpts from a guest essay in The Elysian by lou millar-machugh (they/he) titled “the hidden labour of the internet” for Internet Sovereignty, nine writers exploring the future of the internet. Collect the complete pamphlet as a digital or print edition.
The internet is not magical
Most people’s everyday experience of the internet is that of a mystic force attributed mainly to the work of a select few tech oligarchs.
The experience of the internet as a mystic force is a design choice, subtly ingrained in the collective subconscious through the concept of “Seamless Design.” This philosophy is the guiding force behind most modern interface design, and it teaches that the “seams” of our digital experiences ought to be invisible, nominally to create a more “intuitive” user experience.
But by making the seams of the digital expertise invisible, you also make the people behind it invisible. Seamless Design may make it easier to post a quick snap of your family dinner—but it does not make it easier to exist in and create a more equal society.
TikTok’s estimated 2022 revenue was $9.4B, yet the average creator earns less than minimum wage per hour invested. The “creator fund” is notoriously opaque, and it’s very unclear how creators are actually compensated. The messy editing process, the hours that go into each video, not to mention the content moderators, the infrastructure workers, and the software engineers, are all invisible. The like, comment, and share buttons are designed to give us a rush of social validation without giving us time to pause and notice — or question — anything else, or anyone else but ourselves and the person we see on our screens.
Meanwhile, we toil away, splattering our hearts, our ideas, our brilliant takes on these keyboards and screens thinking that maybe one day the algorithm might hit in our favor.
Maybe something will strike a chord, maybe I’ll inspire enough to make a living wage, maybe creating, caring and pouring it all out there will result in sufficiency.
Maybe the internet will work in our favor?
The internet, as it stands, is an illusory experience of authenticity, when it comes to our sovereignty. It appears we are running the experience, but is the experience running us? Are we pouring our hearts — and our art — into a vacuum of cunningly contrived and calculated extraction?
And this is just the extraction of our words, our hearts, our care, our creativity - not considering our basic needs.
This next article is about data centers, the motherboards of AI, by Tatjana Washington, a PhD candidate in the Evolutionary Biology department at the University of Chicago. The BIG extraction which is awakening us, in a bipartisan manner, to the magnitude of our sacred waters’ importance - and the essential nature of protecting our sense of place, our land, our air.
Data Centers, Pollution, and the Communities Left Behind
Imagine waking up to the sharp smell of diesel exhaust drifting through your window while you watch your community’s river run low but not from drought, but from the massive water demands of nearby data centers. It sounds dystopian, yet this is the daily reality unfolding in suburbs and rural towns across the United States.
Data centers have long relied on freshwater for cooling, but the AI boom has escalated that demand. In 2025, data centers consumed hundreds of billions of gallons of water for cooling and power generation. Developers are now tapping local rivers, aquifers, and municipal supplies at unprecedented rates to satisfy the thirst of data centers, putting the communities that host them at risk. Data center operations still rely heavily on fossil fuels, emitting air pollutants and fine particulates that raise serious public health risks, especially asthma. Meanwhile, chemical runoff from cooling systems contaminates soil and waterways.
These facilities create real environmental challenges and are too often sited and strategically chosen in already vulnerable places. As AI demand surges, the need for more facilities will only grow.
Case Studies: Three Data Centers and the Pollution Protests They Sparked
Protests, town hall shouting matches, lawsuits, and petitions are now routine responses to new data-center projects. Communities simply do not want these facilities in their backyards because of the pollution burden they bring. The three examples highlighted below (from the South, the West Coast, and the Midwest), show the distinct harms of these facilities in overburdened, vulnerable, neighborhoods with a high percentage of People of Color. Together, they show how data center expansion repeatedly reproduces environmental injustice.
Amazon’s Canton Facility, Mississippi (Operational Since Late 2025)
In Canton, a majority Black town long marked by underinvestment, Amazon opened a $10 billion AI data center that promised 1,000 jobs. Yet within months, residents began reporting lung irritation, breathing difficulties, and construction dust that settled over homes and playgrounds. Cooling towers pull millions of gallons of water daily from the already-stressed Big Black River system, while weekly tests of backup diesel generators spike local NOx levels and worsen the area’s elevated childhood asthma rates. “We were promised prosperity, but got poisoned air and vanishing water,” said local activist Maria Gonzalez. Community outrage led to a class-action lawsuit filed in February 2026 alleging Clean Water Act violations; expansions have been halted pending independent audits.
Monterey Park Data Center, California (Halted Construction, February 2026)
Near Los Angeles, residents protested a proposed 1.2-million-square-foot hyperscale facility by EdgeCore. This facility had the potential to increase fine particulate exposure and cancer risks, according to local modeling. California’s chronic water scarcity made the projected 500 million gallons of annual demand especially alarming for the already over abused and used San Gabriel Valley aquifers. E-waste estimates added another layer: the site could generate thousands of tons of obsolete servers every few years, raising fears of lead and mercury leaching into landfills. After more than 3,000 petition signatures and powerful testimony from farmworkers about crop-damaging runoff, the city council revoked permits in February 2026 and halted the expansion “This isn’t innovation; it’s environmental colonialism on our doorstep,” declared the lead organizer Mei Lin with the No Data Center Monterey Park coalition.
Stargate Project, Saline Township, Michigan (Permitted 2025, Ongoing Delays into 2026)
South of Ann Arbor, the $7 billion Stargate venture, a product of OpenAI and Oracle, promised a tech renaissance when it gained approval in fall 2025. Instead, it targeted and capitalized on a regulatory loophole that would allow unchecked emissions from natural gas turbines, potentially adding 1.5 million tons of CO₂ per year. Water withdrawals of roughly 1.8 billion gallons annually from the Huron River basin threaten wetlands and riparian ecosystems. In January 2026, more than 200 residents stormed township meetings, successfully delaying Phase II until stricter emissions caps are enforced. “Our soil’s turning toxic, our river’s running dry—all for someone else’s cloud storage,” said resident Kathryn Haushalter.
These battles reveal a clear pattern of environmental injustice: pollution hotspots cluster in overburdened communities where the promise of jobs and economic prosperity rarely offsets the loss of clean air, clean water, and peace of mind.
Mitigation Strategies in the Queue for 2026
After years of petitions and protests, developers are finally incorporating more sustainable designs, even though critics question whether these measures are sufficient enough. In Virginia, Dominion Energy’s planned 25 gigawatts of solar and wind by 2035 will help power new facilities with far lower fossil-fuel dependence and water use through advanced air-cooled systems that recycle 95 % of vapor. Microsoft’s Chicago’s development, rolling out in phases from mid-2026, is piloting immersion cooling and other efficiencies projected to cut chemical runoff by 30 %. Similar innovations (i.e closed loop cooling, on-site renewables), are appearing in projects nationwide. These innovations could begin to ease the disastrous environmental issues associated with data centers.
Conclusion
Data centers advance us into an intelligent future, yet their pollution footprint is causing real, measurable harm to millions of people and places. As both a student and a resident of a city already negotiating its own energy future, I believe we can, and must, do better. True progress will require transparent water accounting, binding emissions limits, equitable siting policies, and the political will to prioritize people over unchecked expansion.
While data centers are currently bringing massive bipartisan opposition and unification of the people, there are now millions (if not billions) of dollars being invested in campaigns and politicians with the intention to block local level legislation from interfering with data center creation + production. Still, local people are rising up in opposition to these inequities to give voice to the voiceless: their local water, air and ecosystems, while the threat of environmental degradation continues.
Data centers exist to fuel the expansion of AI, which is entirely built on the culmination of acquired human wisdom, including the post I am typing now.
Simultaneously, AI is predicted to take a large chunk of our economy’s jobs by only 2030. Sam Altman, CEO of ChatGPT, suggested a universal living wage and a number of other pretty pro-social ideas, as a safety net for the trauma in which mass lay-offs might cause.
Ironically, with the prediction of AI taking a majority of human beings’ jobs, that leaves those same companies without a huge swath of paying consumers, rendering the action of replacement meaningless, if there is no consumer to fill the demand pool and buy their wares.
In such a case, could it be that AI is actually how capitalism eats itself?
So — what can we do?
We can take back our sovereignty — our time, attention, existence, presence, love, hearts, bank accounts — and maybe most importantly, our imaginations.
Are we the consumers or are we the ones being consumed?
In Alcoholics Anonymous’ lauded 12-step program, which calibrates extremely high on David Hawkins’ scale of consciousness, the very first step is about Awareness. Awareness that something has become unmanageable:
We admitted we were powerless over the substance or behavior – that our lives had become unmanageable.
Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.
Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.
Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.
Admitted to God, to ourselves, and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs.
We were entirely ready to have God remove all those defects of character.
Humbly asked Him to remove our shortcomings.
Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
Made direct amends to such people wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others.
Continued to take personal inventory, and when we were wrong, promptly admitted it.
Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry that out.
Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these Steps, we tried to carry this message to others and to practice these principles in all our affairs.
Another reason AA is so very successful is that it cultivates a sense of deeper meaning — of something greater, of responsibility, of accountability.
Maybe we don’t think we are addicted - or maybe we don’t see the addiction as unmanageable. Maybe we can’t feel the addiction.
I type this as my kid is consuming Youtube on the couch, the first thing he wants to do when he gets home. He gets a parent-sanctioned, limited amount of time, but the dopamine hit is very real.
There is no flaw in the design, similar to the intention of the origins of the labor pool — keep wages low enough that labor was forced in order for survival — keep the hit subliminal enough not to notice the behavior change, the repetition, the algorithm.
Yet, all is not destined to the confinements of our existence within our own prescribed algorithm.
There are imaginative, soulful experiences, communities and alternative internet spaces popping up which intend for reclamation of our sovereignty, our time, our hearts. The Viridescent Community, Wisdom Workshop, Vision Train, Emunah, Design School for Regenerating Earth, RegenIntel, Re:Biz, Evolve and The Blueprint Within are all places which are intending collective care and community. Come one, come all.
Futher, third spaces like Metalabel and DFOS intend for individuals and communities to own their internet-spawned creativity with full sovereignty. Are you seeing internet alternatives popping up in your Awareness or spheres of influence?
Three prevalent fears of human beings are:
1. death 2. guilt 3. meaninglessness.
Why have we been taught to have such a dominating fear of death?
What parts of our society are designed to make us feel guilt? (Recall my recent post on Grief, Rest & Pleasure?)
What parts of our lives give us true meaning?
Are we aware of our existence within a system?
And, by proxy, are we the system? Yes, of course, me too, by way of this very post, by my existence in this moment, by succumbing to the cuts of fear + scarcity.
Are we asking questions of ourselves — and genuinely listening for the answers?
As Arkan Lushwala says, “Thinking is Listening.”
On this Mother’s Day Weekend, may we ask of Mother Earth what she needs — and give the time and space to truly hear her.
Feet on the earth, hand on the heart wishes,
Marley
P.S.
Join us for the VIRIDESCENT Rewilding Retreat in the backcountry of Montana, October 1-5th, 2026!
AND/OR
Book a virtual water healing for a mother/mother lover you know. We work together to shed expired energies and make space for more self-love and nourishment. I have conducted 12 water healings over the past month to amazing results and beautiful testimonials. You’ve got to believe in it to experience it. Such is life.
