Finding the power to fuel our connected world

My ability to write this column is directly related to the subject of this week’s cover story. Why? Because I’m working online. I’m reading a digital copy of what staff writer Stephanie Hanes filed to her editors. I’m searching the web for some background here, a fact there. I map the location of a neighborhood Stephanie visited in seconds. All the while, I’m sitting at my desk, connected, like all of you, to an enormous world that is impossibly close at hand.

It would be easy enough to think that an ethereal “cloud” makes this possible. But of course, it doesn’t. I, and you, are tethered as we work to massive concrete warehouses that form, as Stephanie elegantly puts it, “the physical backbone of our digital lives.” For many people, these structures are as invisible as the internet itself. But that is changing: Fueled by our work demands and lifestyles, they’re multiplying at astonishing rates, gobbling up land.

And that’s why this is a story about all of us. We’re all likely to feel and see their impact eventually, directly or indirectly.

So I hope you’ll take a trip with Stephanie and photographer Riley Robinson this week to Carroll County, Maryland. It’s where Stephanie’s grandparents had a farm, and it’s a powerful spot for telling this story. The area is bracing itself as our voracious and borderless appetite for more processing power and more electricity encroaches. Riley’s affecting photos – from rolling farmland to data centers that loom over suburban backyards – underscore the rapidly shifting reality.

Travel with them, as well, to northern Virginia’s “Data Center Alley.” Loudoun County, a generous hour’s drive south, hasn’t seen a single day in 14 years in which a data center was not under construction, Stephanie reports. That’s a lot of very visible infrastructure. In fact, Virginia has the highest concentration of data centers in the world, something that is brought home to me each time I, a new resident of the state, navigate a gauntlet of the windowless, cookie-cutter centers that border some of the roads leading to my relatively exurban town. They’re a source of mounting local concern and activism.

For more and more people, the issue is not a lack of realism about what it takes to sustain our highly connected world. Rather, the question that rises to the top is this: Is a no-holds-barred construction mentality that is rapidly and irrevocably changing the essential fabric of our lives really the only way forward?

You and I are part of that consequential discussion, each time we text or pop open our laptop or scroll on our phone. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve ever seen a data center or thought much about the infrastructure of our online lives. As Stephanie writes, these “controversies ... are not just about energy and industry. They are about what we decide is progress, and how we imagine our future.”

This column first appeared in the March 24, 2025, issue of The Christian Science Monitor Weekly. Subscribe today to receive future issues of the Monitor Weekly magazine delivered to your home.