For decades, small-town America’s biggest exports were potatoes, boredom, and ambitious kids who couldn’t wait to leave. Then the machines came.
In Umatilla, Oregon — a dusty town once known for its prison and chemical weapons depot — Amazon arrived with a server farm the size of an airport. The locals called it “Area 51.” Overnight, the strip clubs gave way to strip malls, and the daughter of Mexican farmhands became a real estate star, selling homes to out-of-town contractors and coders.
As The Wall Street Journal noted, “a growing fleet of Amazon data centers has turned the region around Umatilla into an unlikely nerve center for one of the most expensive infrastructure build-outs in US history.” The change was immediate: home prices doubled, restaurants filled up, and the city’s budget ballooned from millions to hundreds of millions.
For a while, the American dream ran on fibre-optic cables and free Wi-Fi. The tech boom that once skipped over rural America had finally arrived — only it didn’t bring startups or entrepreneurs. It brought windowless concrete fortresses, endless server racks, and the hum of machines that never sleep. Data became the new crop, and for a brief, shining moment, the harvest seemed infinite.
But like every boom, it came with a question no one wanted to ask: what happens when the building stops?
Zoom Out
To understand the answer, you have to zoom out — from Umatilla’s hillsides to the glass towers of Silicon Valley, where the AI boom was born not from invention but exhaustion. Big Tech had run out of new frontiers. The social media bubble had burst, the metaverse had become a meme, and streaming was bleeding money. So, like any good conjurer, the Valley found a new story to sell: artificial intelligence.
AI became the miracle narrative for Wall Street’s imagination — a trillion-dollar dream that machines would think, talk, and save capitalism from boredom. But behind the hype and the demos, the numbers don’t work.
Every large model — from ChatGPT to Gemini — costs billions to train, thousands of high-end chips to run, and enough electricity to power a city. Each new version burns more cash than the last. Unlike the internet or smartphones, these systems don’t get cheaper with scale; they just get hungrier.
The Dogshit Economics of AI
Cory Doctorow, the writer and tech dissident who coined “enshittification,” calls it what it is: “dogshit unit economics.” Microsoft “invests” in OpenAI by letting it use its servers for free. OpenAI records that as income. Microsoft counts it as revenue. Nvidia “funds” data centres that instantly spend that same money buying Nvidia chips. It’s the same dollar passed around in different costumes, each time declared as growth. It’s not innovation — it’s accounting cosplay. The AI boom is a financial ouroboros, swallowing itself while calling it progress.
The Asbestos Economy
Meanwhile, the fantasy trickles down. Companies fire employees because AI will “replace” them, even though it can barely write an email without hallucinating. Small towns bulldoze farmland to build data centres that offer only a handful of permanent jobs. Governments subsidise electricity for machines that mostly generate heat and hype. Doctorow compares AI to asbestos — a miracle material we’re stuffing into the foundations of civilisation because it seems useful right now, only for future generations to dig it out at ruinous cost.
From Boomtown to Bustville
Back in Umatilla, the new prosperity feels brittle. The construction workers are thinning out. The housing costs have outrun local wages. And the townspeople who once toasted their luck are quietly wondering whether the servers humming in the hills will keep humming forever. They probably won’t. The AI boom is starting to look like a Potemkin village built on borrowed chips and borrowed confidence. The money flowing into small-town America isn’t new wealth — it’s the echo of speculative capital looking for the next high. When it bursts, the glow of those server racks will dim, and the silence that follows will sound like déjà vu — another great American boom that ended where it began: in belief.
The Punchline
The apocalypse won’t come from sentient machines plotting humanity’s demise. It’ll come from spreadsheets imploding under the weight of their own optimism. Silicon Valley sold small-town America the dream of a digital future. What it delivered was a Ponzi scheme in a hard hat — the illusion of progress built on the oldest American instinct of all: to get rich before the lights go out.
In Umatilla, Oregon — a dusty town once known for its prison and chemical weapons depot — Amazon arrived with a server farm the size of an airport. The locals called it “Area 51.” Overnight, the strip clubs gave way to strip malls, and the daughter of Mexican farmhands became a real estate star, selling homes to out-of-town contractors and coders.
As The Wall Street Journal noted, “a growing fleet of Amazon data centers has turned the region around Umatilla into an unlikely nerve center for one of the most expensive infrastructure build-outs in US history.” The change was immediate: home prices doubled, restaurants filled up, and the city’s budget ballooned from millions to hundreds of millions.
For a while, the American dream ran on fibre-optic cables and free Wi-Fi. The tech boom that once skipped over rural America had finally arrived — only it didn’t bring startups or entrepreneurs. It brought windowless concrete fortresses, endless server racks, and the hum of machines that never sleep. Data became the new crop, and for a brief, shining moment, the harvest seemed infinite.
But like every boom, it came with a question no one wanted to ask: what happens when the building stops?
Zoom Out
To understand the answer, you have to zoom out — from Umatilla’s hillsides to the glass towers of Silicon Valley, where the AI boom was born not from invention but exhaustion. Big Tech had run out of new frontiers. The social media bubble had burst, the metaverse had become a meme, and streaming was bleeding money. So, like any good conjurer, the Valley found a new story to sell: artificial intelligence.
AI became the miracle narrative for Wall Street’s imagination — a trillion-dollar dream that machines would think, talk, and save capitalism from boredom. But behind the hype and the demos, the numbers don’t work.
Every large model — from ChatGPT to Gemini — costs billions to train, thousands of high-end chips to run, and enough electricity to power a city. Each new version burns more cash than the last. Unlike the internet or smartphones, these systems don’t get cheaper with scale; they just get hungrier.
The Dogshit Economics of AI
Cory Doctorow, the writer and tech dissident who coined “enshittification,” calls it what it is: “dogshit unit economics.” Microsoft “invests” in OpenAI by letting it use its servers for free. OpenAI records that as income. Microsoft counts it as revenue. Nvidia “funds” data centres that instantly spend that same money buying Nvidia chips. It’s the same dollar passed around in different costumes, each time declared as growth. It’s not innovation — it’s accounting cosplay. The AI boom is a financial ouroboros, swallowing itself while calling it progress.
The Asbestos Economy
Meanwhile, the fantasy trickles down. Companies fire employees because AI will “replace” them, even though it can barely write an email without hallucinating. Small towns bulldoze farmland to build data centres that offer only a handful of permanent jobs. Governments subsidise electricity for machines that mostly generate heat and hype. Doctorow compares AI to asbestos — a miracle material we’re stuffing into the foundations of civilisation because it seems useful right now, only for future generations to dig it out at ruinous cost.
From Boomtown to Bustville
Back in Umatilla, the new prosperity feels brittle. The construction workers are thinning out. The housing costs have outrun local wages. And the townspeople who once toasted their luck are quietly wondering whether the servers humming in the hills will keep humming forever. They probably won’t. The AI boom is starting to look like a Potemkin village built on borrowed chips and borrowed confidence. The money flowing into small-town America isn’t new wealth — it’s the echo of speculative capital looking for the next high. When it bursts, the glow of those server racks will dim, and the silence that follows will sound like déjà vu — another great American boom that ended where it began: in belief.
The Punchline
The apocalypse won’t come from sentient machines plotting humanity’s demise. It’ll come from spreadsheets imploding under the weight of their own optimism. Silicon Valley sold small-town America the dream of a digital future. What it delivered was a Ponzi scheme in a hard hat — the illusion of progress built on the oldest American instinct of all: to get rich before the lights go out.
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