Week 25 Dispatch
06/22/26 - 06/28/26
The Open
A neighbor lost it on Nextdoor this week. All caps: "OUR WORST NIGHTMARE: DATA CENTERS," followed by a warning about astronomical water use and noise loud enough to wreck a home.
Sincere, a little unhinged, not anywhere near us, but not wrong. That same morning, Apple quietly raised the price of a MacBook and blamed a memory shortage caused by the exact data centers my neighbor was yelling about. Neither noticed the other. It's the same story.
For two years we argued about AI in the abstract. Would it take the jobs, pass the bar, want to be our friend, or our god [more on this soon]?
This was the week it stopped being a thought experiment and became a number on a receipt. In five days it showed up at the checkout line, in the backyard, and on the ballot. Which is to say it became real.
Anyway. Noise in. Here's what cleared.
Before the jump
Wendell Berry, "Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer" (Harper's, 1987). The Kentucky farmer-poet set his test for any new tool: cheaper, smaller, less energy-hungry, fixable close to home, and it must not "disrupt anything good that already exists."
The AI buildout fails that test on contact. He called blind faith in the machine "technological fundamentalism" almost forty years before your neighbor started screaming about it on Nextdoor. Or also in my case, people talking about it nonstop at non-work events. Nearly every single social outing now feels like a work function, but that's my problem, not yours.
Four pages that will outlast the cycle, it suddenly fits.
Sonic companion
Grandaddy, "Jed the Humanoid" (Spotify). A lo-fi ballad about a homemade robot everyone builds, gets bored of, and forgets, until he drinks himself to death from loneliness. Sigh.
Word of the Week
Jevons paradox (n.) — when a resource becomes more efficient to use, we don't use less of it, we use far more. Coal in 1865, compute in 2026. Every efficiency gain in AI was supposed to make it cheaper and lighter, and instead, it made the whole world want more, which is how "efficient" models ended up draining reservoirs and re-pricing your laptop.
This Week's Memo
Your AI Strategy is Betting on a Burnt-Out Layer
The Roundup
// Power. A June Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57% of Americans are opposed to a data center near them, while 14% are comfortable with one. The backlash went bipartisan, and it's starting to cost incumbents their seats. The compute has to live somewhere, and somewhere is voting. But NIMBY and everything. → cost me the election
// Politics. All three House candidates Mayor Mamdani backed won their New York primaries Tuesday, stretching the democratic-socialist bench toward Washington. The buried detail: AI-industry super PACs spent tens of millions trying to stop them. The machines have a campaign budget now. They always did in a way, but they still do, and now you know. → a new kind of politics
// Money. Apple raised Mac and iPad prices by up to a third on Thursday, and Microsoft hiked the Xbox the same day, both pointing at the AI data centers vacuuming up the world's memory chips. We spent two years afraid AI would take the job. The first broad hit landed on the receipt instead. → the consumer tax on the buildout
// Culture. GTA VI pre-orders opened this week at $80, or $100 for the Ultimate, and the "physical" copy is a code in a box with no disc inside. The biggest entertainment launch in history, and you're not buying a game so much as renting one you can't resell, lend, or hold. A few retailers refused to stock an empty case on principle. → "whats in the box!?"
// AI. Here's the tension nobody's pricing while your laptop reprices: the big four will spend a combined $725B building AI this year, per FT-compiled earnings, up 77%, and Microsoft says $25B of its share is just the same memory chips that bumped your Mac. Meanwhile, MIT's most-cited study still finds that 95% of corporate AI pilots show zero measurable return. The costs are here. The payoff is still a maybe. → 95% and counting
// Sports. The US won Group D and still found a way to lose, dropping a 3-2 to an already-eliminated Turkey, or Türkiye, on a 98th-minute goal. First in the table, may this serve as a wake-up call. The knockout round won't forgive that defense. FITFO. → first in the group, last to the ball
Find your signal.
— BG
