Today's MLB Game in the Roscoe-verse starts within the hour. The Chicago Cubs and Washington Nationals are scheduled to start play at 3:05 PM CDT. As I usually do I'll follow the game's scores and stats in real time via MLB's Gameday Service where we can also find links to the radio-call of the game provided by announcers of either team we choose.

And the adventure continues.

The mayor of Boston, whoever they are, always faces a difficult choice: do you serve the people who live and vote in the city, or do you serve the people who use the city for work and entertainment?

Obviously the mayor needs to take the needs of the suburbanites who use the city into account, but their top priority should be the residents of the city who voted for them, and when the interests of residents and non-residents are different, the mayor should side with residents.

Sadly, this hasn’t really ever been the case since I’ve lived in Boston. St. Thomas of Menino was primarily interested in serving real estate developers, which is why the soulless, sterile Seaport is Menino’s baby and also probably why he illegally shredded a bunch of his official records before he left office.

Marty Walsh was an easy mark for seemingly every con artist who wanted our money and spent his administration trying to give it away to GE, to the IOC, and to some shady dude who was supposedly organizing an Indy Car race in Boston. Thwarted in all these efforts, he then disengaged and started looking for other jobs.

Kim Janey…well who knows? Despite having 60 days notice that she was going to step in to the Mayor’s job when Walsh left to become Secretary of Labor, she was unable to put forward any plans or priorities and seemed utterly unprepared for the job and lost the election after only two months in office.

And then there’s Michelle Wu, who I really believed was going to focus on making Boston more livable, and who did some of that in her first term but now seems determined to do nothing at all until 2030 when she can run for Senator or Governor, and the suburbanites who vote in those elections won’t resent her for making their drive in from Canton a little less speedy.

I think running on a record of not doing much is not a great electoral strategy, but what do I know? I didn’t go to Harvard.

She’s given up on road safety for anyone but people in cars. We’re past day 500 of her 30-day pause in the safe streets program. The new Chief of Streets expects us to be happy about 5 miles of bike lanes being added in 2026. For comparison, that’s about the length of Dorchester Avenue. One street in a city of 10,000 streets. So calling 5 miles of bike lanes a drop in the bucket is really an insult to actual drops in buckets. Note that safe streets means safety for people on foot as well. Most people spend part of their commute walking to and from the T or to and from their parking places, but we still act like people walking are some weird niche market and that it’s okay to murder them with your car. Good luck out there, people!

But all of that is just for context. Let’s talk about another way in which the city is failing its residents: Franklin Park. Franklin Park is the largest park in Boston, the Olmsted-designed “jewel of the Emerald Necklace.” (Yes, emeralds are jewels, so the nickname is redundant. I dunno what to tell you. Just consider it charming and let it go.) It borders Roxbury, Dorchester, and Jamaica Plain. It’s not a tourist destination; it’s merely a beautiful, underutilized, neglected 527-acre park that is beloved by the communities that surround it.

And there are two big things going on in the park at the moment. The first and biggest is the reconstruction of White Stadium with a view to having Boston Legacy, our new NWSL team, play there. The second is the muli-year Franklin Park Action Plan.

Let’s begin with the stadium, a project I supported because the stadium has been a dump for 30 years and nobody ever did anything about it. My son played high school soccer there and it was gross and uncomfortable for fans and actively unsafe for players. Oh yeah, and half of the stadium couldn’t be used because it was structurally unsound after a fire.

I know some of the folks involved in anti-stadium-reconstruction activism. They have a deep suspicion of public-private partnerships, which is entirely fair, and also a desire to keep Franklin Park their little secret that is not widely used, which is entirely unfair. (There was also some racist grumbling at the beginning about the process—Michelle Wu rammed the project through and had some folks complaining she was running the city “like China.” And may I once again plead with bigots to do some research on the political implications of being from Taiwan, as Michelle Wu’s family is, versus being from mainland China. Thanks. But also stop being racist.)

I think anything that brings more people to the park is a good thing, and I supported the project with some reservations. Mostly that we already had an NWSL team in Boston called the Breakers. They played in Harvard Stadium, which was hard to access by public transportation and had inadequate parking, and they eventually went under. Though the new White Stadium will be nice, it is also hard to access by public transportation and has inadequate parking.

Still, I figured this would get the city to pay attention to the park and would ultimately be good for us in the neighborhoods surrounding the park. But as demolition and construction have gone on, I’ve noticed that none of the traffic stuff promised for the construction process (all still visible here) has actually happened:

Walnut Avenue: Closed to construction vehicles and reserved for local residents. Construction traffic will use designated access points to minimize congestion.

Neighborhood Traffic Calming Adjustments:

• Temporary shift of the center line between #435 Walnut Ave & Iffley Rd to create temporary, wider travel lanes for heavy duty trucks.
• Temporary one-way conversion of Peter Parley Road from Forest Hills St. to Walnut Ave.
• Local access only to Glen Rd and Sigourney St, Robeson St, Peter Parley Rd and Iffley Rd. Additional signage will be deployed to keep through traffic on Forest Hills Street and Washington Street.

No community meetings, no updates. They just never did it. Maybe there were good reasons for this. Maybe not. But I now have a lot more sympathy with my neighbors who opposed the project because they didn’t believe the city was capable of being honest about its intentions.

Which brings us to the Franklin Park Action Plan. This came about because a developer wanted to use the location of a dilapidated parking garage in Downtown Boston to build a luxury residential tower for the super wealthy to use as a tax dodge/money laundering scheme. I guess maybe some rich people actually live there as well, but that’s not what this kind of building is really for. The problem was that the new tower would cast a shadow on Boston Common, which is against the law in Boston, so Walsh negotiated a deal: we’ll let you throw literal shade on our public space if you give us 25 million dollars to use on a different public space.

So landscape architecture firms were hired, and the city paid them handsomely: Reed Hilderbrand got $925k of public money; Agency Landscape + Planning got $500k, and I can’t find out how much MASS Design Group got paid, but I think it’s safe to say the total cost of producing the plan was around 2 million bucks. I guess this includes the community meetings I endured, with lots of powerpoint slides and “taking our feedback into account.”

Okay, so the plan dropped in 2022, and all the work is supposed to be done by 2030.

Everything that follows I put at the doorstep of the Wu administration. Not only is the work not going to be completed by 2030; it seems like most of it is never getting done at all.

Halfway to 2030 from the release of the plan, let’s look at what’s been done! (All these are copied from the pdf of the Franklin Park Action Plan—my notes in bold)

Park-Wide Improvements

Lighting —no progress

Signage-no progress

Entrances-no progress

Stormwater Management—no progress

Heritage Tree Care—some progress: I have seen arborists at work in both The Wilderness and the Long Crouch Woods.

The Playstead

1. Restore the Bear Dens for multi-purpose use.—some progress has been made. The bear dens were closed off in May 2025, and a sign was posted saying the work should be completed by July 2025. It’s August 2026, and the work has not been completed. So we’re now 15 months into what was supposed to be a 2 month job.

2. Long Crouch Woods

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting, improved trails, & new nature play areas.—They’ve definitely been working on this. They made a cool labyrinth out of invasive plants that they removed. Trails are not improved.

3. White Stadium

• Make improvements for shared community & Boston Public Schools use, including new parking—in progress. Old stadium has been demolished, new stadium is under construction. Of course this is now its own project, separate from the Franklin Park Action Plan, and it’s got private money behind it, which may account for the speed of the project.

4. Restore The Overlook ruins and return The Elma Lewis Playhouse to its historic location with a new stage, restrooms, and seating—No progress.

5. The Playstead

• Upgrade the fields (including drainage/stormwater improvements), create the tailgate edge & improve parking, and establish a new Playstead Loop path for bikes and pedestrians (including seating, lighting, and planting).—No progress.

Peabody Circle & Refectory Hill

1. Establish a new ‘front porch’ pedestrian entrance and terrace along Blue Hill Avenue—no progress

2. Reinstate the historic pedestrian circulation and expand tree planting to create a new Peabody Circle Plaza for events & programming—no progress

3. Stepped Seating Grove—Create terraced outdoor seating with new canopy trees for outdoor education and programming—no progress

4. Integrate a new parking lot on Refectory Hill-no progress

American Legion

Abbottswood

• Perform invasive removals & add new planting;

introduce new trails.—IDK, haven’t been over there.

Integrate a new outdoor classroom adjacent to the

wet meadow—no progress

American Legion Playground

• Make playground improvements, including a new splashpad—no progress

Ellicottdale & Schoolmaster Hill

Restore the upper lawn with shaded picnic and BBQ areas, expand the tennis courts, and provide restrooms—no progress

Restore the lower lawn for flexible use, and provide a boardwalk and trails within the wet woodland—no progress

Ellicott Arch

• Restore the arch, and add lighting & new planting—no progressSchoolmaster Hill

• Restore the Schoolmaster Hill ruins & pergola, and introduce a flowering tree walk along the path leading from Ellicottdale—no progress

The Wilderness

The Wilderness Ecological Restoration

Perform invasive removals, add new planting, and make trail and wayfinding improvements—There are parks employees in overalls doing something in here. Haven’t seen much in the way of results other than some knotweed removal, but let’s say it’s in progress.

Circuit Drive & The Valley Gates

1. Circuit Loop

• Reconfigure vehicular circulation to provide a safe

multi-model circuit throughout the park—no progress

2. The Circuit Drive Parking Lot

• Improve and expand the parking lot with canopy

trees and stormwater management—no progress

3. The Valley Gates

• Clarify circulation & restore the Valley Gate

headhouses—no progress

I can’t find it in the action plan, but I have noticed that the Shattuck tennis courts are being redone. So there’s something happening there.

But most of the stuff in the plan is obviously never happening. Not only because so few of these projects have been started, but also because it’s been clear for years that the City doesn’t care about these projects. You know how I know? In addition to all the stuff named above, part of the plan was repaving the path that goes from the Glen Road entrance to the Overlook—a length of maybe 1000 feet. This took over a year. They paved it, then found out they’d done it wrong, then undid it, then re-did it—there may have been a few more iterations, but the bottom line is that what should have been the work of a week at most took over a year.

There was someone from the Parks department nominally overseeing the project. I think she came out to the site twice.

And then there’s the bear dens, above. What was listed as a two-month job has taken 14 months so far. For context, the old stadium was still standing when this modest project began. It seems likely the new one will be complete before this project finishes.

I gave input, I watched the slides, and I really believed that the city was at last going to pay some long overdue attention to this amazing park.

And it was all bullshit. And apparently a lot of people knew it was bullshit. Here’s the Franklin Park Coalition’s memo that came out at the time in which they ask for 2 Park Rangers to be included in the budget, though it would be much better to set that money on fire because at least then it could briefly provide some warmth and therefore be more useful than park rangers. They estimate that the cost of the stuff included in the action plan is 100 million dollars and ask for the city to earmark 20 million dollars per year to make sure the plan is going to happen.

I did not hear anything from the Franklin Park Coalition about how this plan was pie in the sky bullshit at the time. I haven’t seen any of the local media following up on the progress of the Franklin Park Action Plan. And the city seems to just be hoping the whole thing blows over, which seems like a pretty safe bet at this point.

Boston has a lot of problems, and I’m not suggesting that this is the most important one. It’s just a perfect example of how, yet again, we don’t have a city government that cares about improving the lives of Bostonians.

Here’s my frustration: it seems like every day I read the news and see that Mayor Mamdani in New York is working, in small and big ways, to improve the lives of people who live in his city. When I was knocking doors for Michelle Wu’s campaign, I thought she’d do the same for Boston.

But, as the absolutely pathetic progress on the Franklin Park Action Plan shows, our mayor has other priorities. Franklin Park abuts Dorchester and Roxbury, real neighborhoods where hundreds of thousands of Bostonians live, but what’s that against the opinion of the people who really matter? You know, the ones with money.

I am allowed to grieve what I wanted, without dishonoring what I felt.

A very very short read. I don't share Brown's pessimism about AI, but this story dates back to 1954 (!) and is a fun read.

Dwan Ev ceremoniously soldered the final connection with gold. The eyes of a dozen television cameras watched him and the subether bore throughout the universe a dozen pictures of what he was doing.

He straightened and nodded to Dwar Reyn, then moved to a position beside the switch that would complete the contact when he threw it. The switch that would connect, all at once, all of the monster computing machines of all the populated planets in the universe — ninety-six billion planets — into the supercircuit that would connect them all into one supercalculator, one cybernetics machine that would combine all the knowledge of all the galaxies.

Dwar Reyn spoke briefly to the watching and listening trillions. Then after a moment's silence he said, “Now, Dwar Ev.”

Dwar Ev threw the switch. There was a mighty hum, the surge of power from ninety-six billion planets. Lights flashed and quieted along the miles-long panel.

Dwar Ev stepped back and drew a deep breath. “The honor of asking the first question is yours, Dwar Reyn.”

“Thank you,” said Dwar Reyn. “It shall be a question which no single cybernetics machine has been able to answer.”

He turned to face the machine. “Is there a God?”

The mighty voice answered without hesitation, without the clicking of a single relay.

“Yes, now there is a God.”

Sudden fear flashed on the face of Dwar Ev. He leaped to grab the switch.

A bolt of lightning from the cloudless sky struck him down and fused the switch shut.

#brown

Drawing: Julia Royer (copyright 2026)

This is a quick test of the new “embed” functionality in write as.

It doesn't address what I want. I want to be able to upload the audio file into write as.

Adding a hyperlink in a blog post doesn't give me what I want. I might as well just ping the audio hyperlink direct into a social media post rather than write a blog post with it in.

Any way here is the test:

https://open.spotify.com/episode/0s7mgCqMl7VTEzhgu4P3Lz

Introduction: The Threshold of Epistemic Surrender

To cross this threshold is to abandon the posture of the academic, the historian, and the speculative theologian. It requires an act of radical epistemic surrender — a shift from reading about the Sacred Text to being read by it.

For centuries, scriptural interpretation (tafsir) has functioned as an accumulative, external discipline. The seeker was taught that to understand the Revelation, one must assemble an ever-expanding apparatus of external data: lexicographical roots, historical contexts of revelation, legal precedents, and the competing opinions of medieval authorities. These tools preserve the historical silhouette of the text. They operate entirely within the realm of objective distance. They treat the Quran as a static, historical object anchored in seventh-century Arabia — a text to be dissected, categorised, and intellectually mastered by an autonomous, detached subject.

Hudur — Divine Presence — shatters that distance. Revelation is not merely an event recorded in history. It is a continuous, real-time descent (tanzil) occurring in the immediate present whenever a heart opens to receive it. The Hermeneutics of Presence does not approach the Quran as a book to be analysed by the human intellect. It approaches the Quran as an active, living environment in which the human soul is exposed, rearranged, and illuminated.

Traditional hermeneutics asks: “What did this verse mean historically?” Legalistic hermeneutics asks: “What rule does this verse extract?” The Hermeneutics of Presence asks: “What is this verse enacting upon my consciousness in this very moment?”

This shift from representation to enactment is the cornerstone of an unmediated Quranic Irfan. The Primary Text does not merely convey information about the Unseen (al-Ghayb). It acts as the primary vehicle through which the Unseen breaks into the domain of human perception. To read with Hudur is to move from secondary reporting (khabar) to direct, existential taste (dhawq). Before the Quran can be understood as a law or a history, it must be experienced as an ontological confrontation between the Absolute and the temporal creature.

The Organ of Perception: Reclaiming the Qalb

The primary barrier to experiencing the Quran as a living presence is not intellectual ignorance. It is an organ error.

Modern educational and religious paradigms have trained us to approach text almost exclusively through the analytical, discursive, conceptual mind. We read to gather information, build arguments, or satisfy intellectual curiosity. The Quran identifies a different organ as the sole recipient of its transformative power: the Heart (al-Qalb).

“Verily in this is a reminder for whoever has a heart, or gives ear while he is present as a witness.” (50:37)

The Quranic Qalb is not the modern sentimental heart — the seat of irrational emotion. In Quranic psychology, it is the central organ of spiritual perception, intuition, and holistic integration. The subtle locus where the divine spark (al-Ruh) meets the physical container of human nature (al-Jasad). The discursive intellect can parse grammar, analyse structure, and categorise laws — but it remains confined to the realm of form (Surah). Only the Qalb perceives meaning (Ma'na), tastes essence (Dhat), and experiences the reality of Presence (Hudur).

When the heart is veiled by heedlessness, intellectual pride, or unexamined egoic attachments, the Sacred Text becomes opaque. The words remain visible on the page. The acoustic vibrations reach the eardrum. The intellect parses the syntax. No illumination occurs. The reader remains locked in the outer shell.

The Hermeneutics of Presence begins with the deliberate purification and orientation of the Qalb. It demands an internal state of stillness and vulnerability before engaging the word. The heart is not a static container. It is a highly sensitive instrument that constantly fluctuates between states of expansion (bast) and contraction (qabd), clarity and turbidity. To read with Hudur is to bring the heart into alignment with the acoustic and spiritual frequency of the Revelation — to fulfill the condition named in the verse: to give ear while present as a witness. The reader does not merely listen or scan. The reader becomes an active, existential witness to the descent of the Word into the vessel of their own immediate awareness.

The Triad of Realisation: Tilawah, Tafsir, and Tadabbur

Three distinct modes of scriptural engagement. Historically conflated or arranged in rigid hierarchies that marginalise the contemplative dimension. In the Hermeneutics of Presence, they form an integrated, non-linear triad — each a necessary phase in the interiorisation of the Word.

1. Tilawah: The Body of the Sound

Not merely the vocalisation of text. The physical incarnation of the Divine Word through human breath, cadence, and resonance. The Quran was revealed as an oral, acoustic phenomenon — a spoken discourse designed to enter the human nervous system through sound. The acoustic patterns of the Arabic — its lengthenings, pauses, reverberations, and rhythmic shifts — are not decorative. They are precise vibratory frequencies engineered to bypass the defensive mechanisms of the analytical ego and directly alter the state of the Qalb. Tilawah provides the physical anchor for Hudur, grounding spiritual presence in the body through rhythmic breath and vocalisation.

2. Tafsir: The Intellectual Frame

The necessary, foundational work of the discursive intellect. Linguistic boundaries, semantic roots, grammatical structures, historical context. Without rigorous grounding in the outward form provided by Tafsir, spiritual interpretation collapses into arbitrary fantasy or subjective projection. But within the Hermeneutics of Presence, Tafsir is a means, not an end. It builds the doorway. It does not constitute entering the room. Once the intellectual frame is established, Tafsir yields to a higher mode of perception.

3. Tadabbur: The Spiritual Penetration

The ultimate engine of the Hermeneutics of Presence. The deliberate, deep, sustained immersion of the purified heart into the internal depths of the verse. Where Tafsir stops at the external meaning of the words, Tadabbur asks what those words reveal about the eternal nature of God, the hidden mechanics of the soul, and the immediate state of the reader. Active, contemplative wrestling — the verse critiques, dismantles, and rebuilds the reader's self-concept. Tadabbur transforms textual knowledge into existential realisation (Tahqiq).

The Four Pillars of the Present Hermeneutic

Pillar 1: Personal Address (Al-Khitab al-Mubashir)

Every statement, command, warning, and glad tiding in the Quran is addressed directly and personally to the reader in the present moment. When the text says, “O you who believe,” it addresses the living spark of faith within your heart right now. When it describes the hypocrites, it commands you to inspect the subtle insincerities, dualities, and hidden compromises within your own psyche — not to point fingers at historical enemies or contemporary opponents. The Quran is a private letter from the Eternal to the individual soul. To read it as a general public document or a dead historical archive is to miss its primary intent.

Pillar 2: The Dissolution of Time (Fana' al-Zaman)

In the state of Hudur, the artificial boundaries of linear time dissolve. The narratives of the prophets, the cosmic descriptions of the Day of Judgment, the creation of Adam — these are not events strung along a chronological timeline. They are simultaneous realities existing within the timeless space of the Divine Consciousness, rendered accessible to the human soul through Revelation. The Day of Judgment is not merely a distant future event; it is an active spiritual reality unfolding within your consciousness whenever the Light of Truth exposes the hidden motives of your ego. Paradise and Fire are not merely future geographical destinations; they are immediate states of proximity and distance, peace and burning remorse, accessible to the heart in the here and now.

Pillar 3: Radical Receptivity (Al-Insaat)

“And when the Quran is recited, listen to it and keep silent, so that you may receive mercy” (7:204). The silence commanded here is not the cessation of physical speech. It is the silence of the internal dialogue. Most readers approach scripture with a noisy mind — pre-existing theological biases, political agendas, personal anxieties, eager attempts to fit the text into pre-built conceptual boxes. Insaat requires suspending all internal chatter, empty opinions, and defensive intellectualising. Becoming an empty vessel upon which the Divine Word can etch its own meaning without distortion.

Pillar 4: The Ontological Reflex (Al-In'ikas)

Every verse possesses a direct, mirror-like reflection in the structure of human existence. Human beings are created as the comprehensive microcosm (al-Kawn al-Jami') — containing within themselves reflections of all Divine Attributes and all cosmic layers. Every textual statement corresponds to an internal state. The text is never “about something else.” It is always, simultaneously, about the divine-human relationship unfolding within the reader's own being.

The Structure Ahead

With the foundational posture of Hudur established, Part I systematically builds the methodology required to read the Sacred Text as an unmediated engine of spiritual illumination.

Chapter 1: The Primary Language of the Unseen examines how the Arabic of Revelation operates fundamentally differently from ordinary human language — not merely as a system of signs designating physical objects and abstract concepts, but as an active alteration of consciousness. It explores the precise distinction between Tafsir and Tadabbur; the principle of polysemy — how a single Quranic root contains multiple, non-contradictory layers of meaning designed to unfold as the reader's spiritual perception deepens; the holographic relationship between the Signs in the Horizons and the Signs in the Soul; and the acoustic mechanics of the oral Quran — how sound, rhythm, and breath operate as direct spiritual transmission.

Chapter 2: The Self-Referential Grammar of Batin establishes a rigorous, text-internal grammar for reading the Quran's inner meanings without drifting into arbitrary allegorisation or flattening literalism. It examines the self-imposed, text-internal constraints that distinguish legitimate ta'wil from arbitrary projection; the primary archetypal metaphors woven throughout the scriptural fabric — Light, Water, Darkness, Clay, and Fire — and how they define the fundamental forces operating within human consciousness; and the re-definition of the Unseen — shifting it from a distant, inaccessible theological realm into an immediate, present dimension of experience waiting to be unveiled through spiritual presence.

The Ultimate Aim of Presence

The Hermeneutics of Presence is not an end in itself. It is the doorway.

When you close the book after reading with true Presence, you do not walk away possessing more information. You walk away altered. The illusions of the ego have been exposed. The heart has been polished. The boundary between the sacred text and your daily existence has begun to dissolve.

The Quran is not merely a book sitting on a shelf. It is the fundamental architecture of Reality itself. By learning to read the written Revelation (al-Kitab al-Mastur) with presence of heart, you unlock the ability to read the open Revelation of Existence (al-Kitab al-Maftuh) with the same illuminated vision. You step out of the secondary shadows of secondhand religion and enter the radiant, unmediated light of the Divine Presence — where the Speaker, the Word, and the Listening Heart meet in singular, uninterrupted communion.

I put a thirst trap on my Hinge, one of the photos of me flexing in the posing room. Suddenly, I’ve gotten a lot more matches, and people are talking with me and flirting. I guess I’m not surprised, but a little part of me is.

D*m*nic. A British living here for the last 5 years but entered the bakery for the first time today.

L*vi like the jeans, who is a vegan from Texas, with Mexican heritage, who was well-versed in recent viral news of a Singaporean woman who talked about her boyfriend not being her physical type but was also mindful about not adding to the existing misogynistic hate directed at Erica Kirk.

V*n**ss*, who works in tech and M*rk, a dog trainer and forest tour guide.

I like remembering people and their names.

تاريخ النشر: 11:28 فجر الخميس 30 صفر 1448 [بحسب التقويم وننتظر إعلان التاريخ الشرعي من المحكمة]

خلاصة:

تولد الخبرة من أعمالٍ نزاولها ونحسنها بعد حين، لا من نطاقٍ ضيق، أو وصف وظيفي قاصر، أو اسمٍ كبير أو لقب صغير. خلاصة تجربة مهنية بلغت سبعة أعوام ونصف أو تزيد في سوق العمل. ليست دقيقة تنقضي قبل أن ينفتح باب المصعد، لكنها دقائق تساعدك أيضًا على تأمل مسارك المهني مستقيمًا كان أم متعرجًا.

مقدمة:

اشتد تعرج مساري المهني في العام الماضي 1447، واقترن السؤال عنه في المقابلات بصمتٍ يعاقبني بالرفض. ولم تزل إجاباتي -وإن صدقت- شبهة قوية للسائلين على مرافعة دفاعية أنتهض بها للاعتذار عن شيءٍ لا يعتذر منه وليس لي يدٌ فيه أو في أكثره. وما أضيق وقت المقابلات الوظيفية عن الشرح والتعليل والبيان الصادق لما جرى في الماضي.

أحدثكم اليوم عن جمالٍ يتوارى في المسار المتعرج، وعن خبرة تراكمت في مهماتٍ ووظائف لم تكن في الوصف الوظيفي، ومسؤوليات تجاوزت مسؤوليتي المحدودة، ومشروعات ليست في نطاق العمل.

وألحق بالمقال نموذجًا من سيرتي المهنية لمن أراد العلم والعمل بمقتضى العلم.

1- لا تعليق بعد اليوم: استخراج الذهب في قطاع تقنية المعلومات (14-3-1446)

لم يكن من شأني وقد انضممت حديثًا إلى تلك الشركة أن أشتغل بتصنيفها الفني عند هيئة الحكومة الرقمية. لكن رئيس الشركة عهد إلي بمتابعة ذلك الملف العالق لما نالت الشركة أقل مما تستحقه، وكان ينبغي أن تنال التصنيف الذهبي. فشمرت عن ساعدي واشتغلت بتحديث ملفات الشركة، وحسن عرضها، وتتبع ما نقص من شهاداتها ووثائقها، وإعادة رفعه في المنصة، ومواصلة الهيئة بين الحين والآخر.

اشتغلت بالمشروع شهرين ونصف الشهر حتى تحقق الهدف بحمد الله في عصرٍ من الثلاثاء في ثالث شهور السنة [ربيع الأول 1446]. وكان مشروع رفع التصنيف الفني خدمة تضطلع بها مكاتب وشركات وتتقاضى عليها الأموال الطائلة. فحمدت الله عز وجل على عملٍ ناجحٍ تنوء به المكاتب.

لم ألتفت إلى ما أنجزته حتى حدثت به أحد الأصدقاء ذات صباح، فأخبر زملائه عني، وسألوني أن أقدم إليهم عرضًا فنيًا وماليًا. وكاد أن يتم الأمر لولا مشيئة الله.

2- اربط لتضبط: قائمة متجددة لشراكات محلية ودولية (1445/1 – 1445/6)

دخلت إلى دنيا المناقصات وعالم العروض الفنية في منتصف عام 1444. وكان مما أدركته أن منظمة واحدة -وإن كانت كبيرة هائلة- لا تستطيع أن تعمل وحدها على أكثر الفرص التي تناسبها. وعرفت أن نجاح الشراكة شراكة في النجاح.

لم يكن من وصفي الوظيفي متابعة الشراكات القائمة وإدارة علاقات الموردين. إذ كان عندنا قسم المشتريات، والمطلوب مني -ومن سائر الفريق- تقويم المنافسات المختارة من منصة اعتماد، وإعداد ما يناسبها من العروض الفنية والمالية.

لم نتخصص في المجالات التي نخوضها، وكنا نعوِّل كثيرًا على شركاء متشاكسين محليين ودوليين.

ولم يلبث مدير القسم حتى انتخبني لإعداد قائمة الشركاء في الحال والمآل مقترنين بالحلول والخدمات التي يقدمونها.

اشتغلت بمشروع إقامة الشراكات وتقويمها شهرًا أو شهرين، وكان علي أن أتصل بالشركات وأن أبحث عمن يمثلهم في المملكة العربية السعودية أو منطقة الخليج.

وأعجب من ذلك أنني أنفقت بعض أيامي في اجتياز شهادة لإحدى الشركات العالمية، ونجحت في اختبارها بعد شق الأنفس وأعنت زميلًا لي على ذلك.

أفادتني هذه الخبرة كثيرًا بحمد الله، فكانت سببًا ساقه الله إلي لأترشح إلى وظائف المبيعات وبناء الشركات.

الربط سبب وثيق إلى الضبط [1].

3- تقدم إذا تأخر غيرك: المشاركة في إدارة مشروع تقني كبير (1443/6 – 1444/6)

عامٌ مضى في وظيفة أتقنتها، واجتهدت في أداء مهماتها، فلم تزدني الشركة هللة واحدة رغم إلحاحي ومطالبي. كنا نشتغل ببناء ذكاء الذكاء قبل أن يعرف الناس عنه شيئًا. وكنا نعلمه الكلام ونختبر قدرته على الاستجابة، وندربه على عبارات مختلفة عربية وإنجليزية فصحى وعامية.

تخصصت في بناء المحتوى النصي لبرمجيات المحادثة الآلية [شات بوتس Chatbots]، واستطعت أن أزودها بنماذج متعددة من المدخلات والاستفسارات على هيئة (intents, utterances, and queries) ولا داعي لكتابة الكلمات بحروف كبيرة. خطوة مهدت لي التعرف إلى التعلم العميق (deep learning) والذكاء التوليدي (generative AI).

والمقصود أنني اضطلعت بقدرٍ لا بأس به من مهمات إدارة مشروع تقني كبير (وتفاصيله في سيرتي الذاتية الكاملة التي تحصل عليها إذا راسلتني في البريد hijriman47@keemail.me).

استنابني مدير المشروع وكذلك مدير الفريق فصرت أشهد الصراع على المشروع في ساحات الحرب كما يسمونها بالإنجليزية (war rooms) وأفاوض العميل والشركة التي تولت المشروع وكذا فريق الجودة والاختبار.

كنت أتلقى التذكرة في جيرا (Jira) بالواسطة أول الأمر ثم آلت إلي الإجابة عنها، وإغلاقها في وقت محدد يسير، وصرت أباشرها بنفسي في كثيرٍ من الأحيان.

أدركت بنفسي كما لم أدرك من قبل في دورات إدارة المشروعات PMP كيف يتجاذب العميل ومدير المشروع المتطلبات، وكيف تصير الأهداف المتفق عليها سببًا في نزاع مستمر.

أردنا أن نقدم للعميل برنامجًا للمحادثة الآلية يغني عملاءه عن إشغال الموظفين بالطلبات اليسيرة المتكررة، والعجيب أننا لم نملك وسيلة لأتمتة إجراءات البناء والاختيار. اللهم إلا نظامًا يسيرًا بنيته في إكسل Excel من مايكروسوفت لتسريع الإدخال والاختبار.

خبرة تمنيت أن أستثمرها لما أردت الانتقال من الشركة سوى أنني انحصرت في اسم الوظيفة الضيق، وأحبطني قلة التقدير الذي لقيته في نهاية المطاف!

4- شذرات من التجارب (1444/6 – 1448/1)

أ- تكيفٌ بلا حدود: تعرفت إلى مبادئ أتمتة الإجراءات (RPA)، فاستعملت باستعمال باور أوتوميت (Power Automate) لتسريع العمل في السير الذاتية. إذ كانت تعبئتها وإلحاقها بالعروض الفنية استنزافًا للوقت وإرهاقًا للأصابع وإجهادًا في غير فائدة.

طريقة بذلتها إلى زميلٍ ما لما غادرت الشركة، ولم تصلح في شركة أخرى لأنها تستعمل باوربوينت (PowerPoint). لم أجد حلًا قليل التكلفة، فاستبدلت الأتمتة بنصفها وحسنت القوالب لتتسع لعروض أخرى، وأضفت إليها مواضع (placeholders) يسهل تعبئتها بالكلمات الدالة على الجهة والمشروع ومدته واسمه وغير ذلك.

ب- القلم يرفعنا: لم يفارقني القلم يومًا في أعمالي ووظائفي، فكم حررت وراجعت صفحات المواقع (Webpages)، ومذكرات التفاهم (MoUs)، واتفاقيات عدم الإفصاح (NDAs)، والترجمات من العربية إلى الإنجليزية وبعكس ذلك. ولذلك كتبت ستة (6) تقارير في مشروعٍ تريد الشركة أن تحرك مدفوعاته الراكدة، ودفعت إليهم ثلاثة (3) مستندات عربية وإنجليزية مطلوبة للطرح المالي.

لست أنكر أنني أفدت من أدوات الذكاء التوليدي حينها، لا سيما أن بعض أهل الإدارة كانوا يظنونها مفتاحًا لكل المغاليق، وحلًا للمشكلات، وابتكارًا للمخارج السريعة.

والله يعلم أنني لا أحب أن أسيئ في كتابتي، وأحملها على عاتقي، وأنظر بنفسي في المعلومات الواردة، وأتثبت من صحتها (fact-checking) لئلا يسأل عن كاتبها على سبيل الذم والحط.

لست أنسى تلك المقالات المترجمة التي دفعت إلي لأحررها متطوعًا فلم أقنع بعيوبها السطحية، بل نفذت إلى أصولها، وقارنتها، وقدمت لطالب التحرير تقريرًا بشيءٍ من التفصيل في عيوب الترجمة وأخطائها الشنيعة.

ج- البيانات كاشفة: مكنتني إدارة المناقصات من المشاركة مع الأقسام الأخرى من مبيعات ومشتريات وفرقٍ فنية، والمساهمة في تحسين أعمالهم. ومن ذلك أنني أخرجت لمديرين أحدهما في المشتريات ذات مرة تقريرًا عن أداء الموردين وشركائهم مستفادًا من نظامه التقني.

د- العبرة بالنظام لا بالوسيلة: تعلمت إمكان التحول الرقمي وسهولة الانتقال إلى عالم الديجيتال في الشركات الصغيرة حيث تقل الموارد وتضيق الميزانية عن أكفأ الحلول وأفضل الوسائل.

تعرفت إلى إدارة المناقصات في نظام Dynamics 365 من مايكروسوفت لتنظيم موارد المؤسسات (ERP)، وأتقنتها في الشركات الصغيرة التي لا تكاد تستعمل الشير بوينت (SharePoint).

أدركت حينها أن العبرة بحسن بناء النظام وإن كان صغيرًا، وضبط موارده وإن كانت قليلة. وقد أبصرت بنفسي تكاسل طائفة من الموظفين عن استعمال النظام التقني المتقدم، ونشاط بعضهم في مجموعة واتساب أو نظام محدود الإمكانيات.

لم أعد أصحاب تلك الشركة ببناء نظامٍ آلي لرصد المنافسات وتصنيفها. لكنني وعدتهم بنظامٍ يسير لضبط المنافسات الحالية، ومعرفة الناجح منها، ورصد ما يأتي في قادم الأيام. وقد وفيت بهذا الوعد.

خاتمة:

كنت أحب أن أرى ثمارًا للبذور التي وضعتها وسقيتها ورعيتها، وكنت أتمنى أن تكفيني الأرقام الناجحة مؤونة تعليل المسار المتعرج الذي سلكته في مسيرتي المهنية. لكنني أحمد الله عز وجل على خبراتٍ تنوعت وتراكمت، وأفادتني كثيرًا في العمل والإدارة. وأحسب أن ما كتبته من مقال يخفف عني -إن شاء الله- وطأة الأسئلة المزعجة التي تنتهي إلى الرفض أو العرض المجحف وكلاهما مرٌ لا حلاوة فيه. وإن شئت أن تقف على مزيدٍ منها، فدونك السيرة الذاتية التجريبية في الحاشية، فتأملها كما تحب!

وكتب البراء بن محمد.

في مشرق الشمس من يوم الخميس سلخ صفر عام 1448.

30-2-1448

هامش

[1]

كان أحد أصدقائي في الشبكة الرقمية مولعًا باقتباسٍ عجيبٍ عن ابن رشد، تذكرته الآن وقد عرفت فضيلة الربط والضبط. والحق أن كلمته في سياقٍ آخر لا يتصل بما نحن فيه، لكنها لطيفة يحسن ذكرها.

(من لم يعرف الربط لم يقدر على الحل)

[ابن رشد – فصل المقال ص 127 طبعة مركز دراسات الوحدة العربية]

ملحق [السيرة الذاتية التجريبية بحسب آخر تحديث 20 صفر 1448]

صورة من الصفحة الأولى

صورة من الصفحة الثانية

صورة من الصفحة الثالثة

صورة من الصفحة الرابعة

صورة من الصفحة الخامسة

“What goes around comes around.” Now, the question. does that quote mean anything? No, i just thought it would be funny to throw something unnecessarily profound at the beginning and then admit i have no idea what im talking about. Anyway, I’ve been thinking about my mother lately, i havent visited her grave in some time. long enough that admitting it feels worse than actually counting the days. i tell myself ill go soon, then days become weeks. weeks become another month, another excuse. its weird how easy it is to avoid a place when you know exactly what you’ll feel once you get there. And then there are the dreams. for gods sake, leave me alone. i already sleep like ive been left halfway through something interesting with these wrist restrainers and a broken door. which doesnt sound pleasant to begin with. my dreams, naturally, have decided to make it worse. sometimes they feel so real that i wake up and have to sit there for a while, trying to figure out which part actually happened and which parts my brain decided would be a fun little extension, because it had nothing better to do. there are times where i have to make a guess. No, not remember. Guess. was that a dream? did i actually say that? did i actually see her? was that a memory? or was my mind just bored enough to manufacture an entire little world and then leave me to deal with it when i woke up? they are convincing. my dreams dont always feel like dreams. they feel like memories that haven’t happened yet or memories that never happened at all. sometimes i wake up carrying the emotion of something that doesnt exist, and somehow the emotion still feels completely real. whatever, thats funny to talk about. i guess ill always fall for my own “tricks”.

Thats enough for today, enough thoughts, enough complaints, i need a cigarette.

Sincerely, Barely trusting my own memory.

Chapter 1: The Prayer You Almost Do Not Want to Say Out Loud

It is late enough that the house has finally gone quiet. The lights are low, the dishes are still in the sink, and your phone is charging across the room. You know this would normally be the kind of moment when you pray, but tonight you sit there with nothing coming. Not anger. Not tears. Not peace. Just a strange blankness that makes you wonder whether you should even try. If you have been living in that silence, this message for when you feel spiritually numb and cannot feel God is not asking you to become more emotional. It is asking you to stop hiding from what is already true.

There is a sentence many believers are uncomfortable saying: “God, I do not feel close to You.” It sounds dangerous because we have learned to associate strong faith with confidence, gratitude, certainty, and visible devotion. So when the heart becomes quiet, we often cover it with religious language. We tell God what we think a faithful person should say instead of what the person sitting in the room actually feels. That is why this encouragement for Christians struggling with spiritual dryness and a tired faith begins in a place that can feel almost too simple: you are allowed to tell God the truth.

Maybe the truth is that you are tired of praying about the same thing. Maybe you have asked Him to change a situation for so long that you no longer know what another prayer would add. Maybe there was a time when you felt His presence easily, and now you cannot remember the last time something inside you truly responded. You still believe. You have not rejected Jesus. You just do not know how to make yourself feel what you think you should feel.

I think many people make spiritual numbness heavier by keeping it secret.

You can sit beside someone in church, sing the same song, hear the same message, and carry an entirely different experience inside. They may lift their hands while you are wondering why the words are not reaching you. You may feel guilty because you remember loving that song once. You may look around and think everyone else has something you have lost.

Then you go home and say nothing about it.

There is a man somewhere tonight who has spent the last year solving problems for everybody else. His family calls when something breaks. People at work depend on him. Someone close to him is going through a hard season. He keeps handling the next thing because that is what he does. When he finally gets ten minutes alone, he realizes he does not feel much of anything. He assumes the emptiness means his spiritual life is failing.

But maybe his heart has simply been living without enough room to breathe.

God knows the difference.

That matters because you may be accusing yourself of something Jesus is not accusing you of.

There are times when numbness can point toward something that needs attention. We can drift. We can become distracted. We can avoid God. But not every quiet season is rebellion, and treating every quiet season like rebellion can make you afraid of your own humanity.

Sometimes you have been disappointed for too long.

Sometimes grief has worn you down.

Sometimes life has required so much emotional energy that when you finally come to prayer, there is simply not much left.

You do not have to solve which one it is tonight.

You can begin with honesty.

“Jesus, I do not know what is happening inside me.”

That is enough to start.

Do not rush to add a better sentence. Do not explain yourself. Do not promise that you will do better tomorrow. Let yourself sit there for a minute without turning the prayer into another responsibility.

The strange thing about honesty is that it can feel less spiritual than performance, even though it may bring you closer to the truth. We often think prayer needs to sound hopeful before it can be faithful. But there are moments when the most faithful prayer is simply refusing to pretend.

Jesus already knows what you feel before you name it.

He knows you are disappointed.

He knows you are tired.

He knows you miss the version of yourself who prayed more easily.

He knows you are frightened by the silence.

You are not giving Him bad news.

You are finally letting yourself stop carrying it alone.

And perhaps that is where you begin again—not by trying to feel God, but by allowing yourself to speak honestly to the God who has never needed you to pretend.

Chapter 2: Staying With God When Nothing Inside You Moves

The next afternoon, you may find yourself standing in a grocery store aisle with a basket in your hand, trying to remember what you came to buy. Your mind has been full all day. You answered people, handled responsibilities, drove where you needed to go, and kept moving. Then, for one strange second beneath the bright store lights, you realize how tired you are. Not just physically tired. Tired in that deeper place where even prayer has started to feel like another thing you should be doing better.

You do not have to turn that moment into a spiritual test.

You can simply recognize it.

There are seasons when returning to God does not feel like returning home. It feels more like sitting beside someone you trust when you do not have anything to say. The relationship is still there. The love is still there. The silence does not cancel either one.

This is where I would encourage you to stop asking yourself whether you feel enough and start noticing whether you are still willing to remain.

You opened this article.

You are still thinking about God.

Some part of you still wants closeness, even if you cannot produce the feeling.

That matters.

You may have spent so much time trying to get your old spiritual life back that you have missed the possibility that God can meet you differently now. Maybe you used to pray for thirty minutes and now you can barely manage three. Maybe you once filled pages in a journal, and now the notebook sits untouched beside the bed. Maybe worship once brought tears, and now you listen quietly while folding laundry.

None of that automatically means you are moving backward.

Faith can become quieter without becoming weaker.

There is a woman sitting in a hospital waiting room tonight with a paper cup of coffee she no longer wants. Someone she loves is behind a closed door. She has already prayed every prayer she knows how to pray. Eventually she stops asking for new words and simply whispers, “Jesus.”

That may be all she has.

It is still prayer.

Sometimes we complicate our relationship with God because we believe every spiritual moment must contain insight, emotion, clarity, or relief. But there are days when faith is simply staying turned toward Him.

If you are spiritually numb, try letting your prayers become smaller for a while. When you wake up, say, “Thank You for another day.” Before a hard conversation, say, “Help me.” When fear rises, say, “Stay close.” Before sleep, say, “I am still here.”

Those prayers are not inferior because they are short.

You can also stop judging every Bible reading by how strongly it affects you. Read a few verses and let them exist without demanding an emotional response. Truth does not stop being truth because your heart is tired.

And give yourself permission to notice your actual life. Maybe you need rest. Maybe you need to talk to somebody. Maybe you need to admit that the last year hurt more than you have allowed yourself to say. Spiritual honesty sometimes begins with ordinary honesty.

There may come a morning when you notice something small. You look through the window and feel grateful for the sunlight. A verse stays with you after you close the Bible. You pray without deciding to pray. You realize the silence does not scare you quite as much.

Do not rush that moment either.

Let faith return at its own pace.

And if you are not there yet, you do not have to be.

Jesus is not standing at some distant finish line waiting for the emotionally restored version of you to arrive. He is with the tired person you are right now.

You can stay there with Him.

You can tell the truth.

You can remain.

Sometimes that is what faith looks like before it feels like anything again.

Your friend, Douglas Vandergraph

Explore the complete Douglas Vandergraph Master Index: https://douglasvandergraph.com/douglas-vandergraph-master-index/

Watch Douglas Vandergraph’s faith-based videos on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@douglasvandergraph

The decisive document in the fight over western Coweta County, Georgia, was not a protest sign or a petition. It was a line on a zoning map. For years, 829 acres of pine and hardwood about thirty-five miles south-west of Atlanta had carried the designation Rural Conservation, a category the county's own comprehensive plan reserved for what it called rural places and complete communities. In April 2026, on a three-to-two vote of the county board of commissioners, that land became Industrial. The change took seconds to enact and will take a decade to build out: nine data centre buildings, two substations, a campus valued at seventeen billion dollars and rated at nine hundred megawatts, roughly the output of a nuclear reactor, dropped into a landscape whose defining feature until that afternoon had been that almost nothing was there.

The residents who had spent fifteen months trying to stop it were, by then, extremely well organised. Laura Beth, the chairwoman of a group called Citizens for Rural Coweta, had learned in early 2025 that a hyperscale campus of more than 4.9 million square feet was proposed to run past her back garden, and had started a Facebook group, Stop Project Sail, which TIME reported in July had grown beyond eight thousand members. They read the ordinances. They turned up to every hearing. They had no financial interest in the outcome beyond the water in their wells and the value of their houses. And they lost, by one vote, on a body of five people.

I keep returning to that margin, because it exposes what the national argument about artificial intelligence tends to skip. We debate whether the machines are worth their cost. The question Coweta County actually had to answer was procedural: who possesses the authority to trade a place's groundwater, its grid capacity and its rural character for a facility it did not ask for and will not use? That has an obvious legal answer in most American jurisdictions, and a deeply unsatisfying one. The bodies with formal power to decide are frequently not the bodies containing the people who bear the consequences. The harm has one footprint and the franchise has another, and the AI build-out has made the gap between them impossible to ignore.

A Country Learning to Say No

The gap is being noticed at scale. On 18 July 2026, according to Reuters reporting carried in newspapers across the country, opponents staged 142 protests across 42 states, coordinated by a group calling itself HumansFirst and described as the first nationally organised day of action against the AI build-out. Texas hosted eighteen events, more than any other state; Georgia eleven; California eight. HumansFirst was co-founded by Amy Kremer, a veteran of the Tea Party and of Women for Trump, who has compared the mood to 2009 while insisting the campaign is nonpartisan, and who blames both parties for letting the companies build at this scale without troubling to consult the people who will live beside it.

The protests are the visible edge of something larger. The Information reported in June 2026 that more than three hundred American cities, towns and counties had adopted bans or moratoriums on data centre development. Data Center Watch, the tracker maintained by the AI research firm 10a Labs, counted 833 active opposition groups across forty-nine states by March 2026, up from 396 at the end of 2025, and calculated that in the first quarter of 2026 alone at least seventy-five projects worth a combined 130 billion dollars were blocked or delayed. Taken cumulatively since the start of 2025, the tracker puts the value of projects blocked or delayed at roughly 286 billion dollars.

Public opinion has moved with it. A Reuters/Ipsos poll of 4,531 Americans, published on 11 June 2026, found that just fourteen per cent were comfortable with a data centre being built near them, and that fifty-seven per cent would oppose one in their community, including two-thirds of Democrats and half of Republicans. Only a third agreed that building data centres at the current pace was mainly a good thing. Seventy-seven per cent were worried that AI would make electricity more expensive, and Republicans, Democrats and independents worried about it in close to equal proportion. This is not a partisan split so much as a broad, cross-cutting discomfort, and it has begun to register at the level of state executives. On 14 July 2026, Governor Kathy Hochul signed Executive Order No. 62, imposing what her office described as the first statewide moratorium in the United States on new hyperscale data centres, pausing discretionary state environmental permits for facilities drawing fifty megawatts or more for up to a year while regulators build a framework. New York's average residential electricity price has climbed by close to sixty-eight per cent since 2019. “They drive up costs for local ratepayers,” Hochul said of the facilities, “and I refuse to let those costs get passed down to New Yorkers.”

What happened in New York before that order is the more revealing half of the story, and it is this essay's question in miniature. On 4 June 2026 the state legislature passed the Responsible Data Center Development Act, a one-year moratorium on state permits for data centres drawing twenty megawatts or more, with dedicated rate classes, transparency standards and impact studies attached. The Senate carried it forty-four to sixteen, the Assembly one hundred and two to thirty-nine. Hochul did not sign it. Six weeks later she issued an executive order of her own, and commentators now expect the Act to be vetoed. The thresholds are the tell: the chamber closest to the affected districts drew its line at twenty megawatts, the single executive at fifty, more than twice as permissive. Both instruments are lawful, both get reported as a moratorium, and they are not the same policy. The choice between them was settled by which office holds the pen.

One widely repeated figure deserves care. Reporting on the backlash, including TIME's, has cited electricity price rises of up to 267 per cent in states with dense data centre activity. That number originates in a Bloomberg analysis of wholesale prices at tens of thousands of individual grid nodes, which found that in some locations near major clusters the monthly wholesale cost of power was as much as 267 per cent higher than five years earlier. It is a wholesale, node-level finding rather than a residential bill, and when Senator Elizabeth Warren used it as a household figure in June 2026 PolitiFact rated the claim mostly false. The distinction matters, because the ease with which the number has migrated into the shorthand of the debate is itself a symptom of how little reliable, locally specific information reaches the people asked to accept these facilities.

The Difference Between By-Right and By-Permission

To understand where authority actually sits, you have to understand a distinction almost nobody outside land-use law thinks about until it lands on them. In American zoning, a use is either permitted by right in a given district, meaning a developer who meets the technical standards is approved administratively through site-plan review, or it requires a discretionary act, a rezoning or special exception, which triggers public hearings and a legislative vote.

For most of the industry's history, in most of the places it grew, it was by right. Loudoun County, Virginia, the densest concentration of data centres on earth, permitted them by right across much of its industrially zoned land, which is precisely how the corridor filled so fast and so quietly. That changed on 18 March 2025, when the board of supervisors voted seven to two to make data centres a special exception use in districts where they had been by right, converting an administrative rubber stamp into a legislative process with staff review and public hearings. Even then, the board grandfathered applications submitted before 12 February 2025 for projects more than five hundred feet from homes. The reform arrived after the pipeline had already formed.

The by-right question determines whether there is a public decision at all. Where a data centre is by right, there is no hearing to attend, no vote to lobby, no record to appeal. The community's only formal opportunity to shape the outcome came years earlier, when the zoning map was drawn, in a proceeding almost nobody attended because nobody imagined what would eventually be built there. The decision had, in effect, already been taken by the county's past self on behalf of its future one.

Where discretion does exist, the procedural rules become the whole battlefield. The most consequential legal defeat the industry has suffered in Virginia turned on a technicality of notice. On 7 August 2025, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Kimberly Irving voided the rezoning for the Prince William Digital Gateway, a project of more than two thousand acres beside the Manassas battlefield, holding the ordinances void ab initio because the county had failed to comply with the state code's public-notice requirements: the advertisement for the December 2023 hearing was published three days before it. The Court of Appeals of Virginia affirmed unanimously on 31 March 2026. The county and the developer Compass Datacenters withdrew from the litigation in April. QTS, the Blackstone-owned operator, petitioned the Supreme Court of Virginia in May through an affiliate, then withdrew the petition on 2 July 2026, leaving the lower rulings standing, and after a Court of Appeals order on 29 July the rezonings are void and the land reverts to the district it held before. The largest data centre campus ever proposed in the United States, some 2,100 acres of it, is dead. Years of civic argument about water, viewsheds and historic land hinged on the calendar arithmetic of a legal notice, because that was the only lever the law actually handed the objectors. The lever worked. The project was not defeated on water, or on viewshed, or on any ground the community had spent years assembling. It was defeated on the date a newspaper advertisement ran.

Ken Confidential

The second structural feature that determines who decides is information, and here the asymmetry has been engineered deliberately. In July 2026, Public Citizen published a report by Deanna Noël titled The Secret Data Center Buildout, documenting the routine use of non-disclosure agreements between developers and the public officials who will vote on their projects. It found that eighty per cent of Virginia localities with proposed or existing data centres have NDAs in place, and that at least ten states have introduced bills restricting the practice. Some agreements forbid officials from revealing that discussions are occurring, that confidential information has been received, or even that an NDA exists.

The Minnesota Star Tribune documented the same machinery in its own state, reporting that eight cities, two counties, at least one state agency and a school district had signed such agreements; of twelve cities the paper approached with known data centre proposals, only four had never signed one. Leslie Krueger, the University of Minnesota's assistant vice president for planning, space and real estate, spent August 2023 corresponding about Meta's Rosemount campus, code-named Project Bigfoot, with a company representative who identified himself to her only as “Ken Confidential”. Further north, in Hermantown near Duluth, city officials knew from September 2024 that a large project was proposed and declined to confirm publicly what it actually was until the Star Tribune obtained the city's emails roughly a year later, at which point the scheme filed as Project Loon turned out to be Google's. A community can be kept from knowing not merely who is building but what is being built, for a year, by the officials it elected. In Tucson, negotiations over a 290-acre campus proceeded for roughly two years behind NDAs that concealed the end user's identity from the public and from most of the city council. “Giant corporations prefer to operate in the shadows,” the council member Lane Santa Cruz said, “but Tucson is not for sale. We deserve transparency and accountability.”

Coweta County shows how the two asymmetries compound. Investigative reporting by DeSmog, based on public records requests, established that Project Sail's public face, an entity called Atlas Development, LLC, was fronting for Prologis, the San Francisco-based logistics real estate giant, whose involvement was concealed until May 2025 even as its logos appeared on project illustrations. The records showed a steady programme of private access: a meeting between a Prologis vice-president and one commissioner at a Newnan law office in July 2025, another with a second commissioner in August, personalised email updates to all five the day before a public hearing, further emails in October. The lobbyist Arthur “Skin” Edge IV submitted recommendations for the county's data centre ordinance on 7 July, writing that he did so on behalf of the Project Sail team and stating that Atlas Development had retained him as an attorney for the project; both Atlas Development and Prologis subsequently told DeSmog that they were not represented by Edge. Somebody's account of who was speaking for whom is wrong, and the instructive part is that the public record does not allow anyone outside those rooms to establish whose. After a CBRE vice-president testified at the November 2025 hearing, commissioners amended their draft to allow data centres on collector roads, raise the height limit from sixty to seventy feet, and replace a requirement that utilities demonstrate adequate capacity with a letter of intent showing preliminary coordination.

Set against that, Laura Beth's account of her group's access is stark. “Coweta County has not met with us specifically about the ordinance,” she told DeSmog, describing commissioners who would accept only group emails and declined the telephone conversations residents requested. The rules governing the facility were being drafted in one conversation and defended in another, and only one of those conversations had a transcript.

The Lawsuit That Followed the Vote

Suppose a community clears every hurdle: it learns about the project in time, secures a discretionary hearing, persuades its elected board, and votes no. What happens then is the sharpest test of where authority really lies, and the answer arrived in a farming township of about 2,200 people in Washtenaw County, Michigan.

In September 2025, after months of contentious meetings, the Saline Township board voted four to one to deny the rezoning sought for a Stargate data centre campus backed by Related Digital, Oracle, OpenAI and Blackstone, with DTE Energy contracted to supply roughly 1.4 gigawatts. Two days later the developers and landowners sued, alleging exclusionary zoning: the claim, under Michigan law, that the township had unreasonably barred a legitimate use, strengthened by the fact that Saline Township had no industrially zoned land at all. Facing litigation costs against an annual municipal budget of roughly a million dollars, the township settled by consent judgment, accepting community benefits worth about fourteen million dollars, including four million for farmland preservation, along with water and noise restrictions. The attorney who advised the settlement observed that zoning power is not absolute.

The sequel is more revealing than the settlement. Residents organised to force a referendum on the rezoning, a right Michigan law affords them. On 14 January 2026 the board formally rezoned the land to industrial to comply with the consent judgment; on 28 January it reversed that action and restored the agricultural designation, reasoning that the judgment itself authorised the project, so no map change was required. Because there had been no formal rezoning, there was nothing to petition against. Tammie Bruneau of the Rural Michigan Defense Fund put the consequence plainly: if the map need not be updated and no notice published, there could be no referendum. The resident Kathryn Haushalter, whose motion to intervene in the settlement had been rejected by a Washtenaw County judge as untimely, asked the question the episode poses: “What does it look like when residents are not able to determine what happens in their communities? What are we expected to do?” On 1 June 2026, Governor Gretchen Whitmer and Sam Altman appeared at the ceremony marking construction of the campus.

Tucson demonstrates the same lesson through geography rather than litigation. On 6 August 2025 the city council voted seven to nil to reject the annexation that Project Blue required, after residents objected to roughly two thousand acre-feet of city water a year. But the land was unincorporated county territory, and the Pima County board of supervisors had already voted three to two in June to sell it and had approved the zoning. The developer, having earlier signalled that the project could not proceed without the city, redesigned the facility for air cooling, which uses far less water and considerably more electricity, and pressed ahead through the county alone. On 3 December 2025 the Arizona Corporation Commission approved the power purchase agreement four to one, Commissioner Rachel Walden the sole vote against; Tucson Electric Power expects to be supplying the campus with two hundred and eighty-six megawatts by 2028. Amazon Web Services withdrew as operating partner. The project continued, and then acquired one more venue. Arizona's attorney general, Kris Mayes, has appealed the commission's approval, contesting the speed of it and arguing that the agreement lets the utility and the developers set electricity rates between themselves, a power the state constitution reserves to the commission alone. For once the proliferation of forums runs in the objectors' favour, though nobody in Tucson could reach that one either. The state's chief legal officer took an interest, which is a different thing from a community having a say.

The pattern in both cases is not that local government was overruled. It is that “local government” was never a single thing. It is a set of overlapping venues — township, county, court, utility commission — in which a developer need prevail only once, while residents must prevail everywhere.

Where the Decision Actually Lives

Step back far enough and the venue keeps moving upward. Justin Kollar, writing in the Journal of the American Planning Association in 2026, describes this as planning under pre-emption: states removing land use, zoning and environmental review authority from cities and counties through statutory overrides, utility governance, fiscal incentives and procedural constraints, so that decisions migrate to state agencies, utilities and corporate actors, and planning becomes administrative coordination rather than deliberation.

West Virginia has gone furthest. Its House Bill 2014 bars counties and municipalities from adopting or enforcing any ordinance limiting a certified microgrid district or a certified high-impact data centre, and exempts those projects from county and municipal zoning and land use ordinances, from building permitting, inspection and code enforcement, and from licence requirements. What is left to the locality is the power to charge fees and to send fire engines and police cars. Nor does the statute restrict what may be generated inside a microgrid district, so a gas, coal or nuclear plant may be sited in a county that has been relieved of any authority to review it. And the property tax revenue such a facility produces does not stay where the facility stands: the statute routes the greater part of it to the state, partly to fund reductions in income tax. That last provision repays attention, because the standard defence of accepting a data centre is that the host is compensated for what it absorbs. West Virginia has legislated away the deliberation and the compensation together, and left the county with the facility. In Pennsylvania, a proposed Data Center Siting and Permitting Act would have the state environmental department designate at least fifteen pre-approved sites. More than three hundred data-centre-related bills were introduced by state legislators in the first six weeks of 2026.

Much of the most consequential decision-making never touches land use at all. It happens at public utility commissions, bodies whose members most residents cannot name. On 15 April 2026 the Louisiana Public Service Commission voted four to one on Entergy Louisiana's application to build the generation for Meta's Richland Parish campus: seven new gas-fired power stations, some two hundred and forty miles of transmission and a set of nuclear uprates, a programme of 21.37 billion dollars, the largest investment in the utility's history, binding ratepayers across the state for the term of a twenty-year agreement. What the commissioners approved that day was not the plan. It was a request to fast-track it, skipping key steps of the standard regulatory review; the vote on the application itself is set for November 2026. The distinction is this essay's subject reduced to a single procedural motion. Before anybody decides the question, somebody decides how much deliberation the question is going to get, and that second decision is taken first, in a proceeding almost nobody is watching. Entergy maintains that Meta will cover construction costs and that customers will save money. The Alliance for Affordable Energy has warned that if Meta departs before the contract ends, the cost of the gas plants could fall on ordinary ratepayers; the Union of Concerned Scientists noted that the commission declined to investigate a financing arrangement under which Meta established an additional parent entity, retaining a twenty per cent stake, and borrowed twenty-seven billion dollars against the project. Whatever one concludes about the risk, a decision of that magnitude about who bears what is being taken by five elected commissioners in a venue with no relationship whatsoever to the parish hosting the buildings.

The tariff question is following the same path. According to Utility Dive, state regulators approved twenty-nine large-load tariffs in 2025, against fourteen in the whole period from 2018 to 2024, and by June 2026 twenty-four states had approved at least one. Minnesota's HF 16, enacted in June 2025, requires the state utility commission to create a very large customer rate class and allocate attributable costs to it. Oregon's POWER Act directs its commission to establish a separate class for facilities of twenty megawatts or more. Texas Senate Bill 6, signed on 20 June 2025, established a regime for loads of seventy-five megawatts and above, requiring new transmission-level connections to install equipment permitting remote curtailment during firm load shed events. These reforms matter enormously for whether the build-out raises household bills. They are also decisions taken hundreds of miles from any affected backyard.

Then there is the fiscal layer, which quietly converts a public choice into an accounting one. Good Jobs First has documented that most states subsidise data centres through sales and use tax exemptions on hardware and software, some lasting as long as forty years, alongside property tax abatements, and calculates that public subsidy runs to roughly two million dollars for every permanent job created. Abatements and payment-in-lieu-of-taxes arrangements are typically negotiated by development authorities rather than legislatures. At the top of the stack sits Executive Order 14318, signed on 23 July 2025, directing federal agencies to streamline permitting, identify federal land for siting and expedite environmental reviews for qualifying projects. Every one of these levers is legitimate in itself. Stacked together, they mean that by the time a proposal reaches a county board, most of the consequential variables have already been fixed elsewhere.

The Boundary Problem in a Rural County

This is where the argument stops being about zoning and becomes something older. Democratic theory has a name for the difficulty at the centre of the data centre fight: the boundary problem. In 1983 the political theorist Frederick Whelan set it out with uncomfortable clarity. Democracy is a method by which a group makes decisions, but it offers no democratic method for deciding who belongs to the group; any vote on the boundaries of the demos must be taken by a demos already constituted, which places the foundational question outside democratic determination. Robert Dahl, who framed the same difficulty a decade earlier, could find no satisfying escape from it.

One candidate answer is the all-affected-interests principle: those affected by a collective decision should have a say in making it. Robert Goodin, examining it in Philosophy and Public Affairs, treated the principle as the most promising basis for constituting a demos while showing how radically expansive it becomes once taken seriously, since almost any decision affects almost everyone at some remove. Sarah Song, writing in International Theory, argued the other way, that the demos should be bounded by the state, precisely because affectedness is too elastic to draw workable lines. The debate is unresolved for good reasons. But the data centre is an unusually clean instance of the mismatch it describes.

Consider the footprints. A hyperscale campus draws on an aquifer that obeys hydrology rather than municipal boundaries; its cooling demand, at the upper end of industry estimates, can reach five million gallons a day, comparable to a city of fifty thousand. Its electrical load falls on a regional transmission system, and PJM's footprint alone spans thirteen states and the District of Columbia. Data centres consumed about 4.4 per cent of American electricity in 2023, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory's report for the Department of Energy, and are projected to reach between 6.7 and twelve per cent by 2028. Emissions travel with the wind; xAI sited turbines for its second Memphis supercomputer across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, while the computing sat in Tennessee. Ratepayer costs fall on a customer class defined by a utility's service territory. Not one of these footprints coincides with the electorate of a county board of commissioners.

The subsidiarity principle, familiar from European constitutional law and Catholic social teaching, holds that decisions should be taken at the lowest level competent to take them. It is usually invoked for localism, and here it is often assumed to settle the matter in favour of the county. But subsidiarity contains its own limit, and the limit is competence. A township of 2,200 people cannot competently allocate a regional grid's capacity, and should not have to. Equally, a state utility commission cannot competently decide what a particular hillside means to the people who live beneath it. The failure is not that decisions are made too high or too low, but that they are distributed across levels in a way that lets each venue treat the questions it is worst placed to answer as somebody else's problem.

Elinor Ostrom, whose fieldwork on commons governance won her the Nobel prize in economics in 2009, derived design principles for institutions that manage shared resources without collapsing. Two are directly relevant: that the boundaries of the resource and of the group entitled to use it be clearly defined and congruent with local conditions, and that most individuals affected by operational rules be able to participate in modifying them. Measured against those principles, American data centre siting fails not because it is too democratic or too little, but because the people bound by the rules and the people entitled to change them are systematically different sets of people.

The Strongest Case Against the Veto

It would be easy, and dishonest, to leave the argument there. The case for local control over land use has a bleak record, and anyone who wants to strengthen community authority over data centres should sit with it.

The most rigorous account is Neighborhood Defenders, the 2019 study by Katherine Levine Einstein, David Glick and Maxwell Palmer, which examined thousands of participants in local land-use proceedings and found that the people who turn up to oppose development are not representative of their communities. They are disproportionately older, whiter, wealthier and far more likely to be homeowners; they oppose new housing considerably more strongly than their neighbours do; and the participatory institutions built to democratise planning reliably amplify their voices. The result has been a decades-long housing shortage borne overwhelmingly by people who never got to attend the meeting because they did not yet live in the town.

The same dynamic has kneecapped the energy transition. The Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia found that by the end of 2024 at least 459 counties and municipalities across forty-four states had adopted severe local restrictions on siting renewable energy, a sixteen per cent rise in a year, and identified 498 contested projects across forty-nine states. Between 2018 and 2023, at least thirty per cent of utility-scale wind and solar projects were cancelled during siting, largely because of community opposition, local ordinances and zoning. If your principle is that affected communities may refuse infrastructure they did not choose, that principle has already been road-tested, and used most effectively against solar farms and transmission lines.

The pro-build response also has a legitimate core. Matthew de Boer, writing in the Fordham Law Review in 2026, notes that states have aggressively pursued data centres with incentives while declining to regulate their siting, leaving municipalities to manage hyperscale facilities with frameworks designed for warehouses. His proposal is light pre-emption modelled on housing reform: not the elimination of local authority but its discipline through procedural mandates and objective standards. The Michigan exclusionary zoning doctrine that defeated Saline Township exists for a reason. A jurisdiction with no industrial zoning anywhere within it has, in effect, pre-committed to refusing every industrial use, and a legal system that permitted that at every boundary would make nothing buildable anywhere.

The honest position, then, is that “who decides” genuinely cuts both ways, and that a general right of local veto is not a principle anyone should want applied consistently. Which is precisely why the boundary problem is the right frame. The complaint from Coweta County and Saline Township is not, at its strongest, that localities should be able to refuse anything. It is that the procedure by which these decisions are made produces answers no defensible theory of authority endorses: hearings held after entitlements are secured, ordinances drafted by the applicant's lobbyist, referendum rights extinguished by declining to amend a map, consequences distributed across airsheds, watersheds and ratepayer classes that no ballot anywhere encompasses. That is not the tyranny of the neighbourhood defender. It is the absence of any forum in which the actual question can be put.

Making the Franchise Fit the Footprint

What would it take for a decision of this kind to be legitimate rather than merely lawful? The reforms already circulating are more modest than the theory suggests, and worth taking seriously precisely because they are achievable.

The first is informational, and nearly consensual. Public Citizen's recommendations amount to a simple proposition: officials should not sign non-disclosure agreements with private developers about matters they will later vote on, developers should disclose their identity, projected water and energy use, procurement plans and financial incentives before entitlements are granted, and existing agreements should be published. Attorneys quoted in reporting on Oklahoma's secrecy deals have questioned whether such agreements are even enforceable against public bodies. Pima County changed its own policies on NDAs and environmental review in September 2025, after what its supervisors called lessons learned from Project Blue. And the standard objection, that transparency of this kind is commercially unworkable, has now been answered by the only sort of party who could answer it. On 18 March 2026 Microsoft announced that it would stop using non-disclosure agreements with local governments for data centre projects anywhere in the world and would terminate those already in force, saying that transparency with the communities where it operates was paramount. That followed a commitment in January to pay the full cost of the power its facilities draw, decline local property tax breaks, replenish more water than it consumes and invest in local training. Microsoft is so far the exception, and should be called one: Public Citizen records that every other major technology company continues the practice. A single exception is still enough to dispose of the claim that the practice is necessary. Nothing about the AI build-out requires that the people voting know less than the people lobbying them.

The second is jurisdictional, and follows from the boundary problem. If the harms of a facility cross municipal lines, notice, standing and formal comment rights should cross them too. There is no technical obstacle to requiring that a rezoning application within a defined radius of a boundary trigger notice and consultative standing for the adjacent jurisdiction, or that a groundwater withdrawal above a threshold trigger review at the level of the aquifer rather than the parcel. That would not give neighbours a veto. It would give them a seat, the minimum the all-affected-interests principle can be read to demand without becoming unbounded.

The third is fiscal, and has the most momentum. Large-load tariffs and dedicated rate classes of the kind Minnesota, Oregon and Texas have adopted move the ratepayer question into a proceeding where it can be argued explicitly. If a facility's grid costs are ring-fenced to the customer that causes them, the county board's decision becomes one about land, water and noise rather than about everyone else's electricity bill, and the venue mismatch shrinks. The same logic applies to abatements: a forty-year tax exemption negotiated by a development authority binds successor councils and their electorates, and ought to require the deliberative treatment any long-dated public borrowing would.

New York's executive order is a hybrid of all three. It pauses state permits, an exercise of upward authority, while directing Empire State Development to publish a community investment framework within sixty days to guide local negotiations, and the Department of Public Service to prepare a generic environmental impact statement so proposals are assessed against a consistent standard rather than each locality improvising. Whether that produces better decisions or merely relocates them is unclear. That it exists in place of the statute the legislature actually passed, and at more than twice the legislature's threshold, is a reminder that the reforms are governed by the same question as the projects. But it recognises that a county board asked to evaluate a nine-hundred-megawatt load with a planning staff of a dozen is not being empowered. It is being handed a decision it has no capacity to make and then blamed for the outcome.

A Judge in Newnan

On 5 May 2026, Citizens for Rural Coweta filed a petition in Coweta County Superior Court asking a judge to declare the rezoning invalid. Their argument is that the commissioners disregarded the county's own comprehensive plan, which designated the land for rural places rather than industry, and did so despite the site's groundwater recharge areas, wetlands and watershed. It is, in essence, a claim that the county broke a promise to itself.

There is a coda to the vote that is easy to miss, and it may be the sharpest thing in this account. In May 2026, weeks after rezoning the Sargent land, the Coweta commissioners adopted a moratorium on any future data centre project in the county. Residents said it was too little and far too late; one likened it to shutting the barn door once the horses were out. But consider what the sequence establishes. The county was entirely capable of pausing. It held the instrument, understood how to use it and did use it, one decision after the only decision that mattered. Coweta's future self is now protected in a way its present self declined to be, and the difference between those two counties is not one of law, or capacity, or information, or public sentiment. It is a difference of timing, which is to say a difference of nothing at all except that the applicant arrived first.

The venue is telling. Having lost in the only forum where they could vote, the residents have moved to the one forum where nobody votes at all. That is the recurring shape of these disputes. In Prince William County the decisive intervention was a judge's reading of a notice statute, and it killed the largest project in the country. In Saline Township a consent judgment did what the electorate had refused to do, and a second judge declined to reopen it. In Tucson a unanimous rejection was routed around by a county land sale and a corporation commission vote, and the next serious challenge came from a state attorney general. Litigation has become the default civic instrument of the AI build-out because it is the only instrument that reliably crosses the boundaries everything else respects.

There is a version of this story in which the residents are simply wrong: in which a county gains a tax base and a state gains capacity it badly needs, and a few hundred households absorb a view they dislike, which is roughly what infrastructure has always asked of somebody. I do not think that version is obviously false. What is false is the assumption that the current procedure is capable of telling us which version is right. A process in which the applicant's lobbyist helps draft the ordinance, the developer's identity is concealed behind a shell entity, commissioners meet privately with one side and by group email with the other, and a referendum right can be extinguished by declining to amend a map, is not a process that produces a trustworthy answer to a hard question. It produces an answer and calls it settled.

The families in Coweta County who moved out of Atlanta to be surrounded by trees are not, in the end, asking for a veto over American AI policy. They are asking something democratic theory has never fully answered and American land-use law has stopped even trying to: what makes a decision about a place belong to the people who live in it. Nine hundred megawatts is arriving either way. Whether it arrives as something a community decided or as something that happened to it is a difference no amount of tax revenue will retire, and it is being settled right now, county by county, in rooms that most of the affected will never enter.

References

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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