I am finding at 50+ that fitness is more of a necessity than what it used to be. When I was younger, and into fitness, it was more so I could look better. Getting healthier and feeling better was sort of a side effect. Now that I'm older it has turned around. I am doing it to be healthier and feel better, and a side effect is that my body has changed.

In my experience I find that consistency is the most important thing with all fitness activities. It's sort of like learning a new skill. You have to keep at it to let it develop and become part of your life. It isn't just about the physical activity or eating better (although those things are very important). There is also the mental side that is just as important as doing the things. You have to get your mind used to finding the time to make it part of your life.

With all fitness things it is good to start off slow and easy. It isn't terribly important how much you do at first, as long as it keeps repeating. Plan it, commit to doing it, do it. It gives you an idea of how much you can handle, and gets your mind used to doing it.

If it's too easy, add a little more to the next until it is harder. If it is too much, don't push too hard. Always try not to do too much too soon. Injury is very discouraging. Find the balance between too easy and too much. Be committed to your routine, but at the same time also don't be too rigid about it. A missed day is history when the next day begins. Forget about it and move on. Never stop educating yourself about fitness, and never be afraid to try new things. Let the routine evolve as you learn more through education and experience.

If you keep at it, and keep adding a little more, you will inevitably start to feel better. I would never say that it is easy, but it does get easier, and more enjoyable.

There will be times when it seems that all the effort is for nothing. Especially in the beginning. You have to get your mind around not seeing or feeling the results from your efforts for a time. I read a term awhile ago that stuck with me. It was: Have Faith In The Process. Don't get discouraged by the lack of results in the beginning.

I find it very useful to track everything you do. It doesn't need to be complicated. It can be a tracker on your wrist, an app, or a notebook and a pen. Even if you are only recording time, date, what you did, and how much you did. It is important to have something to look back on and say, wow, I remember when THAT was all I could manage. The only person you should ever compare yourself to or compete with is your past self.

I’m a little bit sad in myself because I did not manage my time in order to finish watching all of attack on Titan in time for the theater showing, and so I will either have to watch the final movie for the first time blind, or I will have to Watch some sort of abridged season four. Oh well. This really isn’t nearly the worst thing in the world lol.

• INSURGENT THOUGHT: Downloadable library of digital books on philosophy, “anarchist shit”, mysticism, and more. Instant download for me despite my allergy to extensive screen-reading. Via Warren Ellis' latest ORBITAL OPERATIONS.

• Also via Orbital Operations: THE NIGHTLY RADIO.

• Also, also: L'IL FACTORY BOOKS!

• PAPER BULLETS: 110 Years of Political Stickers from Around the World by Catherine Tedford, dropping December 2026 from PM Press.

• The Bird by Ahmed Naji.

#radar

Freundinnen & Freunde der Weisheit! Pausen machen uns nicht nur kreativer, sie helfen uns auch, bessere Entscheidungen zu treffen. Lasst uns also ab und zu innehalten!

Unsere Arbeitswelt, die Tempo und Dauerleistung glorifiziert, wird Pausieren oft als Schwäche missverstanden. Doch laut der Innovationsberaterin Natalie Nixon liegt genau darin eine bislang unterschätzte Stärke: Strategisches Innehalten fördert nicht nur Klarheit und Kreativität, sondern steigert nachweislich auch die Qualität von Entscheidungen und Prozessen. Der Vergleich mit der Formel 1 bringt es auf den Punkt: Wer nicht gezielt bremst, riskiert, in der Kurve die Kontrolle zu verlieren.

Eine bewusst eingesetzte Pause ermöglicht vier zentrale Effekte: Sie schafft Perspektivwechsel, fördert die Vernetzung von Gedanken im Gehirn, sorgt für Ausrichtung auf die eigenen Werte und verhindert vorschnelle Fehlentscheidungen. Nixon empfiehlt konkrete Formate: eine 2-Minuten-Reflexion vor wichtigen Entscheidungen, eine 10-minütige Tagesrückschau und ein wöchentlicher 30-Minuten-Block für strategisches Denken. Diese einfachen Habits fördern langfristig nicht nur die Produktivität, sondern auch die emotionale Widerstandskraft.

Führungskräfte, die Pausen bewusst in ihren Alltag integrieren, berichten von besserer Kommunikation, weniger Korrekturschleifen und klarerer Zielorientierung. Der Schlüssel liegt im Perspektivwechsel: Nicht die ständige Aktivität bringt Spitzenleistung, sondern die Fähigkeit, zur richtigen Zeit innezuhalten. Wer sich regelmässig vom Alltag zurückzieht, schafft Raum für das, was wirklich zählt – und handelt danach gezielter, klarer und erfolgreicher.

Denkanstoss zum Wochenbeginn

„Ideologen sind Leute, die glauben, dass die Menschheit besser sei als der Mensch.“ – Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969)

ProductivityPorn-Tipp der Woche: Digital detox (Geräte bewusst nutzen)

Es ist zu einfach, sich von Mails, Social Media oder Nachrichten ablenken zu lassen. Plane feste Zeiten, in denen du bewusst offline gehst, um dich voll auf deine Arbeit oder deine Erholung zu konzentrieren.

Aus dem Archiv: Micro-Habits – Kleine Gewohnheiten mit grosser Wirkung?

Micro-Habits gelten als einfache, aber wirkungsvolle Strategien, um das Wohlbefinden im Alltag zu verbessern. Es sind minimalistische Gewohnheiten, die so klein sind, dass sie kaum Überwindung kosten, aber langfristig dennoch Veränderungen bewirken sollen. In den letzten Jahren hat sich dieser Ansatz in der Produktivitäts- und Selbstoptimierungsszene etabliert. Die Idee: Wer sich jeden Tag nur wenige Minuten einer positiven Handlung widmet, entwickelt nachhaltige Routinen, die Körper und Geist guttun. Doch wie wirksam sind diese kleinen Habits wirklich? Während einige von ihnen gut durch wissenschaftliche Studien gestützt werden, fehlt für andere der eindeutige Beleg.

weiterlesen …

Vielen Dank, dass Du Dir die Zeit genommen hast, diesen Newsletter zu lesen. Ich hoffe, die Inhalte konnten Dich inspirieren und Dir wertvolle Impulse für Dein (digitales) Leben geben. Bleib neugierig und hinterfrage, was Dir begegnet!

EpicMind – Weisheiten für das digitale Leben „EpicMind“ (kurz für „Epicurean Mindset“) ist mein Blog und Newsletter, der sich den Themen Lernen, Produktivität, Selbstmanagement und Technologie widmet – alles gewürzt mit einer Prise Philosophie.

Disclaimer Teile dieses Texts wurden mit Deepl Write (Korrektorat und Lektorat) überarbeitet. Für die Recherche in den erwähnten Werken/Quellen und in meinen Notizen wurde NotebookLM von Google verwendet. Das Artikel-Bild wurde mit ChatGPT erstellt und anschliessend nachbearbeitet.

Topic #Newsletter

海岸は、いつ来ても曇っていた。 空は明るいのに、光だけがどこか遠くに置き忘れられている。波は低く、砂浜は乾いていて、潮の匂いより先にコンクリートの冷えた匂いが鼻に入る。

私はそこで、ずっと歩いていた。

道は海に沿っているのに、海を見るための道ではなかった。 むしろ、何かを遠ざけるための道に見えた。

夕方になると、鳥が急にまっすぐ飛び始める。 それまで好き勝手に漂っていた群れが、ある瞬間だけ同じ方向へ細い線になっていく。巣へ帰る時間なのだと誰かが言っていた。あまりにも迷いがなくて、見ていると少し恥ずかしくなる。

風は、その頃だけ足元に来た。 上着は揺れないのに、靴紐だけが撫でられる。

海岸沿いには、用途のわからない窪みがいくつもあった。 そのうち一つは、牛乳を積んだトラックがぴったり入る幅をしていた。実際に入っているところを見たことはない。ただ、誰もが「あれは牛乳のためだ」と知っていた。

少し先に、異様に長い直線がある。 台車が勢いをつけるための場所だ、と教えられた。 ロビーから、ときどき音のしない台車が出てくる。誰も押していないように見えるのに、一定の速度で流れていく。そのたび、近くのパンフレット立てが風を受けて、ガラスが割れたみたいな音を立てる。

そこには病院があった。 だが、入り口のドアは一度も開いているのを見たことがない。

以前、訪問販売の男がそう説明しながら点滴を売りつけてきた。透明な袋の中で液体がゆっくり揺れていた。私は断ったが、男は「呼吸に点数がつく時代ですから」と言った。

数日後、本当に通知が来た。 今日の呼吸は74点。 改善の余地があります。

ポストには、自分の呼吸をグラフにした紙も入っていた。波形がやけに美しく、見ているうちに、自分の肺ではなく遠くの海流の記録に思えてくる。

高台には、いつも同じ子どもが立っている。 ツルッとした顔で、双眼鏡も持たずにこちらを見ている。監視、と誰かが呼んでいたが、何を監視しているのかは分からない。

「記憶力良いですね」

歩いていると、ときどきそう言われる。 誰に言われたのか、毎回思い出せない。

敷地の境目あたりには、ずっと寝かされたままの一輪車がある。 みんな少し遠回りして避ける。雨の日も、風の日も、誰も触れない。ある朝、年寄りがその前で静かに拝んでいるのを見た。理由を聞くと、「転ばなかったから」と答えた。

その近くの掲示板では、リュックサックが喋っていた。

今日は鳥が多いため、迂回ルートを推奨します。

紙にそう書いてあるだけなのに、たしかにリュックサックの声だった。

夜になると、遠くのガソリンスタンドが見える。 窓枠の中にだけ存在する、小さな都市みたいだった。白い光が静かで、給油している人たちはみんな、水槽の魚みたいに縦の動きをしていた。

海岸の途中には、警察がただ歩き回るだけの広い空き地もある。事件は起きない。だが彼らは毎日いる。以前、雷が真横に落ちた管理人を見たことがある。その翌週から、管理人室には本人の代わりに立派なボクシンググローブが飾られるようになった。休みの日には、その隣にアロハシャツも吊るされる。

いつからか、駅で寝ていた人たちが少しずつこちらへ流れてきていた。 曇り空の下で、彼らはみんな同じ方向を向いていた。

私も歩き続けた。

草むらからは、見えるほど明確に酸素が出ていた。 緑色の泡みたいなものが、地面から静かに湧いていた。

そして夕方、とうとう公園を見つけた。

入り口には赤い富士山が飾られていて、その横に永久機関の偽物が置かれていた。 ゆっくり回るだけで、どこにも動力が繋がっていない。

門は開いていた。

中は、果てが見えなかった。

遊具も道も木もある。 だが、奥へ行くほど輪郭が曖昧になる。遠くにエレベーターだけが見えて、扉には新しいなぞなぞが貼ってある。

屋上から落ちてきたらしいリンゴが、地面で潰れていた。

私は少しだけ立ち止まり、それから入っていった。

背後では、海の音がしていたはずだった。 けれど、いつの間にか、自分が足で地面を蹴る音しか聞こえなくなっていた。

John Steinbach opened the envelope at his kitchen table in Manassas, Virginia, and stared at a number that did not make sense. His January 2026 electricity bill came in at $281. The month before, he had paid something close to $100, the sort of bill he had been paying for years. He checked the decimal point. He read the meter reading twice. He was not running a grow-op in his garage. He had not left the heater jammed on. He was, as far as he could tell, living the same quiet suburban life he had always lived, in a house some twenty miles from the centre of what the industry calls Data Center Alley, the densest cluster of server farms on planet Earth.

“It's just so far beyond any bill that I've ever had,” he told Consumer Reports, in an investigation published in March 2026 that has become, in the months since, something close to a Rosetta Stone for understanding the strange new arithmetic of American household utilities. His bill had not tripled because he was using triple the electricity. It had tripled because of the vast silicon and concrete apparatus humming away in warehouses up the highway, the apparatus that now draws roughly 40 per cent of Virginia's electricity, the apparatus that is training and running the artificial intelligence models the rest of the world uses to summarise emails and generate images of astronauts on horseback.

The bill arrived, in other words, because somewhere in the invisible plumbing of the grid, a decision had been made about whose electricity this was, who would pay for the transmission upgrades required to keep the GPUs cool and the data centres fed, and who would absorb the shock when demand outstripped supply. That decision was not made by John Steinbach. It was not made by his neighbours. It was not made by anyone on his street, his block, or his county council. And that, more than the $181 increase, is the story.

A Gold Rush With Someone Else's Gold

The United States is currently in the middle of the largest private infrastructure build-out since the interstate highway system, and almost nobody who lives in its path has been asked to approve any part of it. According to Fortune, data centres now account for half of all new American electricity demand. According to Consumer Reports, residential electricity prices rose 7.1 per cent in 2025 alone, and in the Mid-Atlantic corridor served by the PJM grid, the wholesale auction that sets capacity prices reached record highs, resulting in average bill increases of more than $17 a month for Baltimore customers of Exelon's BGE utility, a figure that makes Steinbach's triple-digit leap look almost modest by comparison.

Behind these averages sits a deceptively simple question: when a hyperscaler, say, Amazon or Microsoft or Google or Meta, builds a two-gigawatt campus in a rural county, who pays for the substations, the transmission lines, the combined-cycle gas plants and the grid upgrades required to keep it running? Traditionally, utilities answered that question by spreading the cost across their entire rate base, which is to say, across every household and small business in the service territory. This is the legal framework that built America's electricity system, and it is also the legal framework that is now quietly transferring billions of dollars a year from retirees and single parents and small restaurants to the balance sheets of the richest corporations in history.

Ari Peskoe, director of the Electricity Law Initiative at Harvard Law School, has spent years documenting how this mechanism works in practice, and his conclusion is as blunt as it is unflattering: ratepayers, not shareholders, are funding the build-out. Kasia Tarczynska, a researcher at Good Jobs First, has traced the subsidy flows state by state and estimates that data centres are extracting roughly a billion dollars a year in tax breaks in Virginia and Texas alone, a figure that does not even include the uncosted externalities of rate shifting. The subsidies are public. The profits are private. The bills, when they arrive, arrive at the addresses of people like John Steinbach, who did not know there was a deal, let alone that he was on the hook for it.

The Mechanism, in Plain English

The mechanism is worth understanding, because it is the pivot on which the entire community-cost argument turns, and because utility regulators have for years hidden it behind a thicket of acronyms and rate-case filings that discourage lay scrutiny.

When a hyperscaler signs a contract with a utility for, say, a one-gigawatt data centre, that utility must deliver one gigawatt of firm, twenty-four-hour-a-day power. A gigawatt is roughly the annual consumption of 750,000 American homes. To deliver it, the utility must build or expand generation capacity (gas turbines, in most cases, because renewables are intermittent and nuclear is too slow), string new transmission lines, and upgrade substations. These are enormous capital projects, and utilities recoup their costs by applying to a state public service commission to raise rates.

The key word in that last sentence is “rates,” plural. American utility regulation does not typically require the cost of infrastructure built for a specific customer to be charged to that specific customer. Instead, it is socialised across the rate base on the grounds that everyone benefits from a robust grid. This assumption, reasonable in an era when new load came from population growth and air conditioning, becomes surreal when the new load is a single fenced-in campus drawing more power than a medium-sized city and producing no goods, no services and no jobs beyond a few dozen technicians.

In September 2025, Dominion Energy, Virginia's largest utility, formally acknowledged the problem by proposing a new rate class specifically for data centres. It was a partial concession, and critics including the Piedmont Environmental Council argued it did not go nearly far enough. In the 2026 legislative session that followed, Delegate John McAuliff pitched HB 503, a bill that would prevent utilities from putting the cost of transmission lines and generation serving data centres onto residential ratepayers. Governor Glenn Youngkin's subsequent amendments to related legislation instructed the State Corporation Commission to “take all measures to reasonably ensure” that data-centre costs “are not being subsidized by other customers of the utility.”

These are real legislative interventions, and they represent the first serious attempt in any American state to restore the polluter-pays principle to grid economics. They are also, so far, largely reactive. Nearly 600 data centres are already operational in Virginia. More than 100 are under construction or proposed. The horse is not so much bolting as already over the horizon, trailed by a slow-moving legislature and a furious electorate.

The Water Question, and the Silence That Follows It

In January 2026, Al Jazeera published a column by the Egyptian-British commentator Omar Shabana with the understated headline “AI's growing thirst for water is becoming a public health risk.” The column set out a case that, while partially familiar to climate reporters, had not quite been assembled with such clarity before. AI data centres, Shabana noted, are projected to increase global water usage from 1.1 billion to 6.6 billion cubic metres by 2027. Microsoft's own 2023 environmental report acknowledged that 41 per cent of its water withdrawals came from areas under water stress. Google's figure was 15 per cent from high-scarcity regions. And those were the self-reported numbers.

The public health argument ran as follows. Only 0.5 per cent of the water on Earth is fresh. When data centres siphon millions of gallons a day from municipal or aquifer sources in drought-prone regions, households are pushed to ration. Rationing means prioritising drinking and cooking over washing hands, food and bodies. The World Health Organization has long documented the correlation between reduced hygiene and the spread of cholera and diarrhoeal disease, conditions that disproportionately kill children under five, who bear 84 per cent of the global burden. “Although it is too early to draw direct causal links between AI data centres and water-related diseases,” Shabana wrote, “the known facts make this a significant concern.” It was, in WIRED's parlance, the softest possible framing of the hardest possible claim.

The specifics are where the argument gets teeth. In Newton County, Georgia, residents near a Meta facility reported discoloured, sediment-filled water in their taps. In Fayette County, similar complaints surfaced. In Phoenix, Arizona, Consumer Reports documented a facility consuming 385 million gallons a year for evaporative cooling, with projections rising to 3.7 billion gallons annually, in a desert city whose principal water source, the Colorado River, has been in declared shortage since 2021. A 2023 academic study led by researchers at the University of California, Riverside, estimated that a single ChatGPT conversation of 10 to 50 queries can consume roughly half a litre of water once electricity generation is factored in, a figure that sounds trivial until you multiply by a billion users.

The intellectual scandal, such as it is, concerns the asymmetry of visibility. The hyperscalers know precisely how much water their cooling towers consume; they metre it. The communities whose aquifers are being drawn down typically do not. In 25 of 31 Virginia communities surveyed by journalists in 2025, data-centre operators had insisted on non-disclosure agreements with local governments before revealing the details of their water or energy needs. These NDAs, enforceable under state commercial-confidentiality statutes, have meant that residents have often learned of a pending project's footprint only after construction began.

The Noise, the Heat, the Light

If the grid-rate and water stories are the invisible costs of the data-centre boom, the sensory costs are the ones that have, perhaps predictably, driven the fiercest backlash. Data centres, despite a reputation for clean-room minimalism, are loud. They are warm. They are often lit like small airports, twenty-four hours a day, on land that was once farm or forest.

In Southaven, Mississippi, Jason Haley stopped being able to sleep with the windows open in August 2025. The noise came from the direction of the old power-plant site half a mile from his house, where Elon Musk's xAI had begun erecting a cluster of natural-gas turbines to supply its Colossus supercomputer across the state line in Memphis. The turbines, as Haley described them to Mississippi Today, sounded like “a leaf blower” that ran for days at a stretch, all night, every night. Eighteen of them are currently operating. Fifty-nine are planned. xAI is awaiting state permits for the remainder. Whatever those permits say, the noise does not stop for them.

In Chandler, Arizona, a city of 280,000 just outside Phoenix, the battle over data-centre noise began as far back as 2014, when a million-square-foot facility produced a steady drone that drove residents to the council chambers. The city eventually adopted an ordinance targeting data-centre noise specifically. In December 2025, the Chandler City Council unanimously voted down the rezoning application for a proposed AI data centre, the kind of decisive “no” that, a few years ago, would have been almost unimaginable for a facility that promised capital investment and a handful of jobs.

Diana Dietz, who lives several miles from a QTS data-centre campus in Fayetteville, Georgia, told Consumer Reports she was not especially opposed to technology. What she objected to was the parade of earth-moving machinery through her neighbourhood at all hours. “You've got these giant excavation-style dump trucks two minutes from my house,” she said. The trucks, like the turbines, like the substation transformers and the chiller plants, are the visible evidence of a fact that AI boosterism tends to obscure: intelligence in a cloud is, in the physical world, heavy machinery.

The Regulatory Vacuum

The reason these stories keep happening in such similar shapes, in Manassas and Memphis and Chandler and Fayetteville, is that the United States has no coherent federal framework for siting AI infrastructure, and most states have not yet caught up. Zoning law is largely a matter of county and municipal jurisdiction. Utility regulation is a state matter, usually delegated to a public service commission whose commissioners are appointed, not elected, and whose rate-case proceedings are structured for expert testimony rather than public comment. Environmental permitting is split between the Environmental Protection Agency, state environmental agencies, and, in the case of water, a byzantine patchwork of river compacts, aquifer management districts and groundwater statutes that vary wildly from one jurisdiction to the next.

Into this regulatory swiss cheese rolls the hyperscaler, armed with non-disclosure agreements, a pre-negotiated economic-development package, and a timeline that counts in months rather than years. Local officials, often in rural counties with shrinking tax bases, see a multibillion-dollar investment and a handful of permanent jobs, and they sign. By the time the trucks arrive and the neighbours notice, the horse is out of the barn and several hundred megawatts of load have been added to a grid that was not designed for it.

Data Center Watch, a tracking group that has been cataloguing community responses since 2023, reported in early 2026 that roughly $64 billion worth of data-centre developments had been blocked or delayed by grassroots opposition across the United States. There are now 142 activist groups organised in 24 states. Twenty-five major projects were cancelled in 2025 alone. Twenty-one of those cancellations came in the second half of the year. In Wisconsin, sustained local opposition caused Microsoft to abandon plans for a 244-acre campus. In Brandy Station, Virginia, the Culpeper County Planning Commission unanimously denied rezoning for a $12 billion project in June 2024, a rare and galvanising rebuke. In King George County, Virginia, a newly elected board of supervisors reopened negotiations on Amazon's $6 billion campus.

These are not fringe events. They are becoming a pattern. And the pattern is, increasingly, that the hyperscalers are discovering the hard way that the social contract around infrastructure cannot be replaced with a press release.

Enter the Investors

In April 2026, Reuters reporters Simon Jessop, Valerie Volcovici and Supantha Mukherjee published a piece that marks, in retrospect, a turning point in the story. Amazon, Microsoft and Google had each, the article noted, recently abandoned multibillion-dollar data-centre projects in the face of community opposition. Now, shareholders were asking why. More than a dozen investors, ahead of spring annual meetings, were filing resolutions demanding disclosure of water consumption, power usage and community engagement strategies.

Trillium Asset Management, a Boston-based firm managing more than $4 billion, filed a resolution with Alphabet in December 2025 seeking clarity on how the company would meet its existing climate goals given the surging electricity needs of its data centres. Andrea Ranger at Trillium said the company had left investors “in the dark.” Jason Qi, lead technology analyst at Calvert Research and Management, offered the kind of restrained corporate-stewardship rebuke that reads as devastating only when you remember that Calvert sits on hundreds of billions in institutional assets: “We haven't seen them disclosing enough about their water consumption (and the) impact on the local community.” Green Century Capital Management joined the chorus.

The hyperscalers' responses were, on the whole, not reassuring. Microsoft said sustainability was “a core value” and that it was “proactively addressing sustainability challenges.” Google declined to comment. Meta did not return the Reuters reporters' request. Dan Diorio, vice-president of the Data Center Coalition, the industry's lobbying arm, offered what is probably the clearest articulation of where this argument is actually headed: “Being upfront with them regarding energy and water use, and so that residents can understand that this project will not stress their resources... and will protect them as rate payers is crucial.”

That is not the language of a confident industry. That is the language of an industry that has just realised its permits depend on the people whose aquifers it is draining and whose electricity bills it is inflating. The pressure, importantly, is now coming from two directions at once: from below, in the form of local activism and abandoned projects; and from above, in the form of fiduciary-duty shareholder resolutions from firms that can no longer pretend community opposition is an idiosyncratic, one-off risk.

The Social Licence to Operate

In March 2026, the World Economic Forum published a piece in its Agenda section with the title “Why AI and data-centre growth risks stalling without a social licence to operate.” The phrase “social licence to operate” originates in the mining industry, where it was coined in the 1990s to describe the informal consent that host communities grant (or withhold) from extractive projects, regardless of what formal permits say. In mining, the social licence is the difference between a functioning copper mine and a blockaded access road.

The WEF piece argued, in language calibrated for an audience of Davos attendees rather than Virginia ratepayers, that the AI industry was now facing precisely this kind of legitimacy test. “Understanding the importance of a social licence to operate is becoming critical as AI infrastructure, especially data centres, outpaces governance,” the piece observed. “Growing opposition across regulators, politicians and communities is already driving permit blocks and constraining scale.” Communities were not, it argued, “passive hosts” but “stakeholders with leverage.”

The piece then laid out what the industry needed to do to earn this licence: transparency about energy and water use; stable electricity prices; responsible water management; meaningful job pathways; enhanced local infrastructure. It was, in effect, an industry trade body admitting in print what the activists in Chandler and Brandy Station and Culpeper had been saying for years. If you do not earn consent, you do not get to build. If you get to build anyway, you will not get to build the next one. And the next one is where the money is.

The framing is useful because it reorients the ethical conversation away from the hypothetical harms of AI, the rogue superintelligences of science-fiction discourse, and towards the concrete, present, measurable harms of AI infrastructure. It is much easier to argue about whether GPT-7 will end civilisation than to explain to a state legislature why a Microsoft substation should or should not be socialised across the residential rate base. The social-licence framing does the explaining for us: it names the transaction, names the parties, and names the consent that was or was not given.

What Meaningful Consent Would Actually Look Like

If the social-licence argument is to be more than a rhetorical flourish, it has to be translated into institutional mechanisms with actual enforcement teeth. The literature on community consent in infrastructure, drawn from mining, pipelines, wind farms and landfill siting, suggests at least five such mechanisms, each of which is already being tested somewhere in the American data-centre debate.

The first is rate segregation, the Virginia HB 503 model, in which the cost of new generation and transmission built for a specific class of customer is recovered only from that class, rather than socialised across all ratepayers. This is the narrowest but most important reform, because it removes the hidden subsidy that currently makes data centres appear cheaper to host than they actually are. If hyperscalers had to pay the full incremental cost of the grid infrastructure they require, fewer speculative projects would pencil out, and the ones that did would bring with them a more defensible economic case.

The second is mandatory impact disclosure. HB 496 in Virginia, which would require localities to consider annual water-consumption estimates in rezoning decisions, is a modest but meaningful example. A more muscular version would require an environmental and infrastructure impact statement, subject to public hearing, for any data-centre project above a threshold size, modelled on the National Environmental Policy Act but administered at state level with specific provisions for aquifer drawdown, peak-load demand, noise contours and light pollution.

The third is community benefit agreements, the legal instrument used widely in urban development to bind a developer to specific commitments to the host community. In the data-centre context, a CBA might include funded local-grid upgrades, guaranteed rate stability for residential customers, water conservation investments, noise mitigation standards, a public education levy and a seat for community representatives on an ongoing oversight body. These agreements are enforceable contracts, not voluntary promises. The Chandler ordinance targeting data-centre noise is, in effect, a unilateral CBA imposed by a city after losing patience with the developer's assurances.

The fourth is meaningful public hearings with teeth, which sounds anodyne until one realises how often current hearings function as information sessions at which decisions already made are announced to residents. A hearing with teeth is one where the decision can actually be reversed, where the developer is obliged to answer questions under oath, and where non-disclosure agreements signed in advance by local officials are voided as a matter of public policy. The Culpeper County Planning Commission's unanimous denial in Brandy Station is a model of what this looks like when it works.

The fifth is water impact assessment with a veto right for water authorities, a mechanism borrowed from arid-region agricultural law. In several Western American states, irrigation districts already hold something close to this power over new industrial users. Applying it to data centres would mean that a project proposed in, say, the Phoenix metropolitan area would not simply need a permit from the city; it would need affirmative sign-off from the regional water management district, based on a fifty-year draw projection and a public-health impact assessment of the kind Omar Shabana described in Al Jazeera. This is how water scarcity is managed in places that take water scarcity seriously.

None of these mechanisms individually constitute “consent.” Together, they describe the shape of a regulatory regime in which a data-centre project could not be built until the people whose lives it would change had been informed, consulted, and given the ability to shape or stop it. That is not an anti-AI position. It is the position American infrastructure regulation already holds towards pipelines, landfills and nuclear plants. The hyperscalers have been exempt from it essentially by default, because no legislator anticipated that the data centre would become the dominant form of new industrial development in the country.

The Ratepayer Protection Pledge, and Why It Is Not Enough

In early March 2026, executives from Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta and Anthropic travelled to the White House to sign a document called the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. It was non-binding. It committed signatories to “principles” around transparency and responsible siting. Anthropic additionally pledged to cover electricity-price increases related to its own data-centre development, a gesture that impressed some observers and struck others as the kind of one-off public relations flourish that is easy to make when your data-centre footprint is a small fraction of Microsoft's.

The pledge is worth noting because it is, in effect, the industry's first serious attempt at self-regulation, and because self-regulation is almost always what an industry proposes when it fears the alternative. It is also worth noting because it is inadequate in ways that illustrate why the social-licence framing matters. A pledge without enforcement is an aspiration. A pledge that can be reinterpreted by its signatories is a negotiating document. The mechanisms that would actually protect John Steinbach in Manassas, or Jason Haley in Southaven, or Diana Dietz in Fayetteville, are statutory, not voluntary. They live in utility tariffs, zoning ordinances and environmental statutes, not in White House photo opportunities.

The Question of Who Pays

Return, finally, to John Steinbach's kitchen table, and to the $281 bill that started this story. The question the bill poses is not really about kilowatt-hours. It is about a much older political question: who pays for the infrastructure that powers the new economy? The answer the current system gives, by default, by inertia, by the absence of legislative attention, is that everyone does, apportioned by their share of the residential rate base. The answer the activists in Wisconsin and Virginia and Arizona are demanding is that the beneficiaries of the infrastructure should pay for the infrastructure, which is a principle so uncontroversial it appears in first-year economics textbooks. The reason it does not currently apply to data centres is that the law has not been updated to reflect a world in which a single industrial customer can consume more power than an entire American city.

The hyperscalers have, to their credit, begun to notice. The Reuters report on investor pressure, the WEF piece on social licence, the White House pledge, and the scattered community-benefit agreements now being negotiated in individual counties all suggest an industry that has belatedly realised it cannot continue to build its physical substrate in places that do not want it. What is still missing is a coherent legislative framework that gives communities the tools to say no, or to say yes on specific terms, before the earth-movers arrive.

That framework will arrive, eventually, the way such frameworks always arrive in the American system: through a patchwork of state reforms that eventually force federal harmonisation, driven by the accumulation of lawsuits, news stories, bills like Steinbach's and places like Brandy Station where the planners drew the wrong parcel on the map and the locals remembered they were allowed to vote. Until then, the story will continue to be written in envelopes opened at kitchen tables in towns most of the industry's customers have never heard of, by people whose consent was presumed rather than sought, for a build-out whose bill is still only beginning to come due.

The Cost Is Not Abstract

One of the oddities of covering this beat is how persistently the language used to describe AI infrastructure collapses the physical world into metaphor. We speak of “the cloud,” as though data did not live on spinning disks in concrete boxes. We speak of “compute,” as though it were an abstract quantity rather than a thermodynamic process that converts electricity into heat. We speak of “scaling,” as though the industrial footprint of a two-gigawatt campus were a matter of typography.

The activists in Chandler and the ratepayers in Manassas have done the rest of us a small service by refusing this language. The cost is not abstract. It is $281. It is a leaf-blower noise that does not stop. It is discoloured water in Newton County, Georgia, and a parade of dump trucks outside Fayetteville. It is a Microsoft cooling tower pulling from an aquifer that was already in decline, and an electricity bill that arrived in a January envelope and could not be explained by the weather.

What the AI industry has built is, on any honest accounting, extraordinary. What it has failed to build, so far, is the social architecture of consent that every previous heavy-industrial sector in American history eventually had to build: the permitting regimes, the environmental impact statements, the community benefit agreements, the ratepayer protections, the statutes that ensure the people who host the factory are not also the people who pay for it.

The absence of that architecture is not a technicality. It is the entire argument. Meaningful consent does not mean asking permission after the foundation has been poured. It means building a system in which the permission must be asked, granted, and periodically renewed, by the people whose land, water, electricity and night-time quiet are on the line. Anything short of that is not a social licence. It is an imposition with a press release.

John Steinbach will pay his bill. He does not have an option. The question is whether, by the time the next bill arrives, he will have been given any real say in what that bill is for. The answer to that question will determine, in ways the AI industry is only beginning to understand, whether the next gigawatt of data-centre capacity gets built at all.

References

1. Shah, Kaveh. “AI Data Centers: Big Tech's Impact on Electric Bills, Water, and More.” Consumer Reports, 20 March 2026. https://www.consumerreports.org/data-centers/ai-data-centers-impact-on-electric-bills-water-and-more-a1040338678/
2. Jessop, Simon; Volcovici, Valerie; Mukherjee, Supantha. “Investors press Amazon, Microsoft and Google on water, power use in US data centers.” Reuters, 6 April 2026. https://www.investing.com/news/stock-market-news/analysisinvestors-press-amazon-microsoft-and-google-on-water-power-use-in-us-data-centers-4598459
3. Shabana, Omar. “AI's growing thirst for water is becoming a public health risk.” Al Jazeera Opinion, 21 January 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/21/ais-growing-thirst-for-water-is-becoming-a-public-health-risk
4. World Economic Forum. “Why AI and data-centre growth risks stalling without a social licence to operate.” WEF Agenda, March 2026. https://www.weforum.org/stories/2026/03/ai-community-social-licence/
5. Fortune Editorial. “Data centers now account for half of all new U.S. electricity use, just as Americans start to sour on AI.” Fortune, 20 April 2026. https://fortune.com/2026/04/20/us-data-center-electricity-demand-public-opinion/
6. CNBC. “Who is really footing the AI energy bill? Inside the debate about data center electricity costs.” CNBC, 13 March 2026. https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/13/ai-data-centers-electricity-prices-backlash-ratepayer-protection.html
7. NPR. “AI data centers use a lot of electricity. How it could affect your power bill.” NPR, 2 January 2026. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/02/nx-s1-5638587/ai-data-centers-use-a-lot-of-electricity-how-it-could-affect-your-power-bill
8. Virginia Mercury. “These bills aim to regulate Virginia data center siting, generator use and SCC oversight.” Virginia Mercury, 19 January 2026. https://virginiamercury.com/2026/01/19/these-bills-aim-to-regulate-virginia-data-center-siting-generator-use-and-scc-oversight/
9. Virginia Mercury. “The governor's amendments to energy and data center legislation will save money for customers.” Virginia Mercury, 22 April 2026. https://virginiamercury.com/2026/04/22/the-governors-amendments-to-energy-and-data-center-legislation-will-save-money-for-customers/
10. Piedmont Environmental Council. “2026 Data Center Reform Legislation.” PEC, 2026. https://www.pecva.org/region/regional-state-national-region/2026-data-center-reform-legislation/
11. Data Center Watch. “$64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed amid local opposition.” Data Center Watch Report, 2026. https://www.datacenterwatch.org/report
12. Mississippi Today. “Southaven residents fear pollution, complain of noise, from Elon Musk's xAI data-center turbines.” Mississippi Today, 24 November 2025. https://mississippitoday.org/2025/11/24/southaven-residents-fear-pollution-complain-of-noise-from-elon-musks-xai-data-center-turbines/
13. AZ Family. “Chandler unanimously votes against proposed AI data center.” AZ Family, 12 December 2025. https://www.azfamily.com/2025/12/12/chandler-unanimously-votes-against-proposed-ai-data-center/
14. Environmental and Energy Study Institute. “Communities Are Raising Noise Pollution Concerns About Data Centers.” EESI. https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/communities-are-raising-noise-pollution-concernsabout-data-centers
15. ARLnow. “Winter electric bill spikes spark scrutiny of Va. data centers' power usage.” ARLnow, 27 February 2026. https://www.arlnow.com/2026/02/27/winter-electric-bill-spikes-spark-scrutiny-of-va-data-centers-power-usage/
16. The White House. “Ratepayer Protection Pledge.” The White House, March 2026. https://www.whitehouse.gov/releases/2026/03/ratepayer-protection-pledge/
17. Li, Pengfei; Yang, Jianyi; Islam, Mohammad A.; Ren, Shaolei. “Making AI Less Thirsty: Uncovering and Addressing the Secret Water Footprint of AI Models.” arXiv, 2023. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2304.03271
18. CalMatters. “AI data centers could hike California electricity bills.” CalMatters, March 2026. https://calmatters.org/environment/2026/03/little-hoover-data-center-electricity/
19. Virginia Mercury. “Dominion proposes higher utility rates, new rate class for data centers.” Virginia Mercury, 3 September 2025. https://virginiamercury.com/2025/09/03/dominion-proposes-higher-utility-rates-new-rate-class-for-data-centers/
20. Bloomberg. “AI Data Centers Are Sending Power Bills Soaring.” Bloomberg Graphics, 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/

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

Listen to the free weekly SmarterArticles Podcast

In Summary: * At the half, Indiana Fever has a comfortable eleven point lead over the Seattle Storm. Of course, there's still a lot of basketball to play before the game ends.

It was fun following my Texas Rangers this afternoon as they beat the Houston Astos this afternoon, 8 to 0.

When the basketball game ends it will be time to apply myself to the night prayers then put my old self to bed. That's my plan for the remainder of this Sunday.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night. Details of that regimen are linked to my link tree, which is linked to my profile page here.

Starting Ash Wednesday, 2026, I've added this daily prayer as part of the Prayer Crusade Preceding the 2026 SSPX Episcopal Consecrations.

Health Metrics: * bw= 235.9 lbs. * bp= 140/83 (60)

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, wall push-ups

Diet: * 06:45 – 1 banana * 07:20 – 1 seafood salad sandwich * 10:30 – lasagna * 15:15 – fried bananas w. white sugar, 2 cups of hot chocolate

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 05:40 – bank accounts activity monitored. * 05:50 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, nap, * 10:30 – watching “Replay Rundown” on MLB Network * 11:30 – watching old episodes of Classic Doctor Who * 13:00 – now following MLB, Rangers vs Astros * 15:40 – And the Rangers win, 8 to 0. * 15:50 – watching a documentary on recovered bodies from at least four different extraterrestrial species in crashed UFO incidents. * 16:40 – watching preview for tonight's WNBA game, Frever vs Storm

Chess: * 11:00 – moved in all pending CC games

People of all ages and backgrounds come together outdoors, connecting ideas and technology to illuminate the diverse and collaborative nature of AI innovation.

Okay, this will probably sound controversial, but that's not my intent. I'm just sharing my thoughts because AI is everywhere right now, especially on social media and in blog posts.

These views range from fairly neutral:[1] – Manton Reece – Tom Casavant – Paul Thurrott – Richard Campbell

To fairly positive, with the idea that you need to learn or use AI because... – Jim Mitchell – Numeric Citizen – Leo Laporte – Hey Loura – Ricardo Mendes

To more negative views, often focused on whether AI's value proposition can actually justify the money being spent: - Ed Zitron

People tend to frame the debate as two opposing camps: camp 1 wants nothing to do with AI, and camp 2 wants to hand it control over everything. I live in a quieter third camp. Most people are actually somewhere in the middle, but we don't shout as loudly. I see both the risks and the benefits. AI has let me try things I never would have had the courage to try, and it's helped me grow and learn about technology in ways I likely wouldn't have otherwise.

The loudest voices are camps 1 and 2, yet it's usually the middle camp that makes the real decisions when it counts. So maybe camps 1 and 2 should learn a little from us: camp 1 could be a little less rigid, and camp 2 could be more realistic and grounded.

AI is not going away. It may become less democratized. We are already seeing token, credit, and time limits, but those feel like temporary bumps. Many limits are at least partly artificial, and they may ease as the tech and business models evolve.

Given current politics here and abroad, tearing people down doesn't help. If AI isn't being used to create false narratives or spread “fake news,” people should be free to use it or not. I don't support blanket punishments for anyone who used AI to edit, help, or build something. That kind of hard-line stance, and labeling anything non-factual as “slop,” isn't productive.

The larger economic issue is real and has been building for decades. Automation started with the paperless office and industrial robotics. Robots and AI will continue to displace jobs, and that's a societal and political problem we need to solve now, not shrug off with “it's not my problem.” It's not necessarily tomorrow's crisis, but it's coming in the not-so-distant future.

Job losses mean less tax revenue, and corporations and wealthy individuals are skilled at finding legal ways to reduce taxes, wages, and benefits. We should rethink corporate structures and the single-minded focus on shareholder value. A shift toward an employee-and-business-first model would make more sense. After all, without a functioning business, you don't have shareholder value, and without employees, you don't really have a business unless you fully automate. If companies replace workers with machines and still expect high shareholder returns, they may under-invest in the equipment and long-term stability that would make that strategy sustainable.

That's my two cents. I don't think we should be tearing people down for using technology that helps them, that they pay for themselves, and that helps them communicate and complete their vision.

For full transparency, this post contains my thoughts and my opinions, and it was edited and proofread with AI. I made, directed, and approved the changes. AI helped organize my wording and corrected my spelling and grammar. It did not write this post, create the ideas behind it, or shape my feelings or thoughts. That, to me, is responsible AI usage.

I could not afford to hire an editor or an artist for this post, or every other post, to make a feature image. I told the AI what I wanted for a feature image, and it made it. I think it did an amazing job bringing my prompt alive.

1. I am using “views” broadly here. Some examples come from specific blog posts, while others come from podcasts, videos, comments, or general public statements I have seen or heard. ↩

#ai #opinion #technology

John Fortunato 340 pages Minotaur Books (2015)

Tl;dr summary: Disgraced Special Agent Joe Evers delays early retirement by taking on a decades-old cold case with big political implications.

Read this if you like: Tony Hillerman, gritty mysteries, conspiracy theories

See the book on Bookshop

Here's the thing about tropes: there's a reason why they're popular. Yes, they can be overused, but they're also highly effective and enjoyable to read when they're employed correctly. I don't think any genre exemplifies this fact quite as clearly as mystery, and the washed-up detective trope is admittedly one of my favorites. I love a good flawed hero, always root for the underdog, and will rarely turn my nose up at a redemptive arc, so if a story can hit all three of those points I'm probably going to enjoy reading it. 

And Dark Reservations did just that. The protagonist, special agent Joe Evers, is about to be forced into an early retirement after a grief-induced downward spiral. But then he lands one last major case: discovery of new evidence in a high-profile cold case that could send him out on a high note, if he manages to solve it before his retirement becomes official. And, just to add some extra tension, the victim in the cold case is the missing-presumed-dead husband of Grace Edgerton, a politician who's currently the front-runner in the New Mexico governor's race. It's trope on trope on trope—but it works, because everything makes sense together. John Fortunato uses tropes here in the smart and productive way, as shortcuts to get the reader up-to-speed on the character and situation so they can jump right in on the action and how that character are plot are going to develop. 

I don't want to send the impression that I found Dark Reservations derivative or predictable, either. The story's setting on a Navajo reservation adds another layer of complexity. As Joe digs into the cold case, he realizes that Arlen Edgerton's death was likely connected to the theft and illegal sale of artifacts that belong to the reservation. And not just any artifacts. Their existence is the only thing that verifies controversial research published by Professor Lawrence Trudle, which proposes a connection between the Aztec empire and the Anasazi of New Mexico. His theory was widely dismissed by established archaeologist, and he was made a laughingstock, without the discovered artifacts to prove his assertions. Adding to the conspiracy, Trudle suspects that the then-president of the Navajo nation was involved in the theft, along with a prominent and well-connected art dealer. These aren't necessarily the kinds of complications you expect to have come up in a cold case murder mystery, and they were unexpected in just the right way for me. The interweaving of reservation politics, alongside Joe's personal life travails and the usual justice system drama you'd expect from a police procedural style crime story, really upped the excitement and entertainment level of the story. 

Of course, I was predictably most into the artifact side of the story. In part because my interest piques whenever archaeology enters the chat, and especially when it's one of the Mesoamerican cultures I'm mildly obsessed with. But this was also a very fresh angle to bring to the equation. The “shadowy crime organization” is another trope that makes fairly regular appearances in this style of narrative, but usually those mobs trade in things like drugs or arms or people. Shifting the focus to stolen artifacts also means it deals with a different set of moral questions about the commercialization and exploitation of indigenous culture. The thread with Rushingwater and the fight to get the People of Diné recognized as an independent country reinforces this tension, while also introducing an element of chaos at exactly the right moment to ramp up the story’s pace. 

From a craft standpoint, something I was paying close attention to in this book was its voice and the pacing of the prose. This book is an excellent example of how clean and straightforward writing can still be literary in its attention to language. It's simple in the kind of way that reads effortless but probably took a lot of time and care to craft. This is also reinforced by the structure. The interpolation of very quick scenes in between longer passages gives it a very cinematic kind of pacing, and the descriptive language within the scenes reinforces this. Most importantly, the writing never gets in the way of the story, and every word feels like it was chosen with a mind to building the character and sense of place first. I'd say it's definitely a strong example of a mystery novel that is also literary.

Overall, this is a very satisfying read. I don't want to say much about the plot progression or ending to avoid the risk of spoilers, but suffice to say it kept me interested and invested the whole way to the end, which is something else I think is very important for books in the crime/mystery genre. I've now read a couple of books from Minotaur and they've consistently delivered. This one in particular I'd absolutely recommend—obviously for folks who are into police-centered mysteries, but also for fans of archaeology and readers of literary suspense. 

See similar posts:

#BookReviews #Literary #Mystery

Hello again. Hope you had a great weekend.

While you were at home with the family, POTUS was promoting a reading of the bible. He said it was a great optic. This was his portion of the program to push an idiotic idea that the country was founded by christians. This is the christian nationalism program. During the Covid pandemic POTUS stood in front of a church with a book in his hand. He said it was a bible but could not say if it was his own, probably because it was just a prop.

Nothing could be further from the actual truth. The founding fathers were deists. They believed is an unknowable god, certainly not a christian one. This is part of the infamous Project 2025 which wants to force the population into a single religion. They want to remove the portion of the constitution which prevents promotion of any faith.

This is just another reason that this POTUS and his supporters need to be removed from positions of power before they destroy the democracy and your rights get taken away.

Thanks for reading my posts. If you want to see the rest of them, please go to write.as/potusroaster/archive/ Please tell your friends and family if you like them.

BODY WORLDS Wrocław — Facebook-Ad image-grid, May 2026. HIGH NOTE EVENTS sp. z o.o. / Institut für Plastination Heidelberg. Captured for analytical use under §51 UrhG / art. 29 PL Ustawa o prawie autorskim.

The 1992 Robert Zemeckis film Death Becomes Her gave Meryl Streep and Goldie Hawn a magic potion that preserved their bodies forever while their flesh kept on dying underneath. The gag was that you could keep the form while subtracting the substrate. A Facebook ad on a Wrocław feed in May 2026 advertises something close. The exhibition is called Body Worlds, the current edition is The Cycle of Life, the venue is IASE on Wystawowa 1, the run has just been extended to the 30th of June. Four photos: a chess player, a cowboy figure with a hat, a school group looking into a vitrine, a posed body with parents and children standing in front.

The text of the ad reads, in Polish, autentyczne eksponaty — ciał i narządów przekazanych przez dobrowolnych dawców do Instytutu Plastynacji w Heidelbergu 🙏 — authentic specimens, bodies and organs donated by voluntary donors to the Institute of Plastination in Heidelberg, with a prayer-emoji. This is a translation that is not a translation. The German Demokratisierung der Anatomie (the democratisation of anatomy — Hagens' own slogan since the 1990s) does not appear; the Polish phrase is prezentacja naukowa (scientific presentation). The Lutheran-Reformation history that gave the German slogan its weight is unavailable here as a resonance-chamber, so the slogan is quietly replaced by its secular-scientific cognate. Heidelberg, however, makes the trip intact. Its name in the Polish feed is doing two jobs at once: it anchors the donor-consent frame, and it answers a question the ad never asks aloud — where else, then, do these bodies come from.

BODY WORLDS Wrocław — Facebook-Ad text, May 2026. Heidelberg-Attribution + Prayer-Emoji quoted analytically above. §51 UrhG / art. 29 PL.

Donor consent is the moral hinge of the entire operation. The Heidelberg programme has nearly twenty thousand registered donors, mostly German, who have signed away their bodies during their lifetimes. In the slogan's logic, this is enough to make everything that follows acceptable. It is also a specific anthropological position dressed as a universal one. The body owned sufficiently to be disposed of after death is the body C. B. Macpherson called possessive-individualist — a self related to itself the way an owner is related to a property. Other anthropologies have other answers. The body held in trust because it was given. The body that belongs to the relational fabric of the living, who carry obligations to it that cannot be signed away in advance. The body partly withdrawn from disposal because death generates a dignity that survives the person.

The consent-anchor presents one position as natural and makes the others unsayable without an argument. The Menschenbild — the conception of the human person an institution operates with, even when it doesn't say so — is here without being named.

The ad lands very quietly in Poland. The resonance-chamber that in Germany would have spoken at length about this — the Lutheran ethics commissions, the dignity-jurists, the medical-ethicists with institutional standing — is configured differently here. The Polish episcopate has issued no position. The political parties across the spectrum have not raised the question. The academic bioethics chairs, where they exist, have produced isolated individual interventions rather than a consolidated voice. This is not a verdict on Polish capacity for critical reflection. It is a structural fact about institutional configurations: a hegemonial-majority church does not produce dignity-statements the way a minority church under public Stellungnahmepflicht (statement-duty) does; a parliamentary system without an established bioethics-rapporteur does not generate the same case-law pressure that a federal system with three legal tracks generates. The ad arrives without the apparatus that, in another configuration, would have surrounded it with thirty years of argument.

Back to the picture. The plastinates are posed — chess, cowboy, dancer-attendant, family-group exhibit. The cycle of life of the title is performed through these poses, and what the poses share is what they exclude. Not one of the four figures is shown frail. There is no Pflege-Bedürftigkeit (the state of needing care), no terminal weakness, no body that has been visibly given up to dying. The anatomist Andreas Winkelmann at the Charité pointed out two decades ago that classical anatomy required a geschützter Raum (protected space) — closed, mediated, conducted under conditions that preserved the precarious tissue between the donor and those who would learn from the donated body. The exhibition removes the protection and keeps the body, and what it shows in compensation is a body shaped to be looked at by anyone, by which it has had to become a body without the iconography of actual dying. Meryl Streep's character in 1992 would recognise the formula.

Form preserved, substrate quietly removed, the question of what is left declared irrelevant.

Hagens describes himself as an Erlebnisanatom — an experience-anatomist, coined from Erlebnisgesellschaft, the sociological diagnosis of a German late-modern experience-society. He has said that in such a society he must communicate emotionally. The muss does a lot of work in that sentence. A historically specific situation — one country, one decade, one sociological diagnosis — has been quietly refitted as a professional necessity. Other anatomists go on teaching in lecture halls without posing dead chess players. Other communicators of medical knowledge goon running textbooks and open-access platforms and dissection courses.

The muss is a commercial decision to operate in an emotional register, dressed up as a sociological law.

The legal move is the most consequential. Hagens has explained that plastinates are Strukturelemente des menschlichen Körpers ohne Leichenqualität — structural elements of the human body without corpse-character. The phrase does not describe a property of plastinates; it relocates them out of the legal regime that protects corpses. If the plastinate is not a corpse, the burial law does not apply, the post-mortem-dignity provisions of the criminal code do not apply, and the carve-outs the jurist Brigitte Tag has spent decades developing — a conditional toleration of plastination only where consent, post-mortem dignity, and public sentiment are jointly preserved — become unnecessary. An ontology has been declared in juridical clothing. The Polish ad has no need to repeat the move because the Polish legal field around plastination is empty in any case. An industrial process with production sites in three countries does not require a great deal of explanation when there is nobody specifically tasked with asking.

The ad's text promises a full arc: Od pierwszych komórek, poprzez rozwój płodu, dojrzewanie, aż po zmiany ze starzeniem się organizmu — from the first cells, through fetal development, maturation, to the changes of an aging organism. The four photographs do not. The cycle of life made visible in the image-grid is the commercially serviceable middle: an athletic figure in a cowboy hat, an athletic figure at a chess board, schoolchildren peering into a glass case, a posed figure with parents and small children. The first cells and the foetus are in the prose, absent from the picture. The aging organism is in the prose; the figures do not show it. The Cycle of Life is, in the ad, the part of the cycle that is comfortable to look at on a phone screen between other Facebook posts.

None of this is unknown. A dense German-language academic literature on Body Worlds goes back to the late 1990s. Stefan Hirschauer's 2002 essay on plastination called the plastinates Scheinlebendige — the seemingly-alive — and traced the operations of denial they perform. The 2001 edited volume Schöne neue Körperwelten, with Brigitte Tag among its editors, contains a chapter titled Von der herrenlosen Sache zum kommerziellen Objekt — from the ownerless thing to the commercial object — that did the value-form analysis these ads still require. The 2017 paper Kapitalistisch verwertbare Körper in Soziale Passagen updated it. The Duisburg Institute for Linguistic and Social Research has been mapping the discourse for decades. The analysis is in print, in German. What is missing in Poland is not the analysis. It is the political and organisational uptake that would carry it across.

The same Menschenbild travels from Heidelberg to Wrocław unchanged. A self that owns the body sufficiently to dispose of it. A body posed in agency-vocabulary, with frailty edited out. A juridical category designed to release the body from the protective regime that would otherwise surround it. A pedagogical muss that converts a marketing decision into a sociological law. These are not four separate operations. They are one operation seen from four angles, and they describe one kind of person: optimised, agentic, post-mortally disposable, available for educational entertainment under conditions that no longer require asking very much. The German configuration has had thirty years to argue with the package and has produced jurists, sermons, parliamentary questions, court decisions, a small library of academic books. The Polish configuration is meeting the same package now, in the form of a Facebook ad with a prayer-emoji and a link to a ticket vendor. The package itself is identical.

The chess player will be in IASE on Wystawowa 1 until the 30th of June. Visitors will see what the image already shows: a body posed for the encounter, with no day in it that looks like the last day of a body. Streep's character drank the potion for what she thought would be eternal youth. The donor signed for what they understood as anatomy education. The visitor buys a ticket. What is the body walking into the exhibition room agreeing to?

Earlier we ate coal buns by the grill outside, I sat in the folding chair with a beer in my hand and the scarf — a neon coloured keffiyeh, which I bought off the thrift store, it pulled me to it, as I was hunting for a suit for a forthcoming wedding, me now having literally outgrown the ones I have — on me watching the embers and the flames, feeling them warm my face, and I thought that this is the life I want to live

A dog on each side, sitting in this comfortable folding chair, in the bright early summer late evening

It is here I want to sit

It doesn’t sound like much, maybe, but it took me all my life to get there.

Berschad ist eine kleine Stadt in der Zentralukraine, im Osten des Oblast Vinnytsia. Es gibt alles was mensch braucht: Kino, Theater, Parks, einige Restaurants, 3x pro Woche ist Markt, Supermärkte, Bekleidungsgeschäfte, Apotheken, ein Krankenhaus, Stadion, usw. Außerdem liegt die Stadt wunderschön am Wasser, an den Flüssen Dochna und Berladynka.

Der Markt findet dienstags, donnerstags und sonntags statt. Dann erstreckt er sich auf mehrere Straßen im Stadtzentrum, sowie 2 Markthallen. In den Markthallen gibt es vor allem frisches Fleisch, dafür braucht es einen stabileren Magen. Und sonst gibt es einfach alles zu kaufen. Frisches Obst und Gemüse, Samen, Jungpflanzen, Käse, Wurst, Brot, Kleidung, Elektronik, Gartenbedarf, Blumen, an sich braucht es keinen Supermarkt mehr. Da es hier kaum möglich ist von der staatlichen Rente zu Leben, verkaufen auch viele ältere in kleinen Mengen eigenes Obst und Gemüse, Apfelchips (sehr lecker), Kräuter usw. Es ist auch ein schönes zusammenkommen, die Leute kennen sich hier ;)

Überhaupt möchte ich betonen, dass die Obst und Gemüse Sorten hier andere sind, als wir sie in Deutschland / in der EU kennen. Insbesondere Karotten sind einfach richtig süß, und so viel leckerer. Allein deshalb lohnt es sich schon, mal hier her zu kommen, und den Schritt aus der EU zu wagen ;)

Die Stadt ist nicht sehr groß, und trotzdem wurden große, schöne öffentliche Flächen am Wasser geschaffen. Dort ist es richtig schön und ruhig. Eine davon ist die Insel Antalka. Sie liegt nicht zentral, aber noch nahe. Eine große, bewaldete Oase, komplett von Wasser umgeben. Am Wasser gibt es viele schöne Orte zum Grillen, viele sind hier zum Fischen. Dass mensch hier an so vielen Ecken in Ruhe am Wasser sitzen kann finde ich richtig schön und erholsam. Flora und Fauna ähneln dem was ich kenne, aber bei genauerem Hinschauen auch wieder nicht. Vorgestern haben wir einen Igel gesehen, der sah von weitem gleich aus, wie ich sie aus Deutschland kenne, aber seine Beine und das Gesicht waren doch anders geformt, und in einem schönen dunkelbraun.

Im Zentrum gibt es das Haus der Kultur, ein großes Theater. Dort waren wir auch bei einer Vorstellung von “Yachta Kochanja” (Yacht der Liebe). Ich hab nicht alles verstanden, aber genug um immer wieder mitlachen zu können. In dem Stück haben einige sehr bekannte Schauspielis mitgewirkt, der Krieg führt auch dazu, dass die Kultur mehr auf kleinere Städte und längere Touren ausweicht. Da die Gefahr für Luftangriffe in den großen Metropolen erheblich höher ist, werden kleinere Städte auch zum Wohnen wieder attraktiver. Katja ist als der Krieg angefangen hat wieder nach Berschad gezogen, ihr Freund aus Kyiv. Keine Einzelfälle.

Und trotzdem, auch aus Berschad sind Leute ins Ausland geflohen. Wenn wir abends durch das Stadtzentrum laufen, sind die Straßen recht leer, viele Fenster sind dunkel. Das war vor der russischen Vollinvasion anders. Auch wirtschaftlich hat sich seitdem viel verändert. Meine Gasteltern haben in ihrem Geschäft z.B. vorher 10 Personen beschäftigen können, jetzt nur noch 3.

Im Folgenden möchte ich zeigen, an welche Ereignisse in Berschad erinnert wird, und wie. Dies soll stellvertretend für die Geschichte der Ukraine stehen. Erinnert wird in der Ukraine ebenfalls klassisch mit Denkmälern. Im Stadtzentrum ist neben einem Park eine schöner grüner Platz entstanden, an dem mit Abstand an folgendes Erinnert wird:

• Holodomor (Völkermord durch Verhungern, von der Sowjetunion an der ukrainischen Bevölkerung begangen)
• Holocaust – im Bezirk Berschad wurden 24 000 Juden* von Nazis und rumänischen Nationalisten ermordet
• Tschornobyl – das ist ein ganzes Stück weit weg von hier, aber auch den Helfenden aus dieser Region wird Gedenken geschenkt. Der letzte Eintrag ist von einem Toten 2025.

Ein Stück weiter ist ein Denkmal an die toten Soldaten der Weltkriege, im sowjetischen Stil. Am zentralen Platz ist ein Denkmal für die “Nebesna Sotnia” (himmlische Hundertschaft) – die Toten der Euromaidan Proteste 2014. Dazu kommt ein Stück weiter das Gedenken an die gefallenen und vermissten Soldaten seit der russischen Vollinvasion. In vielen anderen Städten werden große Fotos der Held*innen gezeigt. Es ist schon verrückt, wie viel davon zur Lebzeit meiner Gasteltern passiert (ist), und Perestroika und die orangene Revolution wurden dabei noch nicht berücksichtigt.

Berschad is a town in central Ukraine, in the eastern part of Vinnytsia Oblast. It has everything you need: a cinema, theatre, parks, a few restaurants, a market three times a week, supermarkets, clothing stores, pharmacies, a hospital, a stadium, and much more. On top of that, the city is beautifully situated by the water – along the rivers Dochna and Berladynka.

The market takes place on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Sundays, spreading across several streets in the city centre as well as two market halls. The halls are mainly known for fresh meat – not for the faint-hearted. Otherwise, you can find pretty much everything there: fresh fruit and vegetables, seeds, seedlings, cheese, sausage, bread, clothing, electronics, gardening supplies, flowers – a supermarket almost becomes unnecessary. Since it's barely possible to live off the state pension here, many elderly people sell small quantities from their own gardens: fruit, vegetables, apple chips (really tasty!), herbs, and more. But the market is also just a lovely gathering – people know each other here. 😊

I also want to emphasise that the fruit and vegetables here are just different from what we know in Germany or the EU. Carrots, for example, are genuinely really sweet and so much more flavourful. That alone makes it worth coming here and taking the leap outside the EU. 😄

The city may not be very big, but it has created some beautiful public spaces by the water. One of them is Antalka Island – not quite central, but still easy to reach. A large, wooded oasis, completely surrounded by water, with lots of lovely spots for barbecuing and fishing. Really peaceful and idyllic.

In the centre stands the House of Culture, a large theatre. We attended a performance of “Yachta Kochanja” (Yacht of Love) there – I didn't understand everything, but enough to laugh along regularly. Several well-known actors were involved in the production. The war has led to culture increasingly shifting towards smaller cities and longer tours, as the risk of air strikes in the major metropolitan areas is considerably higher. This is also making smaller cities more attractive to live in again – Katja moved back to Berschad when the war started, her boyfriend came from Kyiv. Not isolated cases.

And yet: many people have fled Berschad for abroad as well. When we walk through the city centre in the evening, the streets are fairly empty, many windows dark. Before the full-scale Russian invasion, it was completely different. A lot has changed economically since then too – my host parents used to be able to employ ten people in their shop; now it's down to three.

In what follows, I want to show what events are commemorated in Berschad – and how. This is meant to stand as a reflection of Ukraine's history more broadly.

Next to a park in the city centre, a lovely green square has been created where – with clear distance between them – the following are remembered:

• Holodomor – the genocide by starvation carried out by the Soviet Union against the Ukrainian people
• The Holocaust – in the Berschad district, 24,000 Jewish people were murdered by Nazis and Romanian nationalists
• Chornobyl – far from here, but the helpers from this region are also commemorated. The most recent entry is from someone who died in 2025.

A little further on stands a Soviet-style memorial for the soldiers who fell in the World Wars. In the central square, a memorial honours the “Nebesna Sotnia” (Heavenly Hundred) – those who died during the Euromaidan protests of 2014. And a bit further still, the soldiers killed or missing since the full-scale Russian invasion are remembered. In many other cities, large photos of the fallen heroes are displayed for this purpose.

It's both impressive and deeply unsettling how many of these events fall within my host parents' lifetimes. Perestroika and the Orange Revolution can be added to that list as well.

Denkmäler: Holocaust

Holodomor

Tschornobyl

Weltkriege

Himmlische Hundertschaft (Euromaidan)

Helden der russischen Vollinvasion aus Berschad

Eindrücke von der Insel Antalka

Ausblick vom Stadtpark, schön

weniger schön: (#Danger of a single story / picture)

Geschäft meiner Gasteltern Osvita (Bildung)

im Theater

Stadtzentrum

This afternoon I have a baseball game to follow: my Texas Rangers vs the Houston Astros, scheduled to start in just a few minutes.

And a little later today I'll have a basketball game to follow: my Indiana Fever vs the Seattle Storm, scheduled to start at 5:00 PM CDT.

And the adventure continues.

« L'omniprésence de la mort, l'habitude des deuils, la dévalorisation de la vie noire, l'exposition à l'aliénation, à l'expropriation et au génocide lui donnent une signification particulière. Il s'agit moins d'une forme-de-vie que d'une forme-de-mort. Non pas un refus de la mort, une absolue volonté de survie, mais une capacité à habiter la mort. Vivants parmi les morts ; morts parmi les vivants. L'une des raisons de la ténacité des populations noires partout où elles ont eu à subir des violences démesurées tient à leurs propres traditions de pensée. S'ils étaient déshumanisés, abandonnés à un flou entre la mort et la vie, leur dignité résidait dans des imaginaires, des ontologies, des visions de la mort et de la vie qui les rendaient aptes à faire face à ces catastrophes. »

— Norman Ajari, Le manifeste afro-décolonial, p. 57