Category: Technology

4,000 Posts

This is the 4,000th published post on my blog, going back to 2006 (including a couple of starts and stops across various platforms and a few years when I was encouraged not to have a site). I’ve written around 600,000 words here, which is equivalent to around 10 longer books.

I view this as my personal thinking space… sometimes it’s coherent and polished, and sometimes it’s a random thought or link to something that I want to share with others to read (and my poor friends and family can only take so many links about randomness in a day).

I think Seth Godin said it best here in his celebration of writing his 5,000th post a few years back…

The 5000th post* | Seth’s Blog:

My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.

The selfishness of the industrial age (scarcity being the thing we built demand upon, and the short-term exchange of value being the measurement) has led many people to question the value of giving away content, daily, for a decade or more. And yet… I’ve never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

Printed Copies of Readings in Class

Granted, I’m 47 and graduated Wofford College in ’00 and Yale Div in ’02 before the iPad or Zotero were a thing… but I still have numerous reading packets from those days and still use them for research (shoutout to TYCO Printers in New Haven for the quality work)… but I endorse this position. Now, I use a combo of “real” books and Zotero for online PDF’s that I don’t have time to print out. I’d like to go all paper again, though. Maybe a good 2026 goal?

Also granted, I used blue books for exams with my 6th-12th graders that I taught for 20 years. They loved it (not really… but I got lots of good doodles and personal notes of gratitude at the end of those essays that I’ve kept over the years).

English professors double down on requiring printed copies of readings | Yale Daily News:

This academic year, some English professors have increased their preference for physical copies of readings, citing concerns related to artificial intelligence.

Many English professors have identified the use of chatbots as harmful to critical thinking and writing. Now, professors who had previously allowed screens in class are tightening technology restrictions.

Project Spero and Spartanburg’s New Resource Question: Power, Water, and the True Cost of a Data Center


Spartanburg County is staring straight at the kind of development that sounds abstract until it lands on our own roads, substations, and watersheds. A proposed $3 billion, “AI-focused high-performance computing” facility, Project Spero, has been announced for the Tyger River Industrial Park – North. 

In the Upstate, we’re used to thinking about growth as something we can see…new subdivisions, new lanes of traffic, new storefronts. But a data center is a stranger kind of arrival. It does not announce itself with crowds or culture. It arrives as a continuous, quiet, and largely invisible demand. A building that looks still from the outside can nevertheless function as a kind of permanent request being made of the region to keep the current steady, keep the cooling stable, keep the redundancy ready, keep the uptime unquestioned.

And that is where I find myself wanting to slow down and do something unfashionable in a policy conversation and describe the experience of noticing. Phenomenology begins with the discipline of attention…with the refusal to let an object remain merely “background.” It asks what is being asked of perception. The “cloud” is one of the most successful metaphors of our moment precisely because it trains us not to see or not to feel the heat, not to hear the generators, not to track the water, not to imagine the mines and the supply chains and the labor. A local data center undermines the metaphor, which is why it matters that we name what is here.

The familiar sales pitch is already in circulation as significant capital investment, a relatively small number of permanent jobs (about 50 in Phase I), and new tax revenue, all framed as “responsible growth” without “strain” on infrastructure. 

But the real question isn’t whether data centers are “the future.” They’re already here. The question is what kinds of futures they purchase and with whose power, whose water, and whose air.

Where this is happening (and why that matters)

Tyger River Industrial Park isn’t just an empty map pin… its utility profile is part of the story. The site’s published specs include a 34kV distribution line (Lockhart Power), a 12” water line (Startex-Jackson-Wellford-Duncan Water District), sewer service (Spartanburg Sanitary Sewer District), Piedmont Natural Gas, and AT&T fiber. 

Two details deserve more attention than they’re likely to get in ribbon-cutting language:

Power capacity is explicitly part of the pitch. One listing notes available electric capacity “>60MW.” 

Natural gas is part of the reliability strategy. The reporting on Project Spero indicates plans to “self-generate a portion of its power on site using natural gas.” 

    That combination of a high continuous load plus on-site gas generation isn’t neutral. It’s an ecological choice with real downstream effects.

    The energy question: “separate from residential systems” is not the same as “separate from residential impact”

    One line you’ll hear often is that industrial infrastructure is “separate from residential systems.” 

    Even if the wires are technically separate, the regional load is shared in ways that matter, from planning assumptions and generation buildout to transmission upgrades and the ratepayer math that follows.

    Regional reporting has been blunt about the dynamics of data center growth (alongside rapid population and industrial growth), which are pushing utilities toward major new infrastructure investments, and those costs typically flow through to bills. 

    In the Southeast, regulators and advocates are also warning of a rush toward expensive gas-fired buildouts to meet data-center-driven demand, potentially exposing customers to higher costs. 

    So the right local question isn’t “Will Spartanburg’s lights stay on?”

    It’s “What long-term generation and grid decisions are being locked in, because a facility must run 24/7/365?”

    When developers say “separate from residential systems,” I hear a sentence designed to calm the community nervous system. But a community is not a wiring diagram. The grid is not just copper and transformers, but a social relation. It is a set of promises, payments, and priorities spread across time. The question is not whether the line feeding the site is physically distinct from the line feeding my neighborhood. The question is whether the long arc of planning, generation decisions, fuel commitments, transmission upgrades, and the arithmetic of rates is being bent around a new form of permanent demand.

    This is the kind of thing we typically realize only after the fact, when the bills change, when the new infrastructure is presented as inevitable, when the “choice” has already been absorbed into the built environment. Attention, in this sense, is not sentiment. It is civic practice. It is learning to see the slow commitments we are making together, and deciding whether they are commitments we can inhabit.

    The water question: closed-loop is better but “negligible” needs a definition

    Project Spero’s developer emphasizes a “closed-loop” water design, claiming water is reused “rather than consumed and discharged,” and that the impact on existing customers is “negligible.” 

    Closed-loop cooling can indeed reduce water withdrawals compared with open-loop or evaporative systems, but “negligible” is not a technical term. It’s a rhetorical one. If we want a serious civic conversation, “negligible” should be replaced with specifics:

    • What is projected annual water withdrawal and peak-day demand?
    • What is the cooling approach (air-cooled, liquid, hybrid)?
    • What is the facility’s water-use effectiveness (WUE) target and reporting plan?
    • What happens in drought conditions or heat waves, when cooling demand spikes?

    Locally, Spartanburg Water notes the Upstate’s surface-water advantages and describes interconnected reservoirs and treatment capacity planning, naming Lake Bowen (about 10.4 billion gallons), Lake Blalock (about 7.2 billion gallons), and Municipal Reservoir #1 (about 1 billion gallons). 

    That’s reassuring, and it’s also exactly why transparency matters. Resource resilience is not just about what exists today. Resilience is about what we promise into the future, and who pays the opportunity costs.

    Water conversations in the Upstate can become strangely abstract, as if reservoirs and treatment plants are simply numbers on a planning sheet. But water is not only a resource, but it’s also a relation of dependency that shapes how we live and what we can become. When I sit with the black walnut in our backyard and take notes on weather, light, and season, the lesson is never just “nature appreciation.” It’s training in scale and learning what persistence feels like, what stress looks like before it becomes an emergency, and what a living system does when conditions shift.

    That’s why “negligible” makes me uneasy. Not because I assume bad faith, but because it’s a word that asks us not to look too closely. Negligible compared to what baseline, over what time horizon, and under what drought scenario with what heatwave assumptions? If closed-loop cooling is truly part of the design, then the most basic gesture of responsibility is to translate that claim into measurable terms and to publicly commit to reporting that remains stable even when the headlines move on.

    The ecological footprint that rarely makes the headlines

    When people say “data center,” they often picture a quiet box that’s more like a library than a factory. In ecological terms, it’s closer to an always-on industrial organism with electricity in, heat out, materials cycling, backup generation on standby, and constant hardware turnover.

    Here are the footprint categories I want to see discussed in Spartanburg in plain language:

    • Continuous electricity demand (and what it forces upstream): Data centers don’t just “use electricity.” They force decisions about new generation and new transmission to meet high-confidence loads. That’s the core ratepayer concern advocacy groups have been raising across South Carolina. 
    • On-site combustion and air permitting: Even when a data center isn’t “a power plant,” it often has a lot in common with one. Spartanburg already has a relevant local example with the Valara Holdings High Performance Compute Center. In state permitting materials, it is described as being powered by twenty-four natural gas-fired generators “throughout the year,” with control devices for NOx and other pollutants.  Environmental groups flagged concerns about the lack of enforceable pollution limits in the permitting process, and later reporting indicates that permit changes were made to strengthen enforceability and emissions tracking. That’s not a side issue. It’s what “cloud” actually looks like on the ground.
    • Water, heat, and the limits of “efficiency”: Efficiency claims matter, but they should be auditable. If a project is truly low-impact, the developer should welcome annual public reporting on energy, water, and emissions.
    • Material throughput and e-waste: Server refresh cycles and hardware disposal are part of the ecological story, even when they’re out of sight. If Spartanburg is becoming a node in this seemingly inevitable AI buildout, we should be asking about procurement standards, recycling contracts, and end-of-life accountability.

    A policy signal worth watching: South Carolina is debating stricter rules

    At the state level, lawmakers have already begun floating stronger guardrails. One proposed bill (the “South Carolina Data Center Responsibility Act”) includes requirements like closed-loop cooling with “zero net water withdrawal,” bans on municipal water for cooling, and requirements that permitting, infrastructure, and operational costs be fully funded by the data center itself. 

    Whatever the fate of that bill, the direction is clear: communities are tired of being told “trust us” while their long-term water and power planning is quietly rearranged.

    What I’d like Spartanburg County to require before calling this “responsible growth”

    If Spartanburg County wants to be a serious steward of its future, here’s what I’d want attached to any incentives or approvals…in writing, enforceable, and public:

    1. Annual public reporting of electricity use, peak demand, water withdrawal, and cooling approach.
    2. A clear statement of on-site generation: fuel type, capacity, expected operating profile, emissions controls, and total permitted hours.
    3. Third-party verification of any “closed-loop” and “negligible impact” claims.
    4. A ratepayer protection plan: who pays for grid upgrades, and how residential customers are insulated from speculative overbuild.
    5. A community benefits agreement that actually matches the footprint (workforce training, environmental monitoring funds, emergency response support, local resilience investments).
    6. Noise and light mitigation standards, monitored and enforceable.

    I’m certainly not anti-technology. I’m pro-accountability. If we’re going to host infrastructure that makes AI possible, then we should demand the same civic clarity we’d demand from any other industrial operation.

    The spiritual crisis here isn’t that we use power. It’s that we grow accustomed to not knowing what our lives require. One of the ways we lose the world is by letting the infrastructures that sustain our days become illegible to us. A data center can be an occasion for that loss, or it can become an occasion for renewed legibility, for a more honest accounting, for a more careful local imagination about what we are building and why.

    Because in the end, the Upstate’s question isn’t whether we can attract big projects. It’s whether we can keep telling the truth about what big projects cost.

    Pragmatism for Whom? Energy, Empathy, and the Limits of “All-of-the-Above”

    A recent opinion piece in The Hill argues that Democrats should and are beginning to rethink their approach to climate and energy policy. Pointing to renewed support for natural gas infrastructure, oil and gas exports, and an “all-of-the-above” energy strategy, the author suggests that political realism requires prioritizing affordability, job creation, and national security alongside emissions reduction. The argument is presented not as climate denial but as maturity…a necessary correction to what is portrayed as ideological rigidity. It’s a case worth taking seriously, precisely because it names real pressures and real people. But it also leaves something essential unexamined.

    In recent weeks, a familiar argument has returned to public discourse that Democrats, and perhaps climate advocates more broadly, must recalibrate their approach to energy. Affordability matters, jobs matter, national security matters. An “all-of-the-above” energy strategy here is not ideological retreat but political maturity.

    There is truth here, and it should be acknowledged plainly. Energy transitions are not experienced in the abstract. They are lived locally…in monthly bills, in the dignity of work, in the stability or fragility of rural communities. Any climate politics that fails to take this seriously will not only lose elections, but it will also lose trust.

    And yet, there is a deeper question that this rhetoric consistently avoids. Not whether energy should be affordable, or whether people deserve good work. But whose experience counts when we decide what is practical?

    Pragmatism and the Shape of Time

    Much of the current defense of fossil fuel expansion rests on short-term accounting. Natural gas reduced emissions relative to coal, while fracking boosted GDP and export capacity, strengthening allies and weakening adversaries. These claims are not fabrications in that they are partial truths framed within narrow temporal windows.

    What often goes unspoken is that infrastructure remembers. Pipelines, compressor stations, export terminals, and extraction fields are not neutral bridges toward a cleaner future. They are long-term commitments that shape what futures remain possible. Once built, they exert a quiet pressure on policy, markets, and imagination alike.

    This is not ideology. It is systems thinking. What appears pragmatic in electoral time can prove costly in ecological time.

    The Missing Dimension: Empathy as Perception

    In my own work on empathy, I’ve argued that empathy is not primarily a moral sentiment or an ethical achievement. It is a way of perceiving and is how the world first comes to matter to us individually.

    What’s striking in many contemporary energy debates is how narrow the field of perception has become. Voters, workers, markets, and allies all appear. But watersheds rarely do. Soil rarely does. Forests, species, and future bodies remain largely invisible.

    This absence is not accidental. It reflects a failure of empathy…not emotional indifference, but perceptual narrowing. We have learned to see economic benefit clearly while training ourselves not to see cumulative ecological harm until it arrives as crisis.

    Empathy, understood ecologically, resists this narrowing. It asks us to attend to what bears cost slowly, silently, and often without political voice.

    Land Is Not an Abstraction

    Extraction economies are often defended as lifelines for “overlooked” places. But land is not an abstract resource pool waiting to be activated for growth. It is a living field of relations between humans and more-than-humans that remembers disturbance long after boom cycles fade.

    Anyone who has spent time with communities shaped by extraction knows the pattern. Initial prosperity with infrastructure investment and job creation. And then, often, degraded water, long-term health impacts, ecological fragmentation, and economic precarity occur when markets shift.

    To name this is not to dismiss workers or romanticize poverty. It is to refuse a false tradeoff that pits dignity of labor against the integrity of place.

    Beyond the Binary

    The real failure of the “all-of-the-above” framing is not that it includes fossil fuels. It is that it treats energy as a menu of interchangeable options rather than as a formative relationship between people, land, and time.

    A genuinely pragmatic energy politics would ask harder questions:

    • What kinds of work help communities remain with their land rather than exhaust it?
    • What forms of energy production cultivate care, skill, and long-term stewardship?
    • What do our infrastructure choices teach us to notice…and what do they train us to ignore?

    These are not elitist questions. They are practical questions in the deepest sense.

    A Different Kind of Realism

    Climate politics does not fail because it asks too much. It fails when it asks too little…when it narrows realism to GDP curves and election cycles while ignoring the slow violence written into landscapes and bodies.

    If empathy is how the world first comes to matter, then energy policy is one of the most powerful forms of moral formation we have. It shapes what we see, what we value, and what we are willing to sacrifice…often without saying so aloud.

    The question before us is not whether fossil fuels have brought benefits. Of course they have. The question is whether continuing to expand systems that require ecological blindness can ever count as practical in a world already living with the consequences of that blindness.

    Pragmatism worthy of the name would begin there.

    TikTok’s New Granular Location Data Tracking

    Yuck… be careful out there with your location data, folks…

    TikTok Is Now Collecting Even More Data About Its Users. Here Are the 3 Biggest Changes | WIRED:

    TikTok’s change in location tracking is one of the most notable updates in this new privacy policy. Before this update, the app did not collect the precise, GPS-derived location data of US users. Now, if you give TikTok permission to use your phone’s location services, then the app may collect granular information about your exact whereabouts. Similar kinds of precise location data is also tracked by other social media apps, like Instagram and X.

    Gigawatts and Wisdom: Toward an Ecological Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

    Elon Musk announced on X this week that xAI’s “Colossus 2” supercomputer is now operational, describing it as the world’s first gigawatt-scale AI training cluster, with plans to scale to 1.5 gigawatts by April. This single training cluster now consumes more electricity than San Francisco’s peak demand.

    There is a particular cadence to announcements like this. They arrive wrapped in the language of inevitability, scale, and achievement. Bigger numbers are offered as evidence of progress. Power becomes proof. The gesture is not just technological but symbolic, and it signals that the future belongs to those who can command energy, land, water, labor, and attention on a planetary scale (same as it ever was).

    What is striking is not simply the amount of electricity involved, though that should give us pause. A gigawatt is not an abstraction. It is rivers dammed, grids expanded, landscapes reorganized, communities displaced or reoriented. It is heat that must be carried away, water that must circulate, minerals that must be extracted. AI training does not float in the cloud. It sits somewhere. It draws from somewhere. It leaves traces.

    The deeper issue, though, is how casually this scale is presented as self-justifying.

    We are being trained, culturally, to equate intelligence with throughput. To assume that cognition improves in direct proportion to energy consumption. To believe that understanding emerges automatically from scale. This is an old story. Industrial modernity told it with coal and steel. The mid-twentieth century told it with nuclear reactors. Now we tell it with data centers.

    But intelligence has never been merely a matter of power input.

    From a phenomenological perspective, intelligence is relational before it is computational. It arises from situated attention, from responsiveness to a world that pushes back, from limits as much as from capacities. Scale can amplify, but it can also flatten. When systems grow beyond the horizon of lived accountability, they begin to shape the world without being shaped by it in return.

    That asymmetry matters.

    There is also a theological question here, though it is rarely named as such. Gigawatt-scale AI is not simply a tool. It becomes an ordering force, reorganizing priorities and imaginaries. It subtly redefines what counts as worth knowing and who gets to decide. In that sense, these systems function liturgically. They train us in what to notice, what to ignore, and what to sacrifice for the sake of speed and dominance.

    None of this requires demonizing technology or indulging in nostalgia. The question is not whether AI will exist or even whether it will be powerful. The question is what kind of power we are habituating ourselves to accept as normal.

    An ecology of attention cannot be built on unlimited extraction. A future worth inhabiting cannot be sustained by systems that require cities’ worth of electricity simply to refine probabilistic text generation. At some point, the metric of success has to shift from scale to care, from domination to discernment, from raw output to relational fit.

    Gigawatts tell us what we can do.
    They do not tell us what we should become.

    That remains a human question. And increasingly, an ecological one.

    Here’s the full paper in PDF, or you can also read it on Academia.edu:

    Gigawatts and WisdomDownload

    Renting Your Next Computer?? (Or Why It’s Hard to Be Optimistic About Tech Now)

    It’s not as far-fetched as it may sound to many of us who have owned our own computer hardware for years (going back to the 1980’s for me)… the price of RAM and soon the price of SSD’s are skyrocketing because of the demands of artificial intelligence, and that’s already having implications for the pricing of personal computers.

    So, could Bezos and other tech leaders’ dreams of us being locked into subscription-based models for computing come true? I think there’s a good possibility, given that our society has been slow-boiled to accept subscriptions for everything from our music listening and playlists (Spotify) to software (Office, Adobe, and now Apple’s iWork Suite, etc.) to cars (want more horsepower in your Audi? That’s a subscription).

    To me, it’s a far cry from my high school days, when I would pore over computer magazines to read about the latest Pentium chips and figure out how much RAM I could order for my next computer build to fit my meager budget. But we’ve long been using machines with glued-down chips and encouraging corporations to add to the immense e-waste problem with our impenetrable iPhones, MacBooks, and Thinkpads.

    And let’s face it, the personal computer model has faded in importance over the last 15 years with the introduction of the iPhone and iPads and similar smartphones, as we can binge all the Netflix, TikTok, and Instagram reels (do we use personal computers for much else these days?) we want right from those devices.

    Subscription computers and a return to the terminal model of VAX machines (PDF from 1987), as I used in college to check email, seem dystopian, but now that we’ve subscriptionized our art and music, it’s just a shout away.

    Jeff Bezos said the quiet part out loud — hopes that you’ll give up your PC to rent one from the cloud | Windows Central:

    So, what prediction did Bezos make back then, that seems particularly poignant right now? Bezos thinks that local PC hardware is antiquated, and that the future will revolve around cloud computing scenarios, where you rent your compute from companies like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure.

    Bezos told an anecdote about visiting a historical brewery to emphasize his point. He said that the hundreds-year old brewery had a museum celebrating its heritage, and had an exhibit for a 100-year old electric generator they used before national power grids were a thing. Bezos said he saw this generator in the same way he sees local computing solutions today — inferring on hopes that users will move away from local hardware to rented, always-online cloud-based solutions offered by Amazon and other similar companies.

    After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment

    Over the past year, I’ve been tracking a question that began with a simple observation: Artificial intelligence isn’t only code or computation, but it’s infrastructure. It eats electricity and water. It sits on land. It reshapes local economies and local ecologies. It arrives through planning commissions and energy grids rather than through philosophical conference rooms.

    That observation was the starting point of my November 2025 piece, “Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality.” In that first essay, I tried to draw out the scale of the stakes from the often-invisible material costs of AI, the ethical lacunae in policy debates, and the deep metaphysical questions we’re forced to confront when we start to think about artificial “intelligence” not as an abstraction but as an embodied presence in our world. If you haven’t read it yet, I would recommend it first as it provides the grounding that makes the new essay more than just a sequel.

    Here’s the extended follow-up titled “After the Crossroads: Artificial Intelligence, Place-Based Ethics, and the Slow Work of Moral Discernment.” This piece expands the argument in several directions, and, I hope, deepens it.

    If the first piece asked “What is AI doing here?”, this new essay asks “How do we respond, ethically and spiritually, when AI is no longer just a future possibility but a present reality?”

    A few key parts:

    1. From Abstraction to Emplacement

    AI isn’t floating in the cloud, but it’s rooted in specific places with particular water tables, zoning laws, and bodies of people. Understanding AI ethically means understanding how it enters lived space, not just conceptual space.

    2. Infrastructure as Moral Problem

    The paper foregrounds the material aspects of AI, including data centers, energy grids, and water use, and treats these not as technical issues but as moral and ecological issues that call for ethical attention and political engagement.

    3. A Theological Perspective on Governance

    Drawing on ecological theology, liberation theology, and phenomenology, the essay reframes governance not as bureaucracy but as a moral practice. Decisions about land use, utilities, and community welfare become questions of justice, care, and collective responsibility.

    4. Faith Communities as Ethical Agents

    One of my central claims is that faith communities, including churches, are uniquely positioned to foster the moral formation necessary for ethical engagement with AI. These are communities in which practices of attention, patience, deliberation, and shared responsibility are cultivated through the ordinary rhythms of life (ideally).

    This perspective is neither technophobic nor naïvely optimistic about innovation. It insists that ethical engagement with AI must be slow, embodied, and rooted in particular communities, not divorced into abstract principles.

    Why This Matters Now

    AI is no longer on the horizon. Its infrastructure is being built today, in places like ours (especially here in the Carolinas), with very material ecological footprints. These developments raise moral questions not only about algorithmic bias or job displacement, important as those topics are, but also about water tables, electrical grids, local economies, and democratic agency.

    Those are questions not just for experts, but for communities, congregations, local governments, and engaged citizens.

    This essay is written for anyone who wants to take those questions seriously without losing their grip on complexity, such as people of faith, people of conscience, and anyone concerned with how technology shapes places and lives.

    I’m also planning shorter, reader-friendly versions of key sections, including one you can share with your congregation or community group.

    We’re living in a time when theological attention and civic care overlap in real places, and it matters how we show up.

    Abstract

    This essay extends my earlier analysis of artificial intelligence (AI) as a convergence of science, ethics, and spirituality by deliberately turning toward questions of place, local governance, and moral formation. While much contemporary discourse on AI remains abstract or global in scale, the material realities of AI infrastructure increasingly manifest at the local level through data centers, energy demands, water use, zoning decisions, and environmental impacts. Drawing on ecological theology, phenomenology, and political theology, this essay argues that meaningful ethical engagement with AI requires slowing technological decision-making, recentering embodied and communal discernment, and reclaiming local democratic and spiritual practices as sites of moral agency. Rather than framing AI as either salvific or catastrophic, I propose understanding AI as a mirror that amplifies existing patterns of extraction, care, and neglect. The essay concludes by suggesting that faith communities and local institutions play a crucial, underexplored role in shaping AI’s trajectory through practices of attentiveness, accountability, and place-based moral reasoning.

    After_the_Crossroads_AI_Place_Ethics_v2Download

    Stats from 2025

    This is a little self-indulgent, but I wanted to share some of the interesting stats from my blog in 2025. I was rather surprised to see the site have one its “best” year (numbers-wise with page views, likes, and comments… I won’t apply that label to my own content) since 2016 and reaching levels it was hitting at the height of blogging on the web in the mid 2000’s (though I do think we’re seeing a return to blog culture as more people realize the attention engines of social media are turning us all into wretched creatures).

    • Total posts in 2025: 234 (now up to 3,973 published posts since 2006)
    • Total words written in 2025: 58,300 (don’t tell my PhD advisor)
    • Most popular post time: Thursday 5:00 PM (21% of views… I always tell clients that Tuesday mornings and Thursday afternoons are the times when people consume content on the web… still holds true)
    • Total page views in 2025: 90,434 (2016 had 120,469 and 2011 saw 100,081 views for comparison)
    • Total views all time: 1,002,067
    • Total unique visitors all time: 570,862
    • Best month ever: December 2025 (yep, last month the blog saw its record 37,000 views, which beats out January 2007’s 34,000… crazy!)

    All told, I really don’t care that much about these sorts of stats these days as I know I’m writing for a niche audience. I don’t monetize this site (or your visits, data, or viewing habits in any way beyond simple page views… no Google Analytics, etc. here). However, it is endearing to see new people find and interact with my ramblings here, but especially to see all of you who come back as repeat visitors that like articles, leave comments, and (yes) even share sometimes on social media outlets. I deeply appreciate your engagement, and definitely reach out if you ever have questions about my writing, opinions, or work!

    Elon Musk’s Intent by Substituting Abundance for Sustainable in Telsa’s Mission

    Worthy read on Elon’s post-scarcity fantasy of robots and AGI that relies on the concepts of Superintelligence and trans-humanistic ethics that lack any concept of ecological futures and considerations… a future that, quite frankly, we should not pursue if we are to live into our true being here on this planet.

    Elon Musk drops ‘sustainable’ from Tesla’s mission as he completes his villain arc | Electrek:

    By removing “sustainable,” Tesla is signaling that its primary focus is no longer the environment or the climate crisis. “Amazing Abundance” is a reference to the post-scarcity future Musk believes he is building through general-purpose humanoid robots (Optimus) and Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

    In this new mission, electric cars and renewables are just tools to help build this hypothetical utopia.

    South Carolina’s Data Center Decision Time

    I have grave concerns about the speed at which this is happening all over the state, with little regard to integral ecologies (City Council is debating two new data centers here in Spartanburg as well)…

    9 new data centers proposed in Colleton County:

    “I think South Carolina really is at a decision point: what do we want our state to look like 20 years from now, 30 years from now?” resident and Climate Campaign Associate Robby Maynor said. “Do we want a lot of gas plants and pipelines and data centers? Or do we want to protect the things that make South Carolina special and unique? The ACE Basin is at the very top of that list. This is the absolute wrong location for a complex of this size.”

    In the application for the special zoning exception, the proposed data centers and the substations show the potential impact on this land, especially the wetlands, but some say the impact is even greater.

    What is Intelligence (and What “Superintelligence” Misses)?

    Worth a read… sounds a good deal like what I’ve been saying out loud and thinking here in my posts on AI futures and the need for local imagination in steering technological innovation such as AI / AGI…

    The Politics Of Superintelligence:

    And beneath all of this, the environmental destruction accelerates as we continue to train large language models — a process that consumes enormous amounts of energy. When confronted with this ecological cost, AI companies point to hypothetical benefits, such as AGI solving climate change or optimizing energy systems. They use the future to justify the present, as though these speculative benefits should outweigh actual, ongoing damages. This temporal shell game, destroying the world to save it, would be comedic if the consequences weren’t so severe.

    And just as it erodes the environment, AI also erodes democracy. Recommendation algorithms have long shaped political discourse, creating filter bubbles and amplifying extremism, but more recently, generative AI has flooded information spaces with synthetic content, making it impossible to distinguish truth from fabrication. The public sphere, the basis of democratic life, depends on people sharing enough common information to deliberate together….

    What unites these diverse imaginaries — Indigenous data governance, worker-led data trusts, and Global South design projects — is a different understanding of intelligence itself. Rather than picturing intelligence as an abstract, disembodied capacity to optimize across all domains, they treat it as a relational and embodied capacity bound to specific contexts. They address real communities with real needs, not hypothetical humanity facing hypothetical machines. Precisely because they are grounded, they appear modest when set against the grandiosity of superintelligence, but existential risk makes every other concern look small by comparison. You can predict the ripostes: Why prioritize worker rights when work itself might soon disappear? Why consider environmental limits when AGI is imagined as capable of solving climate change on demand?

    How I Use Obsidian at CIIS: A Relational Workflow for Reading, Reflection, and Writing

    Obsidian has become my living archive since I first dove in back in 2021 as a classroom teacher where I organized teaching notes, conversations, and todos as a Dean of Students… and now it has become the place where course readings, dissertation ideas, phenomenological field notes, theological insights, Canvas posts, and draft papers all meet in a shared relational space. It’s less a filing cabinet and more a garden. What I’m really doing in Obsidian is tending connections by letting ideas compost, cross-pollinate, and eventually grow into papers or long-form reflections. Here’s the core workflow I’m sharing with you.

    Two places where I’d start before you dive in to Obsidian:

    1. Book Notes as Living Conversations

    When I read, whether it’s Merleau-Ponty, Edith Stein, Whitehead, or a text for PCC/ESR, I take notes into a Book Notes template that pulls in metadata automatically:

    • Author / Title / Year / Course
    • Core quotes (copied directly, tagged with #quote and citation)
    • My reflections in first person
    • Connections to other thinkers or my ongoing concepts: [[Ecological Intentionality]], [[Cruciform Consciousness]], [[Empathy (Stein)]], [[Flesh of the World]], etc.

    Each book note ends with a section called “Where does this want to go?”

    Sometimes the answer is a future paper, a blog post, or a concept node. That question keeps the note alive instead of archived.

    2. Canvas Posts → Permanent Notes

    I write most of my Canvas responses in Obsidian first. This lets me:

    1. Draft freely
    2. Link concepts as I’m thinking
    3. Keep a permanent, searchable archive of every class discussion

    Each module prompt gets its own note in my Canvas/ folder. After posting, I create 1–3 “permanent notes” distilled from the response—short, atomic ideas written in my own voice.

    For example, a Canvas post on the chiasm leads to permanent notes like:

    • Perception as reciprocal touch
    • The ecological thickness of the visible
    • Relational openness in the phenomenology of nature

    These then link outward into ongoing clusters such as [[Phenomenology]], [[Embodiment]], [[Nature as Intertwining]].

    3. Writing Papers Through Connected Notes

    When a paper is due, ecological theology, phenomenology, ESR or PCC research, I never begin with a blank page. I begin with a map of notes already in conversation.

    The workflow:

    1. Create a Paper Hub note as a central node for the project:
      • thesis draft
      • reading list
      • list of relevant permanent notes
    2. Pull in linked notes Using Dataview or simple backlinks, I gather every relevant piece of thinking I’ve already stored.
    3. Assemble the argument The writing becomes an act of weaving connections rather than inventing from scratch.
    4. Export to Word/PDF Once the draft is complete, I move into Word for Chicago-style citations and final formatting.

    This lets my academic work grow organically out of months of lived reflection rather than rushed, isolated writing.

    4. Daily Notes as Phenomenological and Ecological Anchors

    Every morning’s Daily Note includes:

    • weather + sunrise/sunset
    • tracking notes on the black walnut
    • dreams, moods, or somatic impressions
    • any quote or insight from my reading

    These small entries, over time, become a longitudinal phenomenological dataset—especially helpful for my ecological intentionality and process-relational work.

    5. The Vault as an Ecology

    Obsidian mirrors how I’m thinking about the world in my CIIS work:

    everything is connected, everything participates, and meaning emerges through relation rather than isolation.

    My vault has three organizing principles:

    • Maps of content (big conceptual hubs)
    • Atomic permanent notes (ideas per note tagged well)
    • Ephemeral notes (daily, in-class, or quick captures)

    The magic is not in perfect organization… it’s in the interplay.

    6. Why This Works for Me

    This workflow keeps my scholarship:

    • Ecological: ideas grow from interaction
    • Phenomenological: grounded in lived experience
    • Process-relational: always evolving
    • Practical: every note has a future use

    It’s become the backbone not only of my life and coursework, but of my dissertation path, Tree Sit Journals, Carolina Ecology posts, and even sermon writing.

    AI Data Centers in Space

    Solar energy is indeed everything (and perhaps the root of consciousness?)… this is a good step and we should be moving more of our energy grids into these types of frameworks (with local-focused receivers and transmitters here on the surface)… not just AI datacenters. I suspect we will in the coming decades with the push from AI (if the power brokers that have made and continue to make trillions from energy generation aren’t calling the shots)… 

    Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers:

    CEO Sundar Pichai said in a Fox News interview on Sunday that Google will soon begin construction of AI data centers in space. The tech giant announced Project Suncatcher earlier this month, with the goal of finding more efficient ways to power energy-guzzling centers, in this case with solar power.

    “One of our moonshots is to, how do we one day have data centers in space so that we can better harness the energy from the sun that is 100 trillion times more energy than what we produce on all of Earth today?” Pichai said.

    Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of Science, Ethics, and Spirituality

    I’ve been interested in seeing how corporate development of AI data centers (and their philosophies and ethical considerations) has dominated the conversation, rather than inviting in other local and metaphysical voices to help shape this important human endeavor. This paper explores some of those possibilities (PDF download available here…)

    Artificial Intelligence at the Crossroads of ScienceDownload

    The Problem of AI Water Cooling for Communities

    It’s no coincidence that most of these AI mega centers are being built in areas here in the United States Southeast where regulations are more lax and tax incentives are generous…

    AI’s water problem is worse than we thought:

    Here’s the gist: At its data centers in Morrow County, Amazon is using water that’s already contaminated with industrial agriculture fertilizer runoff to cool down its ultra-hot servers. When that contaminated water hits Amazon’s sizzling equipment, it partially evaporates—but all the nitrate pollution stays behind. That means the water leaving Amazon’s data centers is even more concentrated with pollutants than what went in.

    After that extra-contaminated water leaves Amazon’s data center, it then gets dumped and sprayed across local farmland in Oregon. From there, the contaminated water soaks straight into the aquifer that 45,000 people drink from.

    The result is that people in Morrow County are now drinking from taps loaded with nitrates, with some testing at 40, 50, even 70 parts per million. (For context: the federal safety limit is 10 ppm. Anything above that is linked to miscarriages, kidney failure, cancers, and “blue baby syndrome.”)

    The Solution to Being Locked In

    Seth describes his situation with LinkedIn posts here, but the refrain is something I’ve been saying for 20 years now… own your own work and have a canonical place for it. Don’t rely on Facebook/YouTube/LinkedIn/X/Etsy, etc., because of the allure of cheap eyeballs and “traffic”… it’s never been easier to have your own domain on your own server and control of your online expressions.

    The Hotel California (and subscriptions) | Seth’s Blog:

    The alternative is to own your own stuff. To build an asset you control, and to guard your attention and trust carefully.

    The best way to read blogs hasn’t changed in twenty years. RSS. It’s free and easy and it just works. It’s the most efficient way to get the information you’re looking for, and it’s under your control. There’s a quick explainer video at that link along with a reader that’s easy to use.

    Who Says Blogging is Dead?

    My site is having its biggest month in almost 20 years (and its best year since 2007, when I was selling sponsorships and made a decent income from them). I’ve not done much to promote things here besides writing, but I do appreciate the tens of thousands of visitors (not bots) that have stopped by.

    We’re about to enter a new age of personal and professional blogging that will swing the pendulum back from the horribleness of social media coalesced around a few corporate platforms. These types of surprising numbers (for me) help convince me that my thoughts are accurate.

    OpenAI’s ‘ChatGPT for Teachers

    K-12 education in the United States is going to look VERY different in just a few short years…

    OpenAI rolls out ‘ChatGPT for Teachers’ for K-12 educators:

    OpenAI on Wednesday announced ChatGPT for Teachers, a version of its artificial intelligence chatbot that is designed for K-12 educators and school districts.

    Educators can use ChatGPT for Teachers to securely work with student information, get personalized teaching support and collaborate with colleagues within their district, OpenAI said. There are also administrative controls that district leaders can use to determine how ChatGPT for Teachers will work within their communities.