Data Monks
Loudoun, Loudun, Leibniz
A friend messaged me asking if I knew anyone who was working in the world of data centers. I did, I told him, know of someone who was up in arms about the use of land where he grew up. He thanked me and told me he was helping with a documentary on data centers as they blister across the world, focusing on one county in Virginia where construction on the massive but inconspicuous structures has been continuous for the last few decades, only accelerated by the AI boom.
Having lived in Richmond for years, I asked him where in Virginia.
Loudoun, he said. Loudoun County.
I’m sure I’d heard of the county before. It surrounds Dulles, is the home to the contiguous wealth of northern Virginia, American dynasties rising and falling, but in this moment, the name struck me because of the slight sonic correspondence with Loudun in France, the site of an infamous mass possession in the late Middle Ages, iconically used as a keystone of phenomenological linguistics and sociology by French philosopher Michel de Certeau. Though one place name is French and one is Scottish, and are not really related at all, the connection between the monastery possessed and the data center stuck in my mind.
De Certau inhabits the scene of the possession and the trials that resulted in the deposition of many tongue-speaking nun, hingeing the whole thing on the fading power of the order of the time, a battle for the interiority of the nun staged in the classic parlance of good versus evil, holy versus devil. The normally closed life of the monastery was blasted open by the affair as the European continent was being blasted open by the Reformation and Enlightenment and the mixed associations of Latin, which, instead of just the Bible, became a vehicle for pagan thought and reason.
The world today is thick with correspondences. Names have covered names and proliferated, dotting the world like the branded patches on a NASCAR driver’s Nomex suits. La Nature est un temple où de vivants piliers/Laissent parfois sortir de confuses paroles.
The Leibnizian monad is a concept set outside of space and time, but connected to it; it is pure homogeneity on the outside, windowless, but inside contains multitudes; the nuns sit worried inside their nunnery, unnerved by the lascivious Father. The knowledge of God was synthesized into generations of forlorn contemplation. Stained glass and chalices and holy wet dreams staining generations of handwoven fabrics. Supplicants made from sweet, royal blood and from salt came forward in dread and glory. Impenetrable power. The quiet power of discipline.
And where has such discipline gone? The holy unity of the monks and nuns in their Invisible Castles giving way to the concepts of the rationalists, the Monad of Leibniz, in which the totality of a concept-being is enclosed, indivisible yet infinitely varied within–the soul, the atom–dispciplining matter and thought for generations until today where Monad is just another corporation offering distributed data processing on the blockchain. Science.
Just as a man sitting in filth in the Middle Ages might feel that history is standing still, kept outside of the monasteries where the theologians were wrestling with God, pushing forth new understandings and overthrowing old ones, the filthy burger-crusted man today sits outside of the great data centers being built all over the world with no clue as to the growing complexity within. The magnitude of the microscopic within is knowable only to the smallest array of professionals.
Just as the Church gobbled up lands, so do the data centers, sucking water from the Earth as the new order of priests without discipline try to summon God. Somewhere, a beautiful schizo is mapping the coordinates of the Kabbalah over the newest schematics for spine plates and server pods. The seriality of the priesthood was replaced with the seriality of the rack, stacking up in the cold dark infinity of these massive spaces, caverns of understanding and processing that function often to better themselves like a metabolic system.
And on the outside? Who can tell a data center from a warehouse? The problem with AI is not that it may be smarter than us, but that it might become the centerpoint towards which all energy flows, as was the case with the Catholic holdings. Water, power, computation–these are the materials of emperors and nothing new.
What madness will come again to Loudon? What ghost makes the people question who really has a hand on the wheel? Time will tell. With Asimov and the prophets of technology, we already have the language for such an upsetting of the order.