Boundaries of Consciousness

Tomorrow, Sunday, November 8, 2026, marks the eve of the 88th anniversary of the 1938 Kristallnacht pogroms. An anonymous group calling itself Philly Bike On Your Left is organizing a boycott ride through Rittenhouse Square to mark the weekend. Their targets are local Jewish-owned restaurants. They plan to disrupt operations at Mac Mart, K'Far Cafe, Huda, Goldie, Dizengoff, and Schlesinger's Deli. Co-organized with Philly Writers Against the War on Gaza, Boycott CookNSolo, and the Philly Solidarity Calendar, the campaign leaves zero ambiguity about its intentions.

A single hyperscale data center burns through 100 megawatts of continuous power and requires thousands of gallons of water every minute just to stop the server racks from melting. When a corporation commands this massive footprint to run proprietary surveillance networks and enclose open-source protocols, it physically takes more than it gives from the surrounding community.

Drawing on recent reporting by Andrew Liu at Inside Climate News, along with data from Bloomberg, Wood Mackenzie, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the Sierra Club, and The Washington Post, we have to confront the physical reality of the internet. Artificial intelligence is routinely sold to the public as something weightless, living in an abstract place called the cloud. But this cloud is heavy. It is built out of concrete, steel, copper, and silicon, and it requires a massive, constant flow of electricity to function.