No More War Pigs Have The Power
Machines, Water, and the Price of Progress
Posted on December 14, 2025
I’ve been thinking about rivers in the sky, atmospheric rivers, and all the ways humans like to believe someone or something is “in control.” The more I look at it, the more I realize that the real story isn’t about control — it’s about sacrifice.
The Rivers That Aren’t Ours to Steer
In December 2025, Washington State was battered by ten inches of rain in just 48 hours. Satellite loops showed a bright ribbon of water vapor stretching from the Pacific clear to Puget Sound. Natural, massive, unstoppable.
China has its Tianhe Plan, the “Sky River,” a vision of nudging moisture across its lands with burners, drones, and cloud-seeding rockets. Ambitious, high-tech — but even if they wanted to, nobody today can point an atmospheric river at Seattle.
The same metaphor has escaped its laboratory and PowerPoint decks, entering our shared vocabulary. And it’s here that people start smelling patterns — some real, some imagined.
The Hands That Tweak, the Machines That Consume
We like to blame the obvious when harm comes. But look around:
- Data centers are sprouting up everywhere. They use millions of gallons of water for cooling, which evaporates into the atmosphere. That vapor is real — but microscopic compared to oceans. Still, it represents a new layer of human influence on the environment.
- Cloud seeding is happening in the U.S., UAE, Russia — but only to tweak precipitation locally. There’s no global joystick.
We aren’t controlling the storms. But we are converting water and heat into infrastructure at unprecedented scale. In a climate system already stretched, even “small” inputs matter.
Sacrifice by Design
The unsettling truth is that institutions increasingly expect humans to adapt to machines, rather than the other way around.
- Tax breaks, zoning, and regulatory pressure push communities into compliance.
- When persuasion fails, legal frameworks — eminent domain, water rights, and infrastructure mandates — enforce it.
- Displacement, environmental harm, and limits on mobility are reframed as “necessary trade-offs.”
It’s not about malice. It’s about momentum, efficiency, and the insulation of power from consequence.
Blame Down, Never Up
One of the strangest features of this moment is how quickly responsibility is pushed downward. The news cycle is relentless in reminding ordinary people that they are the problem: their commutes, their grocery choices, their thermostats, their daily lives. We’re told to eat differently, drive less, travel less — to shrink ourselves in the name of planetary survival.
Meanwhile, the same institutions shaping that narrative quietly admit something else entirely.
The largest and fastest-growing sources of energy consumption aren’t households — they’re data centers, server farms, and artificial intelligence infrastructure. These facilities consume staggering amounts of electricity and water, often concentrated in regions already under environmental stress. Increasingly, they are plugged directly into nuclear reactors.
Yes, nuclear energy is low-carbon at the point of generation. But “clean” does not mean consequence-free. When vast amounts of stable baseload power are diverted to private computational infrastructure, that energy is no longer available for homes, public transit, or broader electrification. Scarcity doesn’t disappear — it’s just redistributed.
So while the public is lectured about plastic straws and personal carbon footprints, the highest-emitting decision-makers operate systems whose footprints dwarf those of entire communities. This asymmetry matters. It creates a moral disconnect: those who make the rules exempt themselves from the sacrifices they prescribe.
Structural Violence
What’s happening is violence, even if it doesn’t look like it in a headline. It’s slow, bureaucratic, legal, and predictable. It’s:
- Unequal: the costs fall on the few while the benefits accrue to the powerful
- Knowledgeable: institutions understand the outcomes in advance
- Repeatable: patterns continue without pause
Calling it “policy” or “progress” doesn’t change the fact that human lives are being reshaped, constrained, or sacrificed.
When People Judge
Most people, looking at these choices, would call them evil — not because of cartoon villains, but because of indifference to suffering. Institutions see efficiency. The public sees moral failure. And when harm is normalized and responsibility outsourced to machines, models, or procedures, the perception of predation grows.
A Reflection
Somewhere along the way, we stopped asking how machines could serve people, and started asking how people could serve machines. Institutions call it efficiency. The public experiences it as sacrifice.
It’s not a dystopian fantasy. It’s the outcome of choices made every day: where to build, who to prioritize, and what counts as “necessary” collateral. And while nobody is pointing storms at Seattle or programming clouds for profit (yet), the systems we’ve created are already reshaping lives in ways that feel deliberate. That is the quiet violence of progress.
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