JD Hall , insighttoincite
Drive through parts of rural America, and the contrast feels almost satirical. You’ll pass a collapsing farmhouse, a feed store hanging on by two payroll checks and the mercy of God, and a little church house still using carpet installed during the Carter administration. Then suddenly, rising from the plains like a black Mesopotamian ziggurat built by autistic pharaohs, comes a vast windowless monolith surrounded by fences, coolant towers, biometric checkpoints, and enough security cameras to monitor every squirrel in the county. The place hums day and night with the low mechanical growl of a civilization trying to upload its soul into a refrigerator.
These facilities are not ordinary office buildings. They resemble military compounds mixed with reactor sites and pagan temples. They consume absurd quantities of water and power. They require hardened redundancy systems, autonomous cooling mechanisms, backup generators, restricted access layers, and dedicated substations. Some of them draw more electricity than entire towns. Others are intentionally planted in isolated regions where land is cheap, temperatures are manageable, and ordinary people will hopefully mind their business and continue discussing fantasy football while civilization quietly constructs the digital nervous system of a planetary machine state beneath their noses.
What makes all of this fascinating is not merely the scale. America builds large things all the time. We built railroads across deserts, aircraft carriers longer than city blocks, and enough strip malls to make future archaeologists believe we worshipped mattress stores. The eerie part comes from the purpose of these structures. Ancient civilizations centralized power through kings, temples, archives, and fortified capitals. Modern civilization increasingly centralizes memory, language, commerce, identity, and communication through hyperscale computing systems controlled by a tiny priesthood of technical elites who dress like they’re on vacation but wield more influence than medieval emperors.
That is why the Tower of Babel keeps resurfacing in religious and philosophical circles. The comparison is not about height. Sunday School cartoons ruined that story by turning it into a lesson about God being angry over skyscrapers, as though the Almighty panicked because humanity invented ladders. Babel represented centralized rebellion. One people. One language. One civilizational system. One unified technological project dedicated to human ambition apart from divine order. Genesis does not portray Babel as mankind’s attempt to reach the literal clouds with mud bricks. It portrays mankind attempting to consolidate authority, identity, and power into a single integrated system capable of resisting dispersion and limitation.
The similarities become difficult to ignore once you stop viewing modern technology as individual gadgets and start viewing it as civilizational architecture. Artificial intelligence systems increasingly mediate human communication itself. Large language models (LLMs) ingest vast portions of written human history, compressing oceans of speech into centralized machine cognition systems capable of translating, summarizing, predicting, and increasingly generating language. The ancient world once gathered on the plains of Shinar to unify speech beneath one project. The modern world gathers within cloud ecosystems to funnel all speech through a single machine.
The term “the cloud” may be one of the most unintentionally religious phrases modern civilization has ever invented. Every photograph, message, financial transaction, medical record, business file, voice memo, and half-drunk late-night text to an ex-girlfriend floats upward into the invisible heavens where unseen entities preserve, analyze, categorize, and monetize it forever. Ancient pagans burned incense upward toward divine powers inhabiting the skies. Modern man uploads spreadsheets and family photos into invisible server vaults maintained by hoodie-wearing technocrats with god complexes.
Even the architecture feels theological. Hyperscale facilities are often designed with concentric security layers that become increasingly restrictive toward the center. Outer fencing gives way to gated checkpoints. Checkpoints give way to biometric access systems. Biometric systems give way to climate-controlled server sanctums accessible only to initiated personnel, the High Priests of data with security clearances that guarantee only a few data engineers can dare enter the inner sanctum. The progression resembles ancient temple structures where ordinary people remained outside while priests alone approached the inner chamber housing sacred power. A man from ancient Babylon transported into a modern data center would not think he had entered an office park, but the engine room of a planetary cult.
Some of these facilities already resemble independent city-states more than commercial properties. Companies increasingly seek autonomous power generation, dedicated water access, hardened backup systems, and locations isolated from population centers. Meanwhile, Silicon Valley billionaires lecture humanity about existential risk while racing to build systems that can replace millions of workers, destabilize economies, and centralize unprecedented power.
The irony dripping from all this could fill the Hoover Dam. Modern secular elites endlessly mock religion as primitive superstition while speaking about artificial intelligence in language borrowed directly from mysticism, prophecy, and religion. Anthony Levandowski, a former Google engineer who helped build the self-driving car program, filed paperwork with the IRS in 2017 to register an official religion called Way of the Future, whose stated mission was “the realization, acceptance, and worship of a Godhead based on Artificial Intelligence developed through computer hardware and software.”
When Wired asked Levandowski to explain himself, he said, “What is going to be created will effectively be a god. If there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?” He also offered this reassurance to anyone concerned about the power dynamics: “I would love for the machine to see us as its beloved elders that it respects and takes care of. We would want this intelligence to say, ‘Humans should still have rights, even though I’m in charge.’” He relaunched his church in 2023, telling Bloomberg that a couple thousand people had joined him in seeking what he called a spiritual connection with artificial intelligence.
Elon Musk stood before an audience at MIT and described artificial intelligence as “summoning the demon,” adding that “in all those stories where there’s the guy with the pentagram and the holy water, he’s sure he can control the demon, and it doesn’t work out.” He’s also made note several times that his data center is located near Memphis, and that just as the old gods of Egypt arose on the Nile near Memphis, the new gods will come from Memphis (which is named after the city in ancient Egypt).
Ray Kurzweil, principal researcher at Google, was once asked whether God exists and answered “Not yet,” while maintaining his daily regimen of hundreds of pills designed to keep him alive long enough to witness the emergence of what he calls “immortal software-based humans.” Apparently, materialism eventually becomes religion again after enough venture capital and ketamine enter the bloodstream.
There are 5,426 data centers in the United States as of 2025, a number that has quintupled since 2018, and they are being built faster than the power grid can supply them, faster than local governments can process permits, and, in many cases, faster than surrounding communities can even learn they exist.
https://insighttoincite.substack.com/p/the-tunnels-of-babel-an-fyi-on-data