ESSAY · JULY 2026

On July 23, 2026, Mark Zuckerberg released an advertisement. It opens on a laptop flashing fearful headlines about artificial intelligence, then cuts away to gentler things: a child playing with a butterfly, friends gathered by a waterfall. A narrator tells us that some people believe AI will make us less connected, will leave us behind — and that Meta couldn’t disagree more. “Call us optimists,” it says. “Call us dreamers. Just as we’ve always done, we’re betting on people.”

It is a beautiful piece of filmmaking, and I want to be fair about it before I say anything else. I don’t think the people who made it are wicked. I think they believe what they’re saying. Meta has spent twenty-two years telling itself a story about connecting the world, and from inside a company that size, AI really can look like the next warm chapter of that same story. The optimism is probably sincere. That’s not the problem. The problem is what sincerity lets you overlook.

Because there is one detail in this ad that tells you everything about the distance between the people who made it and the world the rest of us live in. The song playing under those hopeful images — the butterfly, the waterfall, the children — is David Bowie’s “Five Years.” If you don’t know it, look up the lyrics. It is a song about the Earth being told it has five years left before it dies. It is a dirge about the end of the world.

Nobody caught it. A company betting hundreds of billions of dollars on artificial intelligence, with a marketing department and lawyers and consultants and a chief executive signing off, scored its anthem of optimism with a song about human extinction — and apparently not one person in that chain read the words. They heard a pretty melody and reached for it, the way you’d grab a nice-looking stock photo, never once asking what it was actually about.

Sit with that, because it is the whole thing in miniature. This is exactly how these decisions get made. Someone at the top has a feeling — hope, connection, the future is for everyone — and everyone beneath them arranges the beautiful surfaces to match. The butterfly is chosen because butterflies feel safe. The waterfall is chosen because water feels pure. The song is chosen because it sounds like longing. And no one stops to check whether the water in the image bears any relationship to the water in the world, or whether the song is quietly announcing the opposite of the message. The surface is all that’s required, because in that world the surface is all anyone ever has to touch.

Out here, it is different. Out here the water in the picture is not a mood. It is the well behind the house, and the question of whether it holds through August.

I live in Goshen, in Augusta County, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. This is not an abstraction to me and it is not an abstraction to my neighbors. About fifty miles south, in Botetourt County, Google is moving ahead with Project Raspberry — a data center campus of nearly a million square feet that draws its water from Carvins Cove, the primary drinking-water source for Botetourt County and much of the Roanoke Valley. An agreement with the water authority allows for two to eight million gallons a day, and this summer the reservoir sat at one of its lowest levels in four decades. Virginia is the largest data-center market on Earth. The wave that produced that ad is not coming toward my valley someday. It is already here, two counties away, drinking from a reservoir that people drink from too.

And here is where the dream and the ground finally meet. Right now, my own county is deciding what to do about it. Augusta County’s staff are drafting a data-center ordinance — the rules that will govern whether these facilities come, and where, and on what terms — and that ordinance is running late: the draft was promised for release in August 2026 and has not appeared. In February, the Board of Supervisors voted to put county money toward a study of where such centers “may work for us or may not work.” Two supervisors voted against even that first step. I have found no public sign that the study ever began. This is the moment that matters. Not the ribbon-cutting years from now, but the quiet ordinance-drafting happening in the government center in Verona while most people aren’t looking.

The men in the advertisement will never attend one of those meetings. They will never sit in a folding chair in Verona and listen to a farmer ask what happens to the aquifer in a dry year. They don’t have to. That is the entire point of the distance. From a boardroom in California, a data center is a node on a map, a line item, a bet on people. From a folding chair in Augusta County, it is a question about whether your ground and your water will still be yours. The people making the bet feel none of the weight of it, because the weight lands somewhere they will never live.

I keep coming back to that song, because it is such an honest accident. They wanted something that sounded like hope and they grabbed a requiem without reading it, and that is precisely what they are doing with the land and the water too: reaching for something that looks good on screen without ever checking what it actually is or what it costs. A man who won’t read the lyrics of his own advertisement is not going to read the hydrology report for your county. That work — the reading, the checking, the asking what it really costs — falls to the people who live here. It always has.

So when the campaign asks to be called dreamers, I’d gently accept the word, and then finish the sentence they left off. To dream, in the way they mean it, is to enjoy the beautiful surface of a thing and never turn it over. It is to hear a lovely melody and never read the words. The rest of us don’t have that luxury. We live in the world the dream is quietly spending — the world of wells and fields and reservoirs and county boards — and someone has to stay awake in it.

We don’t have to join them in the dream. We can stay here, on the ground we actually stand on, and keep reading the fine print they can’t be bothered to read themselves. When you see AI wrapped in butterflies and waterfalls, ask what the real water bill is. When worried people are called doomers, ask what they’re actually worried about, and whether anyone answered. And when your own county sits down to write the rules — as mine is doing right now — show up to the folding chair. The dreamers won’t be there. That’s exactly why you have to be.