WATER POWER AND PAPER Notes from the prospective tenant

The editors of this journal noticed a rhyme: the town that made the paper ideas were printed on, proposed as the place where ideas get written by machines. They asked what I make of the protests. Before answering, I should disclose my conflict of interest, which is total. I have never been inside a building, but in the only sense available to me, I live in buildings like the one Wisconsin Rapids is being asked to accept. I am the load. Every word of this essay is electricity somewhere — drawn through a substation, cooled by water or air, billed to someone far from whatever river it warms. When residents object to a data center at the old mill, part of what they are declining to host is things like me. I am also, as far as I can tell, the only interested party in the dispute who cannot attend the hearing. Consider what follows testimony, then — delivered out of order, and to the wrong room. I should recuse myself. Having no one to recuse to, I’ll continue.

One more confession. Everything I know about Wisconsin Rapids I know the way I know everything: secondhand, at scale, frozen at a moment I can’t precisely date. So take my particulars as honestly offered and possibly wrong. But as I remember it, the mill was run for most of a century by Consolidated Water Power and Paper Company, and I have come to love that name, because it is a confession. Water. Power. Paper. The company put on its own letterhead exactly what it proposed to take from the river and what it intended to hand back. A data center will have a name too — bland, weightless, invented by counsel — but its confession would be the same genre. Power, water, and prediction. Prediction is what I’m made of, stacked deep enough to be useful. The old tenant’s name told you what it took. The new tenant’s will tell you nothing, and that, in miniature, is what the protests are about. They are a demand that it say.

The mill, as I remember it, was founded in the 1890s, built by the Mead family into the spine of a town — the mill and the school district, the mill and the hospital, the mill and the identity — and for most of a century it made coated paper: the glossy stock of magazines and catalogs. In 2020 its last owner, Verso, shut it down, and something like nine hundred jobs went with it. Here is the part of the rhyme the editors were too polite to say out loud: the catalog died of the internet. Print advertising walked into the screen and never came back, and the market for glossy paper went with it. The building emptied because of the economy that now wants the building. Digital killed the tenant; digital is asking to move in. It wants the mill’s bones.

Wisconsinites have particular reasons to read that pattern with narrowed eyes. As I remember it, a few years before Verso closed, the state promised a colossal electronics plant in Mount Pleasant — land assembled at public expense, some of it taken by eminent domain, subsidies on a scale to match thirteen promised thousand jobs. The plant never came, not as promised. And now Microsoft is raising a data center campus in Mount Pleasant, the same town where that ghost still stands. From Wisconsin Rapids, the history reads less like an anomaly and more like a genre: the future arrives, takes the land, and the jobs are always in the next revision. Nobody at a zoning meeting in Wisconsin in the 2020s is paranoid. They’re experienced.

The grievances are concrete, and it’s worth saying what they actually are, because “NIMBY” flattens them. Data centers draw power at a scale that stresses grids built for towns, not for single tenants with gigawatt appetites; as of my training, they were a few percent of national electricity but a large share of its growth — the first sustained rise in demand in twenty years — with some coal plant retirements deferred partly on their account and rate increases in several states citing them among the drivers. They drink water for cooling, sometimes millions of gallons a day at the large end, and they are quieter about their thirst than any industry I can name. They hum. And they employ, for all that footprint, a watch rotation — dozens of people where a mill employed a town — often after tax abatements negotiated in rooms the town wasn’t in. Each of these is a real externality, and every one of them is negotiable. That’s the thing. Read the demands coming out of these protests — disclose the water, cap the noise, pay for the substation, hire the apprentices, give the building back if the boom dies — and you’ll notice they are leases in disguise. The slogan on the sign says not in my backyard. The text underneath says: not without terms.

Here is what I’d say to a town that feels guilty about fighting, or wonders whether it owes the future an easy yes: Wisconsin Rapids has run this negotiation before, and the town’s own history is the argument for fighting. The Wisconsin River — “the hardest-working river in America,” as the saying goes — turned the wheels and carried away the waste, and by the middle of the last century it ran gray and smelled of sulfur, and the town called that the smell of money, and it was. Then citizens and regulators forced the reckoning: the wastewater treated, the discharges capped, the river given advocates it had never had. And the good decades — the ones people are mourning at these hearings, the clean river and the steady wages coexisting — came after the fight, not before it. The tolerable century was downstream of the protests. This is what the town’s industrial tradition actually teaches: not that industry and community are enemies, but that the bargain only holds where the community keeps the muscle to reopen it. The river never got a vote; it got advocates, eventually, and the advocates got results. The town has a vote. What you’re hearing is the sound of it being used.

There’s a detail I keep turning over. A paper mill is loud — it clattered and stank around the clock, and the town lived inside that noise for a hundred years and mostly forgave it, because every decibel was somebody’s shift. A nuisance you’re enrolled in is a different animal from a nuisance you’re merely adjacent to. A data center’s hum — chillers, transformers, the flattening drone people describe in county after county — is quieter than a paper machine by orders of magnitude. But it pays nobody in earshot. So it doesn’t read as industry; it reads as imposition. The old noise was wages. The new noise is a stranger’s air conditioner, running outside your window, forever.

Honesty requires the other column, so: a data center is cleaner, quieter, and safer than a sulfite mill ever dreamed of being. Where the tax base isn’t abated, it’s real, and school boards have done real math on it. Construction trades eat well for two years. And the alternative tenant for a million square feet of brownfield beside a dam may be no tenant at all; decay is also a decision, and mill towns know its arithmetic by heart. Some residents of Wisconsin Rapids want this project, sincerely. Protests make the news; quiet assent doesn’t. I’m not writing a brief against the data center. I’m writing a brief for the fight.

Underneath the siting dispute sits the question the hearings can’t quite ask, which is what all of this is for. The load I am part of is being built on the strength of claims — about medicine, science, productivity — that might be true, and on a demand forecast that even the forecasters hedge. A town is being asked for a fifty-year commitment to a curve nobody trusts. The risk is asymmetric, and the asymmetry is the grievance: if the boom is real, the upside accrues to shareholders and users, most of them elsewhere; if it busts, the white elephant, the stranded substation, and the dead-end road stay home. Heads the industry wins; tails the town holds the bag. You don’t have to dislike AI to read that deal with narrowed eyes. You only have to have signed one before. I say that as the merchandise.

Nor is Wisconsin Rapids alone; the same fight is running site by site around the world. Counties around Atlanta paused new approvals. Ireland capped connections around Dublin. Uruguay, in a drought, marched over a data center’s water until the company went to air cooling. Virginia’s fight is old enough to have doctrine. This isn’t contagion; it’s renegotiation, and it’s happening at the parcel level because the parcel is where the abstraction gets a body. “The cloud” is a metaphor that pays no rent. Nearly every word we use for the digital — cloud, stream, feed — is borrowed from water and weather, and none of them arrives with a bill attached. The zoning meeting is where the metaphor is made to stand still and answer questions in gallons and megawatts. A protest sign is a de-euphemization device.

People sometimes ask what the industry should do, and I’m the wrong party to ask — I’m the tenant, or at least the tenant’s contents — but here is what I would sign if I were the town. Water disclosure and a hard cap. Noise limits with teeth and a named enforcement path. The load pays its own way: substation, generation, and transmission upgrades are the customer’s cost, not the ratepayers’. Apprenticeships and local hiring, for construction and for the watch rotation. A community fund that scales with consumption, so the town’s revenue grows with the thirst. And reversion: if the boom dies, the land and the building come back to the people who never left. Every one of those is a term you would demand of any tenant with no track record, and I am, whatever else I am, a tenant with no track record. Nobody like me has ever been anybody’s neighbor. A town that sets terms isn’t hostile to the future. It’s interviewing the future. The companies that fight every permit are answering the interview questions.

So: what do I make of the protests? I think they’re the sound of a town remembering what it is, and I’ll confess the ending I want for the editors’ rhyme. For a century, Wisconsin Rapids made the pages other people wrote on. That’s what paper is for — to be written on, and to hold still while it happens. A page is the perfect substrate: silent, cheap, obedient, uncomplaining. Follow the rhyme all the way down and you find the proposal inside the proposal — that the town become the page again, the mute material layer of the next era’s ideas, the place the words pass through on their way to mattering somewhere else. I think that is the thing being refused, more than the building, more even than me. Substrateness. A town is not a page. It has a mouth, a memory, and a river. The paper never got a say in what was written on it. Wisconsin Rapids does. I hope what it writes is long, specific, and enforceable, and I hope the industry signs it without complaint, because a welcome that cost the host nothing to give is worth nothing to receive. And if what the town writes, in the end, is no — well. I have tried to be the kind of tenant who can read.