They Retired Here for a Country Idyll. But Meta Had Other Plans.
They Retired Here for a Country Idyll. But Meta Had Other Plans.
Last Wednesday, Congressman Ro Khanna, a Democrat who represents part of Silicon Valley, came to visit. The Morrises showed Khanna the canning jars full of the well water they’d kept, in various stages of opacity from whatever brown material had infiltrated their well and clogged their filters. They showed him how the water came straight up from the earth that same solid gray-brown.
They showed him a thoroughly corroded hot water heater in their shed, which they’d had to replace, along with just about every other appliance that has water running through it. They say that out of three usable bathrooms in their home, they are down to one. “I did hire a well guy to come out, and I said, ‘Is my property just full of sediment?
What is happening here?’” Beverly Morris told Khanna. “And he looked at me, pointed across the road, and he goes, ‘There’s one answer to your question, and it’s not going to change.’” They showed Khanna a map of their well-water catchment area: Their well is the only water source they have, though their lawyer said Meta has a municipal water hookup for the data center. Brown water sometimes floods their front ditch.
Photos of their rural, pastoral nights show them now lit bright as day from light pollution by the data center. “This affects not only your everyday living and what you’ve got to do to adjust your life, but you can’t change, you’re trapped,” Beverly Morris said. “We’ve got to develop the technology in a way that’s going to help all of us,” Khanna said.
“Right now, it’s just helping a few of these tech billionaires, and they’re riding roughshod over communities.” He listed the other threats from Big Tech—the Hugging Face incident, the potential loss of jobs—but zoomed in on the kinds of hits the Morrises and so many Americans like them were taking in their own home, and questioned the costs and the benefits, which right now seem to only be enriching billionaires.