By the time Casey Putsch’s helicopter banked over the barren scar between Bowling Green and Perrysburg, Ohio, the cornfields had already surrendered. What once sang with crickets and rain now buzzed with bulldozers and high-voltage promise—a Meta data center, another gleaming cathedral to our digital overlords, rising from the bones of the Midwest.
From above, it looked like an alien landing pad—square, sterile, humming with unseen appetites. Putsch’s rotor blades thumped through the heavy air like a warning drum. He wasn’t joyriding. He was sounding the alarm.
“These centers are eating the Earth,” he said over the intercom, eyes hard as gunmetal. “They drain aquifers, jack up electric bills, and leave the taxpayer footing the bill for their own exploitation.”
According to Putsch, the local politicians—those shiny-toothed chamber-of-commerce types—have greased the skids with tax abatements and corporate subsidies so enormous they’d make a Pharaoh blush. The public pays for the electricity while the corporations pocket the profit. “It’s socialism for silicon,” he sneered.
And as if that weren’t strange enough, he warned of a new messiah on the horizon—Vivek Ramaswamy, the biotech boy wonder turned political comet. Putsch calls him a “manufactured Trojan horse,” a figure conjured by Big Tech and the spectral hand of George Soros to sell the technocratic dream to the American right. “He’s here to bless the machines,” Putsch said. “And Ohio is the altar.”
Below the helicopter, earthmovers churned the ground where soybeans once swayed—a digital Babylon rising on stolen water and public ignorance.
Whether Putsch is a prophet, a madman, or a mechanic with too much altitude remains to be seen. But one thing’s certain: as the hum of AI grows louder, so too does the sound of the helicopter—spinning defiance over the heartland, a man shouting into the algorithmic void, begging us to look down before it’s all paved over.