Every now and then, someone asks a question that refuses to leave your head.
This week, it came from a woman in an online discussion about artificial intelligence and data centers.
She wrote, “My question is always, do we need more?”
Then she added something that stopped me.
“This feels like a new version of America’s Wild West.”
Now that’s a comparison worth chewing on.
We tend to remember the Wild West through Hollywood. Cowboys. Horses. Six-shooters. Good guys in white hats. Bad guys in black hats.
History wasn’t nearly so tidy.
The West was a rush.
Railroads raced across the country.
Mining camps sprang up overnight.
Land changed hands at breathtaking speed.
Fortunes were made.
Fortunes disappeared.
Laws often arrived long after the people who needed them.
It was exciting.
It was chaotic.
It was profitable.
And it wasn’t always fair.
Sound familiar?
Today, instead of staking mining claims, companies are staking claims on electrical capacity.
Instead of railroads, they’re building transmission lines.
Instead of boomtowns, communities are being asked to host data centers that consume enormous amounts of electricity and, in some cases, water.
Everyone says this is progress.
Maybe it is.
Railroads were progress.
Electricity was progress.
The interstate highway system was progress.
The Internet was progress.
None of those developments were mistakes.
But every one of them came with costs that somebody else paid.
That’s the part history books often skip.
The people who lived beside the railroad.
The ranchers whose land was divided.
The towns that boomed—and the ones that dried up.
Progress is rarely free.
Which brings me back to that question.
“Do we need more?”
Notice what she didn’t ask.
She didn’t ask whether engineers could build it.
They can.
She didn’t ask whether investors could finance it.
They can.
She didn’t ask whether politicians could approve it.
Many will.
She asked whether we need it.
That’s a different conversation entirely.
And then comes the hardest question of all.
If there is such a thing as “enough,” who gets to decide where that line is?
The companies?
The government?
The market?
The communities?
Or history, looking back fifty years from now?
We romanticize the Wild West because we know how the story ended.
The people living through it didn’t.
Neither do we.
That’s why I keep coming back to that woman’s question.
“My question is always, do we need more?”
Maybe the answer isn’t yes.
Maybe it isn’t no.
Maybe the first step is simply admitting that before we race into another frontier, we ought to spend a little more time deciding where we’re trying to go.