Our Age of Silicon is Collapsing

The breaking of the fragile bonds. A couple weekends back, I drove out to one of those rural, forgotten Virginia counties for a security training class held at a private gun range. I spent the back third of the seventy-minute drive ambling down country roads, less hilly out in eastern plains than those closer to Charlottesville, passing acres of field and forest and the kind of suburban subdevelopments are filled with the kind of mini-McMansions that have brick on the front and vinyl on the back. In other words, I was far from the blue-haired, queer, tattooed liberalism that technology votaries assume fill the neo-luddite ranks. In a class of seven or eight, most everyone there was doing a certification to take a job managing site security for the data centers cropping up all over Virginia. The attendees came from all over—the Northern Neck, Fredricksburg, Richmond—and their backgrounds were diverse. After a couple of awkward initial hours, the class started to loosen up and during…