But servers are machines with fans, hard disks, and a maximum operating temperature. They are furnished with parts and materials sourced so violently, so cruelly, that every server, every router, every phone on Earth likely carries the debris of its own creation. A fragment of a child worker’s severed limb; a fingernail, or a drop of blood. The fur of a terrified creature maimed in the supply chain and machined into the very device you now hold.

So no – cyberspace will never be left alone by the real world, because that is impossible. The servers are material. They are not safe, and they are not good. They’re flooding in the world’s annual once-in-a-lifetime monsoons. They’re on fire in the routine freak Texan and Californian heatwaves. They’re bought and sold by private equity. They are targets for state actors, militaries, teenage hackers, Luddites, and anarchists alike.

When the server goes dark, we go dark, too. We’ve built an entire civilisation on an unthinkably brutal and comically unreliable stack while hallucinating it as literally anything else. We condemn AI today for making shit up, but what about us? We’re building on a fantasy just as brittle, we are just as demonstrably wrong. Yet we pretend a file isn’t just a gesture that can disappear in an instant. We hallucinate that the server is somehow both fleeting and forever.

– Cade Diehm

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