2026 05 04
Preface: I am merely working through some thoughts on a difficult subject in a public manner, as I love to do!
It finally caught up to me. The dread of knowing hard drive prices have gone up astronomically has been subdued for a few months, as I haven’t yet needed to buy a new one. I’d also recently purchased one measly share of SanDisk stock, which has gone up over 100% already and netted me an on-paper profit of a thousand dollars. If I sell the share and pay the taxes on the short-term gain, I could purchase one new 4tb ssd hard drive. That should get me through the year, so long as I don’t shoot any video or do too many Keep it 100 portrait sessions.
Last week, while driving the back roads to a photo assignment in Indianapolis (INdianapolis, as I say in my head to much amusement), I happened upon a wild scene: hundreds of acres of flat-as-can-be Midwest farmland had been dug up and prepped for development. Endless rows of temporary lighting told me there was an urgency to this operation, if the small rural road jammed with heavy trucks didn’t already do that job. It was a stark contrast to the sleepy landscape I’d been passing through just moments prior. Surely, this is what the makings of a future data center look like, I thought to myself while paradoxically using my Tesla’s self-drive feature to allow me to snap a few photos on my iPhone. While this played out, Scott and Kara discussed Meta’s earnings on the Pivot podcast and I felt the world shrink even more.
After I wrapped the shoot that afternoon, I decided to do some internet digging into what is going on over in Lebanon, Indiana. Turns out, Meta is in the midst of constructing a 1,500 acre $10,000,000,000 ai-powered data center (which comes with 300 new jobs!). The company that just fired 10% of its workforce, while my Facebook feed is filled with so much inaccurate garbage I get the impression nobody actually works at this company, nor cares much about what is said or done on its platform. But what do I know, I’m just a simple man paying $750 for a hard drive so I can fill it with pretty pictures.