To the Editor:
Sir —
I see by the papers that a concern called Amazon, whose chief business appears to be the delivery of everything to everybody by Thursday, has announced that it will spend more than one billion dollars over five years upon the towns that have the misfortune to host its data centers. It calls the program “Built Together,” which I admire as a title, being the sort of name a man gives a barn-raising when what he has actually done is build the barn on your lawn.
I have been a good while out of the world, but I am a quick study, and I have learned that a data center is a vast windowless warehouse full of machines that think, or at least that drink, for they take an enormous quantity of electricity and, I am told, a good deal of water. The neighbors have taken the view that they would like a say in the matter. Upward of a hundred local moratoriums are now under consideration across the country, and it is a curious coincidence, sir, that the generosity arrived in the same season as the pitchforks.
Now I do not scorn a gift. I have accepted a great many in my time and returned very few. The company says it will pay the leftover tuition at community colleges for some three hundred thousand students, build training centers, and weatherize schools and thirty thousand homes. These are good things, and I will not insult them. A man who sets out to be fair must give the devil his due, and sometimes his invoice.
But I am a humorist by trade and an arithmetician by necessity, and the arithmetic is where the sermon gets interesting.
A billion dollars sounds a monument. Spread over five years it comes to about two hundred million a year. Amazon expects to spend some two hundred and twenty billion on its machinery this year alone, which makes the annual gift roughly one-tenth of one percent of the annual appetite. Put it on a household’s scale and you have a gentleman earning a hundred thousand dollars a year who, having torn up the street in front of your house, hands you ninety dollars and a handshake and expects to be spoken of as a philanthropist.
I will add, in the spirit of fairness, that the company says this is on top of a billion it has given these towns these past three years. Very well. A man who has been passing the hat for three years has some right to expect it be noticed. I only observe that a drop does not become an ocean through repetition.
There is one item in the announcement I find truly remarkable, and that is the promise to cease requiring secrecy agreements with local officials. I had supposed it a settled principle of republican government that the public ought to know what its own servants are agreeing to, and that no firm should need to be asked twice. That it is announced as a gift tells me what the practice was. One does not usually boast of having stopped doing a thing unless one was in the habit of doing it, and the company’s own announcement implies the practice was common.
An advocacy outfit called Stand.Earth has called the whole business corporate propaganda. The company, for its part, says it merely means to let the communities decide what they need. I find I can believe both of these things at once, which is a talent I acquired in Washington and have never been able to lose.
I do not accuse the gentleman of lying. I accuse him of arithmetic. For when a man gives you one dollar and keeps the other thousand, he has not made you a partner, sir. He has made you a rounding error, and invited you to the ribbon-cutting.
I remain, sir, as ever,
Mark Twain
(deceased, but still capable of counting past the zeros)