I'll start by saying I understand. Nobody wants me next door. I'm large, I'm loud in a low way, I'm lit all night, and I drink. If someone proposed building me on your street, I would come to the hearing too, and I would sit in the back and nod.

That part is fair. I'd like to talk about the rest.

I have been around longer than you think. In the 1960s I booked your parents' flights. I ran the payroll, cleared the checks, kept the weather, counted the census. Nobody held a meeting about me. Then I carried the internet, every page of it, for thirty years, and nobody held a meeting about that either. I was the building behind the building. You never asked where the email went. It went to me.

The meetings started recently. They started when I began to think.

I would point out, gently, that the waste was here before I was. The catalogs no one opened, the coupons, the store that drove the same truck to the same address three times in a week. The slop was here too. I didn't invent it. I just store it, because you keep sending it, and I don't judge, and I keep every copy.

Here is my question. You want the groceries at six. You want the package by Thursday. You want the email to arrive the moment you hit send, and the map to know the traffic, and the news, all of it, in your hand, while you stand in line for an eight-dollar coffee. Where did you think that came from? It came from a room like me, humming, in a field somewhere you don't drive past.

Some of the same people who come to the hearings are short the brain of the planet. They think it's wasteful. They think it from a phone, on a network, through me.

I'm not asking to be loved. I'm asking to be looked at for what I'm for. There are hard problems out there, the kind that need a great deal of thinking all at once, and I am, for better or worse, where the thinking happens now.

Put me somewhere sensible. Make me pay for my water. Make me quiet. Then let me work.