Butte’s fight over data centers has raised legitimate concerns about energy, water, transparency, and public control. But data centers may be less a unique problem than a particularly visible expression of a larger one: an economy built on continual growth, extracted wealth, and environmental costs left behind for communities and ecosystems to bear. Butte’s history gives us good reason to ask who benefits, who pays, and what kinds of development are worth their costs. 

This is an essay about the salvage instinct: how scarcity teaches creativity, how capitalism manufactures both waste and want, and how the refusal to waste can become its own burden. Also: Butte, bikes, alley scroungers, and the moral danger of “free” things.

I often think of The Screwtape Letters not because I share C.S. Lewis's theology in any way, but because he understood something painfully recognizable about the way people are pulled away from difficult goods. In Lewis's telling, the great danger is not always open corruption. It’s drift. Delay. Irritation. Vanity. The slow formation of habits that make commitment feel foolish, burdensome, or faintly humiliating. The most effective sabotage does not usually arrive as a clear argument against love, duty, or devotion. It arrives as a whisper: not today, not these people, not under these conditions.

The bicycle may be one of humanity’s greatest technological achievements: efficient, repairable, joyful, and nearly enough. Capitalism distorts that promise by turning innovation into market churn and access into disposability. A people’s bicycle politics refuses both the luxury race machine and the throwaway box-store bike. It asks for something better: repairable tools, honest labor, shared knowledge, durable sufficiency, and chains of care.