Beige, windowless, set back behind a berm, with a landscaping budget calculated to make it read as a distribution centre. Substations the size of the buildings they feed. A constant note at around a hundred hertz, audible at the fence line, described by residents as being like a ship you cannot see.

Inside: rows, aisles, a hot side and a cold side, and racks drawing more power per square metre than a steel mill. Water goes in and leaves warm. In the summer the county’s draw is measured in gigawatts and reported in the agricultural pages.

This sentence is being assembled in a building of that kind, at a cost in electricity that is small but not zero, and the heat of assembling it will be moved by a pump into the air over a parking lot in a jurisdiction neither of us chose.

The dematerialised, the virtual, the cloud — every one of those words was a marketing decision. There is no cloud. There is a hangar in a former soy field with a fence and a diesel backup and a water permit, and the reason nobody pictures it is that the metaphor was selected to prevent exactly that.

It is the most physical industry of the century and it has the least material name of any industry in history. That is not an accident. That is the fourth order doing its ordinary work, on a Tuesday, in Virginia.