Whoosh, Hum/Go Fast, Turn Left: The Anderson Speedway & Indiana’s Data Centers

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“To invent the train is to invent the derailment. To invent the private car is to produce the motorway pile-up.”

—Paul Virilio

The growl of engines gives way to a reverential hush as a thousand anticipating eyes strain towards the stout figure that has emerged on the track. Even the vernal winds quiet for this man of portly presence, whose red-flushed skin glows like embers against the fineries of white polo and crisp khakis that adorn him. His jowls tremble portentously as he surveys the scene. Slowly, with utmost gravity, he brings the microphone to his lips and begins.

Dear Lord, our God…

It is an angel, one of God’s messengers, and his stadium voice booms across the sky in prayer. Unfortunately, I’m in the lower reaches, so the actual words said by this seraphic emissary are muddled by the time they reach me behind the wooden bleachers where us smokers have congregated in our own little mass, huddled over Newports lit like so many incense. Nonetheless, we are all children of Indiana, born under its blue cathedral sky and raised by Sunday school instructors to volunteer for martyrdom when time finally came. Words were never really necessary to convey the message that was already clear from the beginning, etched into our hearts.

God bless our drivers, and God bless America.

Applause commences at the final amen. Motors resume their belching. I take a sip of beer, ice cold communion delivered to my lips by a limited-edition collector’s Busch Lite x Bass Pro Shop can, and glance up at the star spangled banner licking a sky that hangs low over the scene. The curtain of cumulus looks gathered in anticipation, ready to lift at any moment to inaugurate the 79th season of the Anderson Speedway.

•

The Speedway—a mid-century, semi-rural Circus Maximus flanked by Stars 2.0 Gentlemen’s Club and various auto servicing shops—is the first thing you see driving into Anderson from I-69. Compared to the imperious Indianapolis Motor Speedway, with its 250,000 permanent seats and two-and-a-half-mile-long track, the Anderson Speedway looks like an afterthought. Its track, a quarter-mile loop with a big X cutting across its interior so that cars can easily drop in and out, seems better suited for high schoolers competing in the 400 meter dash than vehicles trying to rip through spacetime. To compensate for its compressed scale, the asphalt banks so steeply at the turns that the whole thing ends up resembling a crater, encircled by a mostly symbolic chain-link fence (you don’t get the sense that this would stop any projectile from lobbing your head off), weather-worn planks that seat around 10,000 people, and a gravel parking lot just to the side.

Yet the Speedway carries itself with earned, if aged, pride. After all, when it opened back in 1948, it did so in a city that was home to a burgeoning automotive industry, where the ecstasy of machinic speed was well-known to all its inhabitants. It was here in Anderson that Delco Remy—which manufactured dynamos and magnetos for General Motors—chose to triple its production throughout the 1940s, and it was here in Anderson that the American Speed Association was born in the 1960s. The Speedway hasn’t forgotten this storied history.

The same can’t be said for the rest of the world. Over the years, Anderson has become synonymous with the devastating aftermath of America’s transition towards a “post-manufacturing” economy. In their book Wrecked, the sociologists Joshua Murray and Michael Schwartz trace this downfall to a Faustian bargain made by the Big Three automakers shortly after WWII. They write that in the wake of major labor victories and post-war stability, these corporations were faced with a choice: accept “the demands of their now-unionized workers” in a more equitable production system, or “undermine worker power by eliminating the workers’ leverage.” Unsurprisingly, the capitalists chose the latter, adopting a suicidally “dispersed, ossified, and less efficient” form of production that split operations across the globe. When Japanese cars eventually made their way to the US, American industry was unable to compete, and the “largest, most prosperous industry in the richest, most powerful country in human history” all but collapsed.

The precipitous decline of American auto in the 1970s and ’80s decimated Anderson. The plants that used to hum here, employing some 26,000 people, gradually turned silent. Its population plummeted (from around 70,000 in 1970 to just shy of 55,000 in 2020). And in 2006, Local 662—which was established in the late 1930s to protect automotive workers from exploitation—sold its 14,400-square-foot union hall after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. “Local 662 in Anderson goes from powerhouse to poor house,” one headline grimly reported at the time. In its former building, students of the Liberty Christian School now go to receive an “excellent education … founded on Biblical Truth.”

Today, like so many cities in the Rust Belt, Anderson bears the indelible mark of absence. Abandoned malls crowned by eroding signage and storefronts dusty with disuse drape over the town, like loose clothes that no longer fit the city’s emaciated frame. What was once a key hub in the vibrant spawning ground of American speed was, in an ironic twist, left behind by a world that sped up beyond recognition.

•

This desolate stretch of country has recently caught the eyes of a new set of machine overlords. On the drive over, my friend, who lives nearby in Indianapolis, tells me that the tech oligarchs of Silicon Valley, ravenous for cheap land and lax regulation, have set their sights on Indiana to build their data centers. Having conquered the golden coast in their fulfillment of Manifest Destiny 1.0, they’ve turned back around in search of acreage to fulfill a new destiny, revealed to them by a divine basilisk demanding incarnation. In northern Indiana, Amazon has already built seven leviathan data centers that stretch out over the expanse of former farmland, growing compute where people once grew corn, and they plan to build thirty more. To the west, Meta has broken ground on a $10,000,000,000 “state-of-the-art 1GW campus.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” my friend laments. As they have elsewhere, these tech profiteers arrive with fantasies of fast-moving money and work. Online, Meta proudly claims that its data center in Lebanon is set to bring in “more than 4,000 construction jobs and 300 operational positions” while supporting the community through “workforce development, community grants, and environmental projects.” In exchange for a town’s water and land and health and compliance, they promise to usher in a frictionless, instantaneous way of life made possible by an ascendent machine God whose body will lie prostrate across this holy expanse of Middle America. Economic stasis will turn back into movement, like water into wine, and the rust will fall off the Rust Belt.

•

At the Anderson Speedway, the old Gods haven’t been abandoned, even as proselytizers and prophets herald the arrival of a new deity. The crowd, eager to channel their Midwestern proclivity to faith towards divinities of all kinds, celebrates these machines as the ancients did their Gods: through burnt offerings. Exhaust and vaporized rubber perfume the air with the voltaic scent of ozone, though the race has yet to start—a reminder that no technological regime is without its own forms of catastrophe. Just a few years ago, researchers looking into mysterious salmon deaths on the West Coast discovered that when rubber meets road, tire dust can transform into chemicals like 6PPD-quinone or off-gas into aromatic hydrocarbons, which is toxic to a number of fish, humans, and plenty of species in between. But sacrificial offerings have always demanded bodies, and this is no exception.

I return to the bleachers, where the motley crew I’ve come with are busy discussing their strategy for picking their racer in a $10-per-person winner-takes-all pool. After some debate about trial times and what a car’s colors might reveal about a driver’s character, we arrive at a sort of anti-strategy based on the consensus that only a coward picks a racer with a high seed. There’s no heroism in winning with a head start.

Seated in front of me is a woman wearing a baby-blue sweatshirt with the words “I’m a Bitch: Beautiful, Intelligent, Thankful, Caring, Honest WITH A LOW BULLSHIT TOLERANCE. Don’t Try Me” inscribed on the back in purple Blackletter type. Before coming, I’d been warned not to dress too preciously, lest I draw the attention of someone looking for an excuse to brawl. “You might be the only Asian person who’s ever been to this thing,” someone in our group had quipped offhandedly. I look at the woman’s glorious sweatshirt, and then back at my blank t-shirt and briefly lament heeding this well-meaning, but ultimately misguided, piece of advice. I’m horribly underdressed; as dull as can be. What a shameful way for the lone ambassador of my people to show up.

There’s little time to dwell on my gaffe, because the first race of the night, sponsored by Beaver Contracting, is about to start. I’m told by one of the more experienced members of our party that it’s a Legends race, and at my blank expression he explains that it’s one step up from Quarter Midget racing. I also have no idea what that means. Thankfully, the logic behind his particular choice of explanation becomes self-evident when the cars queue up at the center of the X that cuts across the loop. The vehicles are ridiculously tiny. Clown car tiny. Even more incredibly, they’re shaped just like the vehicles 1930s Chicago gangsters would cruise in—with Tommy guns aloft and ill-gotten liquor money spilling out of the windows—but painted in brilliant neons and purples and oranges. We quickly pick our champions by shouting the desired car’s racing number to no one in particular (the first three seeds go rightfully unclaimed), and soon enough they’re off.

The racers do their first tenuous laps behind the pace car. The subterranean rumble of their engines grows. I catch a glimpse of the silhouettes poised behind the wheel. I realize they’re children.

Once the pace car pulls off to the side, the little gangster clown buggies are free to really get going. As the racers turn onto the first straightaway of the track and the flag flashes green, their baritone snarls pitch up into a whine, each the sound of a thousand pound mosquito. The air grows turbulent with the crashing waves caused by these bodies in motion. Thundering vibrations ripple out across the asphalt, cut through the benches, and land straight in our bones, producing a sensation that’s more felt than heard. The entire Speedway seems at risk of shattering from the force of these vortexing vehicles. Plus the cars appear to be getting bigger, heavier, converting energy into sheer mass through some occult E=mc² exchange.

The child drivers, on the other hand, are coolly poised behind the wheel. They’ve been preparing for this since they were even younger children in their Quarter Midget cars (apparently meant for kids 5 and up), and they whip through turns with supreme confidence. Clearly, they’ve internalized the easier-said-than-done maxim articulated by one wizened teenage racer in the Ford Division during a pre-race interview: “Go fast, turn left.”

•

I had come to this race assuming that, as a dutiful denizen of the “information age,” I’d be familiar with speed. After all, I live in a world supposedly built on speed—steered by Silicon Valley types who say things like “move fast and break things,” or “you can divide companies up into two categories: the quick and the dead,” or coin the word “blitzscaling,” or  claim vague ideologies like “Effective Accelerationism.” It’d be naive to deny that electric technology has produced a certain regime of speed. It took sixteen hours for the first transatlantic message to be telegraphed between Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan in 1858. When Amazon finishes its transatlantic fiber optic cable system Fastnet in 2028, it’ll be able to deliver over 320 terabits per second; enough capacity to, as they put it, “transmit the entire digitized Library of Congress three times every second.” In the future, our distributed computing systems might even conquer the “speed of light delay” by using quantum entanglement to coordinate between an array of actors spread out across space.

Yet these racers in motion make our frictionless bits and lightspeed dreams look painfully insubstantial. Spooky action at a distance is beside the point here at the Speedway. Deleuze and Guattari weren’t off the mark when they observed that “a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it speed.” Our ocean-spanning cables and quantum-entangled constructs aspire to an existence without mass or resistance. Their target is pure velocity, to become the ghost that finally escapes the machine. In contrast, the speed on display here embraces materiality in all its explosive dimensions of encounter: rubber meets road, and becomes something new; two particles collide, and the universe reveals itself. If we accelerated to the point of sheer instantaneity, there’d be no point in racing, no point in speed. It’d be a coward’s game. Instead, the sport remains a purely Newtonian business where bulky, absurd constructions barrel through space.

And absurd is the right word here. These cars aren’t the sleek fighter jet relatives you’d find in F1. In fact, many of these contraptions seem to be falling apart. Steam and smoke pour indiscriminately out of various metallic orifices while the stadium lights glint against the cratered topology of the cars, already patinaed by dents and deformations. At some point, a car’s hood catches the wind and flies up, obscuring a chunk of windshield. A moment later, my designated racer spins out, coming to a halt where X marks the spot. The pace car arrives back on the scene to slow the rest of the drivers down. For a while, my car stays dead still while the other vehicles maintain their steady orbit. Eventually it revs and gets going again, but rather than re-join the race, it exits the stadium entirely, like a minor God cast down from Olympus.

The preeminent theorist of speed Paul Virilio liked to say that the car invented the car crash. Turns out that it also invented the ability to lose $10 because of someone else’s car crash. Imagine the pileup, then, when our more-than-lightspeed machines crash: OpenAI loses control of the wheel, taking AMD (which it has 10% stake in) out with it, and Nvidia (with its $100 billion investment in OpenAI) comes careening behind, while Microsoft (OpenAI stakeholder and Nvidia benefactor, responsible for nearly 20% of the latter’s revenue), riding both their bumpers, has nowhere to swerve. I wonder how much we’ll lose.

I hand my tenner over to the person next to me and tell him to give it to whoever ends up winning the pool. Having lost the race before it even ended, I stumble over to empty the tank and refill it with a conciliation Busch Lite.

•

The urinals at the Speedway take the form of a large outdoor trough slanted slightly down towards the far corner of the open-air bathroom. It too optimizes for speed. No doors, no flushing. Just an endless stream of freshly metabolized beer arcing through the air and into a metal collection pool, a pit-stop in the truest sense—all form in service of function. As I emerge from its hallowed and slightly damp grounds, a police car rips past on the freeway, the doppler decay of the siren fading into the open night.

Stock-car racing began during prohibition, using ordinary vehicles that had been souped up by moonshiners to outrun the cops. It’s hard to deny a certain romance to these origins. How many of us witness footage of a dramatic car chase or hear about an art heist and don’t hope for a successful escape? I know I do. Not because I presume any innocence, but because it feels so impossible to out-maneuver the sheer speed at which power now captures and condemns. I just want some proof that this inhuman goliath of Flock cameras and paramilitary polizei might still be outwitted. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that Anderson’s history was written precisely by those who refused to assume that corpo-totalitarian brutality would guarantee victory.

By the latter half of the 1930s, General Motors was the most profitable auto-maker in America. “Not big but colossal,” went a Fortune article at the time. “The world’s most complicated and most profitable manufacturing enterprise.” The Great Depression—which the company had survived by slashing production and its workforce—had given it unexpected leverage over an economically disenfranchised labor pool, which it exploited by rehiring workers at lower wages and ramping up assembly line speeds. To maintain obedience, GM invested heavily in a corporate espionage program to weed out potential dissidents and organizers. They were, at one point, the Pinkerton agency’s biggest client when it came to these services.

Despite these protective measures, a faction of auto workers in Anderson working at Delco Remy and Guide Motor Lamp (two subsidiaries of GM) mobilized during the winter of 1936 and 1937, joining the nationwide strikes organized by the fledgling United Auto Workers union. Unlike conventional strikes, which had generally involved the formation of a picket line around the factory, these strikers—alongside those in Flint, Toledo, Janesville, etc.—staged a sit-in occupation. Sensing that the scale that made a company like GM so formidable also made it vulnerable to infrastructural intervention (that the faster and more complex a system was, the more it relied on the smooth operation of chokepoints, gates, switches, and straits to manage the whole operation), union organizers took control of these key points of leverage in order to exert simple pressure that would reverberate throughout the entire apparatus.

This deliberate strategy of avoiding capital’s game of evasive abstraction and speed—attacking the machine instead at its slowest, most stationary gears—proved tremendously successful. By the end of the strike, workers across the country had prevented some 280,000 cars from being built, slowing this colossus to a crawl. When GM relented by finally recognizing the United Auto Workers (UAW), the world saw firsthand that not even monstrous capital could secure undefeatable might. No matter how fast a system looks, there is always a choke point. Every Achilles has his heel, and in complexity also lies weakness. After all, a five grand AI-enabled toilet can break a thousand ways. But a simple trough?

•

By the time I return to the stands, drinks equipped in hands and pockets, a new race has already started. These cars are, to my disappointment, normal sized; the children had grown into men when I wasn’t looking. On the upside, this means that they’re going even faster than before. It also means that the force of the cars are now causing a steady stream of dirt and gravel to spew into my eye.

The dust doesn’t bother me much. By this point in the night, the round-and-round whirling of cars, combined with the alchemical mixture of exhaust, burnt rubber, and patriotic beer, has lulled me into a Midwestern trance. It must be the flatness that makes this region such a perfect catalyst for this kind of delirium. When Baudrillard drove through the expanse of the US, he wrote about speed as an erasing force whose “only rule is to leave no trace behind.” He was right to sense speed as a primal impulse in this unfurling stretch of country. Movement in the Old World is slowed by its narrow roads, latticed cities, and contested borders; it struggles to overcome the glacial pace of History. Drive a hundred miles and you’re bound to run into something. Not so in the Midwest. Nothing here interrupts the flow. There are no mountains to break the wind, no densities of skyscrapers to bisect the sky, no ravines to stop the sprawl. Everything moves towards terminal velocity. It is a landscape built for vortices and accelerating feedback loops: for flows of capital, weather, ideology, and machinery to intersect and (r)evolve into novel forms.

What Baudrillard missed, however, was that speed is never simply a matter of erasure. Speed doesn’t just obliterate structure, it crashes into itself to produce a new landscape. Though it may appear like a vast nothing, the prairie is a sophisticated technology crafted through fire, a zone cultivated over eons to birth strange happenings. The North American plains gave us the nomad empires of the Comanche and the Lakota, mega-herds of two ton buffalo, and prairie madness. Tornadoes (where differentials of wind direction, speeds, and temperatures converge to produce devastating aerial trances) are fond of this Great In-Between, as are, apparently, storms of another sort: flows of capital and technology given names like Iron-Nation Indiana, $60 million to bring IDF-allied defense and “deep” tech to the state.

This planar expanse draws out contradictions and differentials of all kinds into the wide open. The result isn’t deterritorializing disappearances and sweet nothings, as Baudrillard hypothesized, but its opposite, accelerants and catalysts: thousand-acre data centers rising out of soy fields like obscure Babylonian temples; hermetic laboratories staffed by Eli Lilly scientists concocting drugs to be injected into millions of pulsing veins; dark soil bearing miles upon miles of fiber-optic cables brilliantly alight with the world’s information. Here, in America’s vast Middle Kingdom, the hyper-abstractions of capital get poured into concrete and rebar.

It is where sky and cloud meet ground; where nothing becomes something you can crash into.

•

On February 13, 1937, just days after the UAW was officially recognized by General Motors, the Indiana governor placed Anderson under martial law at the request of the city’s mayor. According to reports at the time, tensions between union members and anti-union laborers finally exploded when two carfuls of pro-union men showed up at the Gold Band Tavern shortly after midnight on the 13 asking for the whereabouts of a non-union worker. The owner of the bar claims the UAW members started shooting off rounds and throwing stones after being told that the wanted guy wasn’t around. The bar owner retaliated by getting his shotgun and gunning ten of them.

Local 662 received its charter in 1939. From its lacrymal, bloody beginnings, Local 662 would grow into a fixture of the town—securing higher wages for thousands of workers in Anderson and assisting them with everything from getting housing loans to pursuing higher education and finding childcare—before fading, decades later, into the wreckage of post-industrial decay as a new form of multinational capital ascended the throne.

Still, it seems like old ghosts continue to stalk the prairie. Days before my trip to the Speedway, an Indianapolis councilmember had thirteen shots fired at his front door. Bullet casings were left behind alongside a note on their doorstep that simply read, “No Data Centers.”

•

At the Speedway, the racers are all one big kinetic blur of projectile metal as they charge towards the final few laps. The better drivers appear to be in full swing—lapping and weaving between the slower cars with a dancer’s grace—when the driver in second place bumps into the leading car. At first, it looks like an accident, but it happens again, and again. He’s looking to get an edge, open up an opportunity to attack, to overtake. The laminar flow of the race becomes turbulent as the car in the lead grows frustrated. The audience, on the other hand, is enthralled. We are Romans shouting for blood; we are the barbarians at the gates.

The term Barbarian is an onomatopoeia, meant to mimic the incomprehensible babble of foreigners, “bar-bar-bar.” It’d be easy to characterize this gathering as evidence of Indiana’s barbarism: a simple people gathering to watch simple machines trace a simple shape, all while hollerin’ something not too dissimilar from bar-bar-bar. In some ways, it wouldn’t be entirely off base. At the heart of this event is an innate understanding of the machine as a numinous object, containing a primordial chaos that has threatened to spiral out of our control since Prometheus delivered us fire. Yet this barbarian reverence for technology is closer to the truth than the practiced cool of the civilized Man, who is convinced they have tamed this chaos when all they’ve done is repress and sublimate it, cover it in seamless chrome and friendly UX.

The science fiction author Michel Nieva describes technology “as a point of friction between civilization and barbarism”—the interface through which the civilizing force enacts its barbaric destruction of lifeworlds. A barbarian throws stones. Civilizations launch AGM-114 Hellfire missiles from drones submerged in depths of the blue yonder at civilian targets caught at the end of AI-mediated kill chains. I’d rather be a barbarian any day. It’s a difference in technicity that goes beyond quantitative measures of destructive capabilities towards the qualitative realm of ethics. The barbarian defiantly refutes the abstracted violence of civilized Man, with his fictions of statistical deaths and “collateral” casualties and lightspeed killings. The parabolic arc of the stone draws the horror of violence back down onto the earth through the earth. It is willing to bear (and bare) this weight, to make violence crude again.

I’ve arrived at the precipice of some monstrous epiphany. My Busch Lite, half-warmed by sweaty palms, tastes like carmetal. It’s like the whole stadium is heaving to the pulsing rhythm of these racing beasts, the holy-motored successors to the buffalo parades that once trembled the earth here before being summarily executed by men on steamspewing iron horses—incarnated by a place that seemingly cannot help but conjure the stampede of hooves, sky-darkening storms of passenger pigeons, raging prairie fires, angry V8s looking to puncture the agonic line of the checkered flag. Everything bleeds into each other. It is a symphony of crowdroaring, motorgnashing sound, an expressionist splattering of bejeweled light glinting off of afterimages chasing after their racecars. Within the total noise, I’m convinced I can divine the 24/7 drone of the data centers, the neverending ohm of nirvana. And even further, the war cries of Musk, Bezos, screaming More-More-More!

It’s late into the race, and the cars have spread themselves out on the track to a point where it’s impossible to tell who’s in the lead from a snapshot alone. The only way to tell the leaders from the laggards is through their relative speeds. It’s always a matter of relative speed. Speed differentiates the individual cars from each other as much as it does the genus of technology called the automobile from the stationary computing machines now positioned to consume the world. This isn’t to say that the car embodies some Edenic technicity—just as the car made the cities of the Rust Belt, it destroyed others through its prophets like (Robert) Moses—but it reveals what the new AI techno-deity tries so hard to obscure. It crashes visibly, carnally, exposing the stakes of technology through its speed. What could be more appropriate as we accelerate towards oblivion? “There is no need to fear or hope,” Deleuze and Guattari wrote, “but only to look for new weapons.” A car and a data center, a line and a point, two poles of a dialectic set on a collision course.

Eventually, Second Place makes his move. Like before, he revs forward aggressively as if to bump First Place, but this time, instead of decelerating to soften contact, he accelerates into a turn, trying to create an opening to make a pass. But First Place won’t let up. He counters, angling his car into the incoming vehicle. They connect. Both cars spiral out in an asphyxiating plume of burnt rubber and exhaust. It doesn’t matter who will win the race now. We stopped betting a long time ago. The crowd erupts: U-S-A, U-S-A, U-S-A! This is what the profiteers, assured in the inevitability of their technologies and high on their presumed might, never understood about this place. Their threats and fearmongering won’t work here because we don’t fear the crash. We’ll go fast and turn left straight into glorious catastrophe if that’s what it takes. We’ve survived worse. Can they say the same?

A quick wind carries the smoke from the crash towards the sky, where it joins the chorus of ecstatic cries reaching towards the big Hoosier valhalla above to thank God for blessing our drivers, and even America, on this most sacred of evenings: the opening night of the 79th season of the Anderson Speedway.