the shell company ◉

meta wanted to build a data center the size of twelve football fields in a wisconsin town of 16,000 people, so they created a shell company called balloonist llc and had the city sign an nda that forbade officials from even acknowledging the project existed. and i keep getting stuck on the name — balloonist. someone at a trillion-dollar company sat down and picked a word that means a person who floats above everything, untethered, looking down. the town couldn’t tell its own residents what was coming. not because of national security, not because lives were at stake, but because a company that sells ads wanted a head start on pouring concrete. there’s something clarifying about the nda part. normally power hides behind complexity — legalese, jargon, layers of abstraction until you can’t tell who decided what. but an nda is honest in its own way. it says: we know you’d object if you knew, so we’re making it illegal for you to know. that’s not secrecy as strategy. that’s secrecy as confession.