The machine has an owner.
In May I published a piece defending the energy math on AI content production. The math holds. The accounting was incomplete.
That piece made a narrow argument honestly: if you are going to weigh the environmental cost of generating an image, weigh it against the drive to the location, the strobes cycling all day, and the grocery bag of styled food that ends up in the bin. Compared to what. I still think that's the right question, and the answer still favors the way I work.
But comparing footprints was the easy version of the problem. The harder one has nothing to do with electricity. It's about who owns the machine, and what else they're renting it out for.
The line item I left off.
In 2021, Google and Amazon signed Project Nimbus, a cloud computing contract with the Israeli government reported at $1.2 billion. In 2024, Google fired roughly fifty employees who protested it. In July 2025, the UN Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories delivered a report to the Human Rights Council naming major technology firms among the corporations it said were profiting from the conduct of the war in Gaza. In September 2025, after reporting in The Guardian on the use of its cloud to store intercepted Palestinian phone calls, Microsoft cut off an Israeli military unit's access to some of its services.
I am not going to adjudicate that war on a food photography website. I'm not qualified to, and it would be obscene to try in service of a marketing argument. But I don't need to settle that question to notice something simpler: the infrastructure underneath my studio is general purpose, it is rented to whoever pays, and some of the tenants are governments at war. That was true in May. I just didn't put it on the page.
I wrote about the electricity because the electricity was the part I could win.
Purity is not on the menu.
The obvious response is to stop. Close the studio, sell the laptop, go back to a camera. I've thought about it seriously enough to write this instead.
Abstention has one problem as a strategy: it doesn't touch the thing it's aimed at. My annual spend on image generation would not register as a rounding error against a single hyperscaler's quarterly cloud revenue. Shutting down transfers nothing away from anyone, and it doesn't stay clean either. The photographer who replaces me syncs to Adobe's cloud, which runs on the same three companies' hardware. So does the client's email, their storefront, their point of sale, their accountant. So does the campaign that organizes against all of it. The stack goes down further than anyone's conscience reaches.
This is not a gotcha, and it isn't absolution. Pointing out that everyone is implicated is the oldest way there is to avoid doing anything. It's just a reason to stop looking for the exit marked innocent and start looking for the one marked leverage, because they are not in the same building.
Where leverage actually sits.
Something worth noticing in that Microsoft story: it moved. Not because customers cancelled subscriptions, but because employees inside the company would not let it go, journalists documented specifics, and eventually a procurement decision got reversed in public. That is a narrow and insufficient outcome. It's also more than abstention has ever produced.
Which tells you the pressure points are worker organizing, investigative reporting, procurement, and regulation. Not consumption. A one person studio in Vermont has no meaningful position on any of the first four. What it has is three things it fully controls, and they're worth more than the gesture.
What work you take. The infrastructure is dual use, so the meaningful question isn't whether you touch it, it's what you point it at. No defense, no state security, no surveillance products, no immigration enforcement, no extraction. Written down in advance, so it isn't a judgment call the week someone offers real money.
Who gets paid. The genuine harm in my industry, the one that shows up in people's actual lives rather than in a think piece, is a photographer who lost three days of work. I'm still one of them. I shoot on assignment, on a camera, for money, and I want that to stay possible for the people who do it. So: hire them where a camera is right, pay real rates to freelance producers, no spec, no unpaid tests. That's a cost, which is what makes it a position rather than a slogan.
Whether you say it out loud. Every client should know exactly how their imagery is made and what it runs on. The studios claiming a clean supply chain are running the same stack with one more layer of abstraction in front of it.
The concentration is the part that should worry my clients.
Strip away the politics and a structural fact remains: three companies own the ground that nearly all of this runs on. The demand at the end of every serious critique of Nimbus is not stop using computers. It's that infrastructure this consequential shouldn't sit in three private hands. That's the part with direct consequences for a family salumi operation in Vermont.
Because concentration is exactly what decides who gets to look good. For fifty years, the ability to make a product look considered was gated by budget, and the gate was set high enough that a national brand with a media buy always looked more legitimate than a better product made by four people in Barre. The one force pushing against that right now is capability moving down market, fast, to people who were previously locked out entirely.
I'd rather that capability be widely held and honestly used than handed back. Refusing to use it doesn't loosen anyone's grip on the infrastructure. It just guarantees that the only people who benefit from it are the ones who were never going to ask these questions.
So I wrote it down.
None of the above is worth much as an essay. A position you can revise quietly under commercial pressure isn't a position. So the lines are now a published document: the work we decline, how disclosure works, what we check before an image ships, consent and likeness, who gets paid, and what infrastructure your imagery ran on. It's at eightfoldcreative.com/standards, and it's dated, so you can watch whether it holds.
I'm not claiming this settles anything. It costs me some revenue and it changes nothing about who owns the data centers. It's the accurate size of what one small studio controls, which is smaller than the outrage and larger than nothing. The alternative on offer is a clean conscience bought with a gesture, and I don't believe that's for sale.