The Road to Abilene
In 1974, a management professor named Jerry Harvey published a story about his in-laws. It was a July afternoon in Coleman, Texas, population 5,607. One hundred and four degrees, according to the thermometer at the Rexall. West Texas topsoil blowing fine through the house. But the afternoon was tolerable — pleasant, even. A fan on the back porch. Cold lemonade. And dominoes, a game that asks nothing of a man in that heat but to mumble shuffle ‘em and move his arm. Then Harvey’s father-in-law said: let’s get in the car and drive to Abilene and have dinner at the cafeteria. Abilene was fifty-three miles away. The car was a 1958 Buick with no air conditioning. Harvey thought this was madness. Before he could say so, his wife said it sounded wonderful — and asked him what he thought. Finding himself apparently alone, he said it sounded good to him too. He added that he hoped his mother-in-law wanted to go. Of course she wanted to go, she said. She hadn’t been to Abilene in a long time. So they went. The dust cemented itself to their skin with their own sweat. The cafeteria food was the kind you make antacid commercials about. Four hours. A hundred and six miles. They arrived home finished and sat back down on the porch under the fan. To be polite, somebody said it had been a great trip. The mother-in-law said no. Not really. She’d have rather stayed home. She only went because the other three were so worked up about going. Harvey said he hadn’t wanted to go either. He’d gone to keep everyone else happy. His wife said the same. She’d only gone because it was so hot and the rest of them seemed to want it. And then the father-in-law — the man who proposed the trip, the author of the whole afternoon — said he had never wanted to go to Abilene in his life. He’d only suggested it because he thought the other three looked bored. Four people sat on a porch in Coleman, Texas, having just driven a hundred and six miles through a dust storm to eat food none of them wanted, in a direction none of them had chosen, at nobody’s request. Harvey called it the Abilene Paradox, and the argument he built on it is the reason it lasted. Organizations, he said, do not fail because people disagree. They fail because people agree — silently, separately, everyone in the car reading everyone else’s silence as enthusiasm. The problem is not the management of conflict. It is the management of agreement. He was clear-eyed about the stakes, too. Some organizations take a side trip, he wrote. Others take terminal journeys to Abilene — when Dallas or Houston or Tokyo was where they actually wanted to go. For thirty years it was standard curriculum. I was taught it at General Motors. Every executive I came up with was taught it. It has the shape of a joke and the sting of a confession, and it works because everyone in the room recognizes the drive they are on right now. I want to tell you what I never noticed for thirty years. The road had houses on it Harvey drove fifty-three miles across West Texas. There were people living along that road. He never mentions them. He had no reason to — it wasn’t his subject. But the curriculum never mentioned them either. Nobody in thirty years of teaching this thing ever stopped to ask what the trip cost the people the car drove past. And I never asked. I sat in those rooms and I nodded at the joke and I went back to work. The Abilene Paradox has four people in a car and a moral architecture built entirely out of their unspoken preferences. It is a masterpiece of self-criticism — and it trained two generations of executives to interrogate the silence of the passengers and never once the silence of the fenceline. Our most honest management parable still only counts the people with seats. The dateline On July 9, 2026, WIRED published an investigation by Evan Simon of Floodlight. It concerns Omaira Garcia, an Air Force veteran, who bought a small ranch with her husband after more than a year of looking. Their piece of heaven in the country. Their kids loved it. She learned that OpenAI was building its flagship Stargate data center directly beside her property only after the construction had started — when the dust began to engulf her house. Today a natural-gas power plant sits roughly five hundred yards from her home. She can see the exhaust stacks from her kitchen window. At night, she says, the light is like being inside a stadium. She tried to sell. She did not get a single offer. A realtor suggested she turn the house into an Airbnb for the data center’s workers. “We’re trapped here,” she said. Her neighbor Paul Daniel is eighty-one. His family has lived in that area for more than two hundred years; he has lived in his own house for forty-four. Nobody told him either. He made a sign out of a plank — one word and an arrow, pointing toward the entrance — and put it on the road leading into the site. The word is HELL. The arrow points to Stargate. The ranch is in Abilene, Texas. Fifty-three miles from Coleman. The permit is the paradox, written into law Normally, if you intend to build a major new source of air pollution, you need a major air permit: environmental review, public notice, a comment period, a chance for the people who breathe the air to say something about it before it exists. Stargate’s developers didn’t use it. In 2024 they secured their on-site power through minor permits — “permits by rule” and standard permits — the instruments ordinarily used for dry cleaners, gas stations, auto body shops. Small things that happen a lot, as one former EPA air enforcement chief put it. No environmental study. No public notice. No comment period. Granted fast and quietly. Stop on that list, because this is where I stop being a commentator. I have run paint shops — in the United States, in Germany, and in India. I have sat on the wrong side of the table from air regulators on three continents. A paint shop is the largest emissions source in an assembly plant and usually its single most expensive building. You are permitting volatile organic compounds and hazardous air pollutants — solvents, isocyanates. You install a thermal oxidizer that burns fuel around the clock destroying what you emit. You monitor continuously. You stack test. You file deviation reports. You are inspected. It takes years, and then it never ends, because a permit is not a document you obtain — it is a condition you maintain, and every year somebody comes to check. The answer in all three countries was the same: prove it, and keep proving it. So I know exactly where the line sits between an auto body shop and a paint shop, because I have spent my career on the far side of it. The permit by rule is for the corner body shop with a booth and a fan. It was never for me. I never once got a paint shop through on a permit by rule. Stargate got ten gas turbines and sixty-two diesel generators through on one. Under those dry-cleaner permits, Stargate is currently allowed to run ten gas turbines and sixty-two backup diesel generators, and to emit more than 1.6 million tons of greenhouse gases and a thousand tons of harmful air pollutants a year. Sixty-two. The rule was written for an operator who wanted a backup generator. Maybe three. The year after, having built the thing, they filed their first major permit application — for forty-one more turbines and eighteen more generators. If it goes through, Stargate becomes one of the largest fossil fuel power plants in Texas, emitting more greenhouse gas annually than roughly two million cars. Watchdogs have a name for this shape: small first, big later. The EPA’s own handbooks have a harsher one. Minor permits that precede major ones are called sham permits. Garcia found out about the expansion when a reporter told her. And Stargate is not unusual. Since 2024, at least thirty-eight Texas data centers have taken the same route, and the state has quietly sanctioned more than 2,100 backup diesel generators. More than half of these facilities filed nitrogen oxide estimates that landed just barely under the threshold that would have triggered public input. Outside San Antonio, one came in at 99.8 tons a year against a 100-ton trigger. Two tenths of a ton. That is not an engineering number. That is a number that was chosen. Understand what the permit by rule actually is. It is not a loophole in the sense of an oversight. It is an instrument that defines who counts as being in the vehicle. It is the four-person car, drafted by lawyers and signed by a state agency. Everything outside it — Garcia’s kitchen window, Daniel’s two hundred years — is road. The agency grading its own exam Asked about all this, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality said its low number of enforcement actions reflects high compliance rather than an absence of enforcement. Read that again. We are not writing many tickets, which proves nobody is speeding. Its backlog runs past fourteen hundred unresolved cases. It cleared thirty-nine last year. And the people saying so are not activists — they are the agency’s own alumni and a Republican-administration EPA enforcement chief. Every one of them is saying it now. Nobody said it in the driveway. What Stargate does not need Now the part that is mine to say, because I was in the car. The Abilene campus is eleven hundred acres. Roughly four million square feet of building. A gas plant that could power every home in Abilene twenty times over. It employs almost nobody. Buick City needed twenty-eight thousand people. It needed them the way a lung needs air. And because it needed them, it formed them — not out of generosity, not out of any theory of human development, but because it could not run otherwise. It made millwrights and diemakers and general foremen because a plant that size cannot exist without them. The formation was real, it was expensive, it was permanent, and it was almost entirely accidental. Flint was destroyed by capital leaving. Abilene is being destroyed by capital arriving — same wound, opposite directions. And Flint drove itself there. I knew. The most-taught parable in American management is a story about four people ruining an afternoon in a Buick, and we taught it inside the company that built the Buick, and it did not save us. And this dateline says it for me: Formation was never a gift. It was a byproduct of needing people. Remove the need and the byproduct stops. A hyperscale data center is the first industrial asset in history that does not require a workforce in order to run. It requires land, water, gas, and silicon, and it requires a construction wave that leaves. It does not require a town. It does not require anyone to become anything. This is why the extraction in Abilene feels so naked. There is no exchange to point at. The factory at least had to make somebody in order to make something. Stargate does not — not because Crusoe is wicked, but because the asset has no mechanism for it. The fuse is longer than the tenure Capital has run without the labor strand before. It works. That is the whole problem — it works, and it keeps working for about as long as one man’s tenure. Pullman, 1894. George Pullman built a town for his workers south of Chicago, and by the standards of its day it was magnificent. Indoor plumbing. Gas, water, sewers. A library, a church, parks, a theater. Visitors came from Europe to admire it. He funded every bit of it — and the word that matters in that sentence is he. Every brick was an asset on the Pullman Palace Car Company’s balance sheet. None of it was in anybody’s name. Then the depression of 1893 arrived, and Pullman cut wages by roughly a quarter and did not cut the rents. The rents were revenue on an asset. The wages were a cost. That is the whole lesson, and it took fourteen years to arrive. The men had been given a library and not a ledger. They could not carry it, sell it, borrow against it, or stop the man who owned it from raising their rent on the day he cut their pay. The strike became a national boycott. Federal troops came to Chicago. Men died in the yards. Pullman died in 1897, and in 1898 the Illinois Supreme Court ordered the company to sell the town off. Crusoe’s fire trucks are Pullman’s library. Ford, 1914. The same lesson from the other side, and the reason I am not asking anybody to be generous. By 1913 Henry Ford had a turnover problem that ought to be taught in every business school on earth and is taught in almost none. The moving line had deskilled the work so completely that the work had become unbearable, and annual turnover at Highland Park ran around 370 percent. Ford was hiring on the order of fifty thousand men a year to hold a workforce of about fourteen thousand. The machine had severed the labor strand exactly as designed, and the asset was choking on it. So in January 1914 he doubled the wage to five dollars a day. It has been remembered ever since as philanthropy, or as marketing — the story that he was paying his men enough to buy the cars. It was neither. It was a man buying back the strand his own machine had cut, because the machine could not run without it. Turnover collapsed. Quality rose. Training cost fell off a cliff. It paid for itself inside a year. Ford is the proof that depositing is not charity. Ford is the proof that depositing is arithmetic. Boeing, 2001 to now. In 2001 Boeing moved its headquarters to Chicago, deliberately away from the people who build airplanes. Over the next decade it pushed the 787’s design and fabrication across a global supply chain on the theory that formation could be somebody else’s cost. The engineering judgment nearest the work was routed around — not once, but as policy. Two 737 MAX aircraft went down. Three hundred and forty-six people. Then a door plug left an Alaska Airlines fuselage in flight in January 2024. Now watch the fuse. Boeing admitted a conspiracy to defraud the United States in a deferred prosecution agreement in 2021. In 2024 the Justice Department found it had breached that agreement. A guilty plea was negotiated; the court rejected it. The Department then reached a non-prosecution agreement, and in November 2025 the charge was dismissed. The families are still in the Fifth Circuit. Every executive who made the decision was gone. Not one of them was in the building when the bill came. That is the pattern, and it is the only sentence in this essay I would defend to the last: Severing the labor strand always looks good for exactly one tenure. The deposit you skip is booked this quarter. The depletion lands after you have left. So the trip to Abilene is not irrational at all. It is perfectly rational, for the driver. The trip is fifty-three miles. The bonus is paid at mile twenty. That is why nobody says Coleman. It isn’t cowardice. It’s arithmetic. So run the fuse on this one. The silicon in a data center depreciates in five or six years. The turbine runs thirty. Omaira Garcia’s lungs have to run forty. There is not one person in that car who will be present for the back half of any of those numbers, and every one of them knows it. The two ledgers Before you get in a car you settle two things. Why are we going. What are we going for. Harvey’s four people never said either one out loud. That is the entire parable. Nobody in Abilene said them either — and the proof of that is not an argument I have to make. It is a pair of columns. Here is everything the record knows about the capital strand at Abilene: Eleven hundred acres. Four million square feet. Ten gas turbines. Forty-one more applied for. Sixty-two diesel generators. Eighteen more applied for. Three hundred and sixty megawatts, headed for twelve hundred. One-point-six million tons of greenhouse gas a year. Over a billion dollars in phase one. An eighty-five percent property tax abatement. Fifteen hundred people building it, around the clock. Eighty gigawatts of new gas in the Texas queue — second in the world only to China. Here is everything the record knows about the labor strand at Abilene: Fifty-seven. That is the contractual floor for full-time jobs. It is the entire second column. Every number in the first list existed before a shovel moved. Each one was engineered, financed, insured, permitted, disclosed. Somebody was paid to be certain of it. Capital counts what it owns, to two decimal places, in advance. The second list has one number in it, it is a legal minimum, and there is no line anywhere — not in the permit, not in the impact study, not in the 10-K, not in the governor’s press release — for the only question that matters. How many people did this thing form? Not employ. Form. Nobody knows. Nobody is required to know. Nobody has been asked. What is the net formation? I am not telling anyone to stop building. Abilene got fire trucks. It got road improvements and school expansions, and those are not nothing, and any argument that pretends they are nothing deserves to lose. The eighty gigawatts will get built by someone. The turbines will be installed and piped and wired and commissioned and then maintained for thirty years by human beings who have to be made first, because nobody is born knowing how. Ask it of the construction site. Ask it of the room where the model gets used. The developer says the fifty-seven will really be more than a hundred. The mayor says two hundred and fifty. Take the mayor’s number. Take double it. It doesn’t matter — those are jobs, and a job is a rental agreement. It tells you a seat was filled. It tells you nothing about whether anybody became anything. And the construction number is worse than it looks. Go read the hiring notices for that site. Certified crane operators. Surveying journeymen. Heavy equipment diesel mechanics. Read those words again — certified, journeyman. Every one of them describes a man who was already formed, somewhere else, by somebody else, years ago, in a hall this project did not build and does not fund. The build-out is not making tradesmen. It is bidding for them. That is a withdrawal. It draws down a stock a previous generation paid for, deposits nothing back, and when the campus is done those men leave and take it with them. Two years, around the clock — and the honest net formation number for that site may be close to zero. Now the other site, the one nobody is looking at at all. Go into any office where a model now does the first draft, the first analysis, the first pass at the code. Ask what that work was ever actually for. It was never for the output. The first draft was always bad. The junior’s spreadsheet always had to be rebuilt. That work existed to make the junior. It was the rung. It was expensive and inefficient and it was the most wasteful thing in the whole enterprise, and it was how you got a senior fifteen years later. Automate the rung and you keep the output and you lose the senior. I am not the first to notice. Erik Brynjolfsson’s team at Stanford tracks it in payroll data: a sixteen percent relative decline in employment for workers aged twenty-two to twenty-five in the occupations most exposed to AI, while experienced workers in those same jobs hold steady. Their term for it is task substitution at the apprentice margin. And serious economists dispute the finding. But look at what that fight is about. Headcount. Both sides are counting jobs — which means both sides are holding the gauge I have spent this essay telling you is the wrong one. A junior can be employed and unformed. If the skeptics win outright, if entry-level employment never drops another point, my question is still unanswered. Nobody has asked it. And look at the fuse on it. You book the saving this quarter. The absence arrives in fifteen years, when there is nobody in the building formed well enough to know the machine is wrong. That is one tenure. That is Pullman and Ford and Boeing, in a room with no exhaust stack in it. So here is the ask, and it is small. One formed person per megawatt. Abilene is headed for twelve hundred megawatts. Twelve hundred people. Megawatts, because that number is already in the permit — filed, reviewed by ERCOT, impossible to bury in a footnote. Nobody can hide a turbine. And because it is the honest index: the megawatts are the gas plant. The thing that fouls Omaira Garcia’s air is the same thing that sets the price. If you would rather picture it than audit it — the campus is about eleven hundred acres. Call it one formed person per acre. Same answer. And if you want to argue the number down, take any other unit on the developer’s own ledger. You land in the same place: One per acre: eleven hundred. One per four thousand square feet: a thousand. One per million dollars of phase-one infrastructure: eleven hundred. Or just the gap — fifteen hundred men came to build it, fifty-seven stay: fourteen hundred and forty-three. Every unit the capital strand chose for itself prices the labor strand between a thousand people and fifteen hundred. I did not pick twelve hundred. The developer’s own filings picked it, four different ways. It is the asset, weighed in the one currency it refuses to count. And not twelve hundred jobs. Twelve hundred formed people, carried all the way through to journeyman, employable in Abilene and employable anywhere. That last clause is the whole thing. Company training makes you employable here. Formation makes you employable anywhere. The difference between them is the difference between a library and a ledger. Then scale it. Eighty gigawatts in the Texas construction queue is eighty thousand people. And publish the count, so the second column has something in it besides a legal minimum. Now notice when it happens. Not in a classroom. Not afterward. During the build. Fifteen hundred men are already on that site, around the clock, for two and a half years. Indenture them there. Year one and year three land on Abilene’s campus. Year five lands on the next campus, because there is always a next campus — and the record travels with the man and not the employer, which is the entire reason this has to be an account and not a program. The build-out forms the workforce for the build-out. Call it a sin tax if you like, but be precise about the sin. The sin is not the data center. The sin is building a thing this size and forming nobody — which makes it a levy a developer can zero out completely by making people. That is the only kind of tax I have ever respected: the kind whose entire purpose is to be avoided by doing the right thing. And it is not even new money. Abilene handed the developer an eighty-five percent property tax abatement to build there. The public is already paying. I am not asking Texas for a dollar it hasn’t already committed — only that the dollars it committed be conditioned on a number. Britain tried this. The Apprenticeship Levy has run since 2017 — half a percent of payroll — and the way it failed is the most useful thing I can give you. Apprenticeships for under-twenty-fives fell by a third. Four hundred million pounds a year went to people who already held a degree. The single most popular programme funded by the apprenticeship levy was Senior Leader. Britain built the levy without the gauge, and the money walked straight to the people who were already formed. So: the number, then the levy, then the ledger, in that order — and the ledger verified by somebody who did not do the training. Harvey’s remedy was to speak up in the car. Garcia was never in the car. So widen it. But you cannot widen what you refuse to count. And before anyone calls this a cost — somebody has to build eighty gigawatts. There are not eighty thousand spare journeymen sitting in Texas waiting for the call. That is exactly why the hiring notices say certified. The industry’s scarcest input is the thing it refuses to make, and it is bidding against itself for a stock that is not being replaced. Ford had this identical problem in 1913. His turnover was three hundred and seventy percent. He did not solve it with a training initiative. He bought back the strand his own machine had cut, and it made him the richest manufacturer on earth. The deposit was not the price of doing the right thing. The deposit was the asset. And source them from inside a hundred miles. The Abilene education region is forty-two school districts, thirteen counties, a hundred and sixty campuses, fifty thousand kids. Three graduating classes is about ten thousand young people. Take all ten thousand. Select twelve hundred. One in eight — an achievement, not a consolation prize, which is exactly why they will come. And draw the radius by the harm, not by an administrative line. Whoever breathes it has first claim on the formation. Fifty-three miles down that road, inside the radius, there is a high school in Coleman, Texas. I have to ask it of myself I wrote this with a machine. It is disclosed below. So the question I am putting to Crusoe and to Abilene and to every company in America is one I have to put to myself, out loud, in front of you. The machine drafted and retrieved and arranged. The judgment is thirty years of paint shops on three continents, and no machine supplied that, and none could. But I already have the thirty years. Somebody paid for them. GM paid. Chrysler paid. Chennai paid. And they paid in the only currency formation takes, which is time on a floor with a man watching me who had done it before. That is the deposit I am spending here, and I did not make it. The question is not whether the machine augments me. It does. The question is where the next man gets his thirty years, if the rung I climbed is the exact rung we are now automating. I don’t have an answer to that one. It is the only question in this essay I cannot put a number on. Omaira Garcia’s kitchen window is the gauge. Somebody go read it. Harvey’s family got home. Garcia cannot. That is what he meant by a terminal journey. The trip is on. The heat is brutal. Everyone in the car is nodding. Somebody say Coleman. Venki Padmanabhan is a co-founder of the Capability Capital Institute and the author of the forthcoming Built to Extract and Already Paid For (Capability Capital Press). He writes at thelonggameforall.substack.com. Written with AI assistance. The argument, the judgments, and the floor testimony are the author’s own. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit thelonggameforall.substack.com
